When I first saw the “Coming Soon” link for Ginger: Beyond the Crystal (available on Steam, XBox One, and PS4) I have to admit that I may have squealed a bit. A puzzle platformer with an adorable little blue dragon-like character. It sounded like the perfect game to play with my daughter. We like playing platformers together, even single player ones. Sometimes I “drive” while she navigates, sometimes vice versa, and sometimes we switch back and forth during the same gameplay session. It is one of the (pseudo-) co-op gaming experiences that we enjoy most (coming in close second to Mario Kart). So when we got the opportunity to review this game I jumped on it.
We were so excited to play this game that we jumped right into it together. No time for me to try it out alone before playing with the kiddo. Let me start by saying this game is really pretty. Bright, crisp colors and adorable characters. We quickly learned that Ginger, our little dragon, was his world’s Chosen One and that he was tasked with retrieving the fragments of the crystal that brought peace and happiness to the world. So far, so good. Cute characters, good narration, and a solid quest. And then we started playing the game.
From the beginning, the game just felt a little laggy. Running through the world itself was good, but when it came to battling any of the enemies we just always a beat behind. Attacks that felt like they should have landed didn’t. Enemies got the jump on us even when we moved first, but we went on through the world purifying and retrieving crystal fragments because we were invested in Ginger and his quest to save the beings in his land. Thankfully there was more puzzle solving than baddie battling.
Pretty quickly we learned that we had to use portals in the main world to navigate out to other parts of Ginger’s universe in order to save like folks and crystal fragments. We also learned that we could find and don different costumes that came with their own abilities (like Bardo that gave us the ability to play music and rebuild bridges) so it felt very much like playing the Lego games that require you to shift between characters in order to solve different puzzles. And this is where we had the most fun playing these kinds of games, thinking about how different abilities might be helpful in some situations and not in others. Thinking about how this game shared characteristics with other games, but differed in other ways. (And it gave Pea the chance to just stand and change outfits and use different skills). It was a blast.
Also take note that this game is narrative heavy. It starts with an overly long (but well voiced) introductory monologue that tells us how we have gotten to where we are. And as the game goes on there is a lot of dialogue between Ginger and other members of his world and those conversations are generally multi-screened. While this was a great opportunity to sneak in some extra reading time we found that too many of these conversation boxes just made us both a little frustrated and had us skimming and skipping through to get to more of the questing (and that is something that I rarely say).
While I would say that Ginger: Beyond the Crystal is a game with amazing possibility, that it’s not quite there. The moments of lagginess were frustrating and the loading time between worlds was absolutely maddening. I didn’t actually time the loading screens, but some of the times even in the earlier levels were in excess of a full minute. While that may not sound like a really long time, it feels like an eternity when you are waiting to get back into the game. While we were playing a review copy I am hopeful that post-release patches of the game might fix some of these issues and make the whole laying experience more enjoyable, but right now it might be a wait and see at the $19.99 console price point, though it is on sale on Steam for $11.99 right now.
We received a free code for this game in exchange for an unbiased review.
