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When I was a child, before I even knew what "being" was, really, I decided I wanted to be a mermaid – not the Disney kind, who sang all day and brushed her hair with an old fork, though I liked her, too. I'd sink to the bottom of my bathtub, letting my thin baby hair fan up around my head like sea anemone, and imagined I was a shriveled but irresistible siren from Greek mythology – one who, I suppose, led rubber ducky sailors to their doom.
I'm surprised to be confronted with this watercolor of childhood memories, of fascination with the sea, horseshoe crabs, and "devil's toenail" oysters, while playing the first FPS to be released under publisher horror Blumhouse, Crisol: Theater of Idols, from Spanish developer Vermila Studios. The game – a competent Resident Evil-like, I soon discover while playing its demo – builds on folktales to create one of the most idiosyncratic shooters I've ever played, and I can't believe it, but I didn't want to stop.
Clearly, I enjoy a good fantasy, the kind Crisol deals in, but I hardly ever touch a shooter unless Leon Kennedy is involved. But, during my 40 minutes with Crisol, I surprise myself – the game's bullets are blood, and suddenly, I'm invested.
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I'm thinking of one of my most beloved games, Bloodborne, whose blood bullets help you blow up monsters at the cost of your health bar. But Crisol takes resource management even more seriously. While Bloodborne encourages you to primarily use quicksilver for your ammunition, Crisol's claret ammunition is more dangerously simple – there's no alternative.
You need to watch your health bar, as I do now. There's a small blood vial at the top of my screen, right under the fat syringe that shows me all my health. Each time I fire, the number in the vial depletes, until, finally, I'm forced to harvest bullets from under my skin. This is how I reload – I squeeze the grip on my pistol, forcing spikes into my fingers and letting a storm of blood turn my wrist brownish.
It's gnarly, but it makes the rest of gameplay feel more intuitive than the typical FPS – with their battle passes, or range of classes and stats minutiae. You can only be one guy. He's some kind of zealot hunting mermaids – Gabriel. He's looking for them in a historical fantasy of Spain, on the treacherous island Tormentosa.
Developer: Vermila Studios
Publisher: Blumhouse Games
Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X
Release date: TBC
In the environment, I see highlights of the Resident Evil franchise – the rotting luxury, 12-foot tall abominations that nearly move you to tears as they stalk you in the dark – while I'm scampering around the demo's tight, '40s-style map to find something that unlocks a bigger gun.
At the same time, I'm admiring the melted candles illuminating broken windows, noticing the abandoned fish at a market with a neon sign. Like Resident Evil 4, Crisol appears to mine the guts and gems from Spain's long, Catholic history to establish an environment that is at once decadent and completely overpowering.
I become comfortable in this beautifully decomposing rose, and Crisol's intoxicating mood – along with its smooth and straightforward combat – makes me more eager to play. I become more aggressive, too. Gabriel supports me in my bloodlust; he's never phased by how many times I make him cut himself. If anything, it makes him think he's a saint with stigmata.
They approach me with their arms and necks at odd angles, creaking like ghost ships.
"Burn in the name of the Sun," he says after I've helped him dispatch a fleet of monsters – wooden marrionettes, with the white, cracked faces of a drowned Virgin Mary statue left to be eaten by shrimp. They approach me with their arms and necks at odd angles, creaking like ghost ships, so I have no choice but to shoot their legs out from under them, make them burst in a pillar of light. When they leave me aching, painfully low on blood, I harvest it from corpses that turn to mulch, or I inject myself with mermaid blood I find scattered throughout the world.
Ah, that must be it – that's why I was thinking of my daydreaming from 20 years ago. With Crisol's tubes of mermaid blood, I guess I've finally fulfilled a juvenile wish. I'm now more of a mermaid than I otherwise would have been, "To drink of that salt breath out of the sea / When grey gulls flit about instead of men," as William Butler Yeats writes. I'm the ancient kind of mermaid that 19th century charlatans would fashion out of leathery fish tails and missing teeth, who'd guide sailors toward cliffsides.
These same dark mermaids steer Crisol: Theater of Idols to its melancholy, just like they did those sailors.
