''Crystal Key 2'', known in Europe as ''Evany: Key to a Distant Land'', is a 2004

graphic adventure game An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or Puzzle video game, puzzle-solving. The Video game genres, genre's focus on story allows it to draw ...

developed by Canadian studio Earthlight Productions, together with

Kheops Studio Kheops Studio was an independent video game development studio created in September 2003. Its games were published by Microïds, which acquired the brand and intellectual property as insolvency assets of Cryo Interactive in 2002. The company was c ...

. It was published by

The Adventure Company The Adventure Company was a Canadian video game developer and a former publishing division of DreamCatcher Interactive. It was sold to THQ Nordic GmbH in 2011 following DreamCatcher's parent (JoWooD Entertainment) assets being sold after entering A ...

, and is the sequel to the 1999 title ''

The Crystal Key ''The Crystal Key'' is a 1999 graphic adventure video game developed by Earthlight Productions and published by DreamCatcher Interactive. A work of science fiction, it casts the player as an interstellar explorer on a quest to save Earth from Oz ...

''.

Gameplay and plot

''Crystal Key 2''s plot builds upon that of the original, and casts the player as Call, who seeks to stop the minions of Ozgar and save the world of Evany.

Development

''Crystal Key 2'' was revealed by

DreamCatcher Interactive DreamCatcher Interactive Inc. (also known as DreamCatcher Games) was a Canadian video game publisher founded in 1996 by Richard Wah Kan. It was best known for its adventure games. In 2006, the company became a subsidiary of JoWooD Entertainment ...

's Adventure Company label in April 2003, at first under the name ''Crystal Key II: The Far Realm''. It was among a slew of announcements in preparation for the 2003

Electronic Entertainment Expo E3 (short for Electronic Entertainment Expo or Electronic Entertainment Experience in 2021) is a trade event for the video game industry. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) organizes and presents E3, which many developers, publisher ...

(E3), and Marek Bronstring of

Adventure Gamers ''Adventure Gamers'' is a computer game website created by Marek Bronstring in March 1998 dedicated to the genre of adventure games. It publishes reviews and previews of adventure games, as well as opinion articles and interviews with game des ...

called it one of the publisher's "top titles premiering at the show", alongside '' Traitors Gate II: Cypher''. Earthlight Productions developed ''Crystal Key 2'' with Virtools and

V-Ray V-Ray is a biased computer-generated imagery rendering software application developed by Bulgarian software company Chaos . V-Ray is a commercial plug-in for third-party 3D computer graphics software applications and is used for visualizatio ...

. It was designed to feature spherical 360° panoramas, unlike its predecessor's more limited viewing areas. According to John Matheson, Earthlight sought to overcome the problems that had affected ''The Crystal Key''s production pipeline and give its art team more room "to be as creative as possible". Initially developed by Earthlight and set for a late-2003 release, ''Crystal Key 2'' underwent "many years" of production and took longer than The Adventure Company had wanted, Benoît Hozjan of

later remarked. As a result, Kheops was hired to co-develop the game late in production, which Hozjan said included "the programming and the integration, hand in hand with John Matheson." In July 2003, Matheson estimated ''Crystal Key 2'' as 75% complete and on track for December, but it ultimately launched in March 2004.

Reception

According to the

review aggregation A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services (such as films, books, video games, software, hardware, and cars). This system stores the reviews and uses them for purposes such as supporting a website where users ...

website

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, ''Crystal Key 2''s critical reception was "mixed or average".

References

External links

* {{Kheops Studio 2004 video games First-person adventure games Classic Mac OS games Crystal Key The Adventure Company games DreamCatcher Interactive games Video games developed in Canada Video games developed in France Windows games Single-player video games