Ginger: Beyond the Crystal Review for Nintendo Switch

Ginger: Beyond the Crystal is a beautiful game on face value developed by Drakhar Studio and published by Badland Games, that is reminiscent to older, popular 3D platformer games like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie. The premise begins with an explanation about a goddess who protects the village brings birth to a hero named Ginger, the main character you play. The elders take care of Ginger and help him grow to be a hero that will one day save the villages if a threat ever arrived. Once Ginger is older, an unknown threat corrupts the crystals that protected the villages. It is up to Ginger to find all the crystals that were scattered in different worlds and restore the villages that were destroyed by the threat.

This game had the potential to be a great 9/10 game especially for gamers who are familiar with 3D platformers from the 90’s and early 2000’s. However, despite the beautiful aesthetics and many nods to older 3D platformers, Ginger: Beyond the Crystal fails in several aspects that makes a 3D platformer fun to play. Several of these aspects include poor map design, mediocre gameplay, poor combat, redundant quests, and glitches. Overall, Ginger: Beyond the Crystal lacks polishing and a full understanding of what makes a 3D platformer fun in the first place.

I will begin with what the developers did right with Ginger: Beyond the Crystal. The music and aesthetics of the game really made this game work for me. Each world had a different theme with different enemies and obstacles to encounter. It is obvious that the developers made each world with a lot of imagination and concept ideas that came to mind. The characters look cute and the world looks fun to play in. There are three villages that you unlock as you finish each village that have their own theme, villagers and enemies that appear. They also attempt to add many secret items or passages in the game that you need to return to once you have the powers to open them. There is a lot happening in the game that you would think it would add variety to the gameplay. However, instead of variety, I felt redundancy instead.   

It looks fun from face value, and I genuinely enjoyed Ginger: Beyond the Crystal the first few hours of gameplay. About 70% in finishing the first village, I was beginning to feel the redundancy of building the town and missions you need to do in the game. The map of the town is confusing and I would double and triple check every time to even make sure I was going the right way. What helped a bit was the compass but even then it was confusing overall. Originally, I felt like the variety of missions you can do made the game a bit fun, but it gets old real fast. For example, there are red crystals that appear in the village that are missions to purify all the red crystals. The catch is each level in these crystals get harder and harder as they appear in the game. I do not think there is a problem making each one more difficult, but there are many that appear in just one village. The redundancy of these types of missions makes it feel like a chore instead of something I looked forward to. One of the biggest glitches in the game is actually in these levels. Ginger would fall through the platform even though I knew I landed on it with confidence (i.e. in the middle of a moving platform). The first time it happened I gave the benefit of the doubt, but it happened several times that would make me avoid the missions for a while until I got around to completing them.  

To be blunt, the gameplay is mediocre and the combat is poor. As a 3D platformer, the movement is not terrible and Ginger moves around pretty well. However, compared to older 3D platformers, the mechanics in Ginger: Beyond the Crystal are boring. The powers Ginger receives from freeing villagers from different levels are only used in certain areas which makes it boring. The only one I genuinely liked was the instrument power which had a mechanic similar to Legend of Zelda’s ocarina. Also, the carts and little planes which helps move Ginger to one platform to another really bothered me. The mechanic worked 20% of the time and I was scared it was going to break my joystick since you have to move it up and down quickly. In one perspective, it seems creative; however if the mechanic was not working well or barely works I think it should have been removed or used with another control. To quickly touch on combat, there were not many options in terms of fighting techniques. If you dashed and hit them, 50% of the time you would most likely get hurt even if you attacked first. Punches rarely worked because the enemy would hurt you. The best way to destroy enemies was to jump on them or jump and then attack. There is just a lack of variety when it comes to attacking your enemy.

Ginger: Beyond the Crystal had potential that is painfully and obviously there based off of just how much effort was put into this game; however it lacks polishing in all the roughest edges that would make this game a great 3D platformer like it’s contemporary A Hat in Time. Once again, Ginger: Beyond the Crystal starts off as enjoyable and I feel many who enjoyed 3D platformers from the 90’s would enjoy this game a bit, but it is not enough to make it a great game. Overall, it just needed more love and more work in the overall mechanics of the game.

Rate: 5.5/10

Check Out the Ginger: Beyond the Crystal Launch Trailer: