Crystal the Witch is a freeware English-language visual novel by studio Devikomi. It is a short piece wherein we follow the tituar protagonist as she tries to brew a special potion for Halloween, which falls on the next day. We quickly learn that Crystal is not the witchcraft expert she presents herself as being online, and she may be a little bit sensitive about that fact. It is a short piece on the whole, taking just under an hour to read.
I have made a tradition of reviewing horror-themed visual novels close to Halloween – see Bad End in 2020, Night of the Forget-Me-Nots in 2021, Return to Shironagasu Island in 2022, and Ghost in 2024. Crystal is not a horror visual novel, but unlike my three prior Halloween reviews, it explicitly references Halloween. Thus, I decided that it would be a timely addition to our ever-growing visual novel review collection.
Crystal the Witch Details
Crystal the Witch is an original English-language visual novel. It was first made available for download by studio Devikomi on Halloween in 2019. It saw two subsequent releases, with version 2.0 becoming available on March 22, 2020, and the current version 2.3 following on July 6, 2021. The original Crystal the Witch was available for Windows, Linux, and Mac in English only. Version 2.0 added an Android version. Version 2.3 added Spanish and Russian translations along with other minor improvements. You can consult the Visual Novel Database entry for Crystal the Witch for a full list of versions and release dates.
Crystal the Witch is available for download for free on Itch.io. The Android version is additionally available as a free download from the Google Play Store.
Like many other English-language visual novels, Crystal the Witch is written in Ren’Py – a popular free and open source visual novel engine.
Studio Devikomi states that it created Crystal the Witch in one month and that it was the group’s first visual novel. The group has not published any other visual novels subsequent to Crystal the Witch as of the publication date of this review.
My Review Version
I ran the Linux version of Crystal the Witch on my Linux desktop. It worked as expected with no issues whatsoever. I assume it should work similarly well on Windows, MacOS, and Android, but I can only speak for the Linux version from personal experience.
Crystal the Witch Overview
I will introduce Crystal the Witch by discussing events in the first part of the novel. This should give readers a good idea of what the game is about without spoiling what happens after the initial set-up.
The novel begins in Crystal’s bedroom the day before Halloween. Crystal is a young, purple-haired woman who claims to be a beginner witch (her age is never specified). She lives with her cat, Lily, and she has a tendency to engage in discussions and debates with Lily, notwithstanding that Lily, unlike other visual novel felines we have reviewed, only “speaks” in expected cat noises.
Crystal partakes in an online witchcraft community. She announces in her online forum that she intends to make a potion that will allow her to speak to the dead for Halloween. Her online friend Claire decides to join her, making the potion separately before meeting Crystal for the first time the next day.
Crystal makes her potion according to the instructions she was given when she purchased the ingredients at a store. However, the potion does not “activate” in the way she anticipated. Crystal checks her social media and sees a post from Witchseller00, a user she does not recognize. The user notes an apparent oversight by Crystal. After immediately going into denial, insisting to herself that there was no way she could have made a mistake. Crystal displaces her frustration on the online commenter, fearful that her online friends and followers would come under the impression that Crystal did not actually know what she was doing. We see Crystal act in two incongruent ways. Our insecure protagonist takes to going through Witchseller00’s social media posts and leaving random mean comments. Then, immediately after in an direct message conversation with her online friend Claire, Crystal incorporates Witchseller00’s advice but puts off coming up with a definite plan for meeting Claire on Halloween.
We learn a good amount about Crystal from this initial set-up. She enjoys participating in the online witch community because it helped her make friends, even if she had not yet met them in person. Crystal is under the impression that these people are friendly with her because they think she is good at witchcraft. Crystal was embarrassed when Witchseller00 respectfully but publicly pointed out an apparent flaw in her potion preparation, but she was also afraid that she would lose her online friends if she was revealed to have made a mistake. Crystal’s reaction revealed her flaws – namely her unearned pride and her petty vindictiveness.
But even when Crystal is being a pain – she always makes time to engage in one-sided conversations with her beloved cat, Lily.
My Review
Below, I will review Crystal the Witch in topical subsections.
Gameplay and Length
Crystal the Witch is an entirely kinetic visual novel, meaning that it has no interactive elements. It is relatively short and should take most readers somewhere in the neighborhood of 45-60 minutes to read.
Aesthetics
The main point of artistic emphasis in Crystal the Witch is Crystal herself. She and her cat Lily are the only two characters to have full portraits. Crystal’s design is important not only in the in-game sense, but also because she effectively serves as the mascot for the novel. Crystal’s face is what someone scrolling through visual novels on Itch.io will see if they stumble upon the subject of this review.
Crystal is well-designed and a definite highlight. She looks like a teenager, although as I noted the game never defines her age and there is no indication that she lives with anyone other than her cat. Crystal was given a color-scheme that fits her interest in witchcraft. Her hair is dark pink, inclining toward purple, she has green eyes and a black dress which matches the ribbon holding her hair in a high ponytail. She wears two necklaces, one being a crystal and the other a pentagram, along with a vial hanging from a sash, and two mismatched earrings, a star on her right ear and crescent moon on her left.
Crystal is very expressive, with a range of faces covering everything from smug satisfaction to embarrassed rage. Her variety and design quality are impressive for what is a first-effort freeware visual novel, and she holds up well against many more commercial protagonists. My only minor complaint with Crystal is her front teeth in a few portraits where she is smiling (as well as in one special background) – specifically, they make her look like a rabbit or woodland creature.
I noted that Crystal’s cat Lily also has a full portrait. Lily receives a surprising amount of screentime because of how often Crystal engages her cat in one-sided conversations. While Lily lacks Crystal’s expressiveness – I will opine that lily is a well-drawn, realistic-looking cat, with an some very careful detail on coloration.
The backgrounds are detailed with one caveat – most of Crystal the Witch takes place in the protagonist’s bedroom, which has the effect of limiting the visual variety. Crystal’s room is well thought out. She likes dark pink and purple. We can see the cauldron on her desk where she makes her potions. Crystal is a bit messy, with clothes and bags thrown about in two corners of her room, but not excessively so. One little touch I appreciated was that she has a star and Moon pillows on her bed which match her earrings.
While Crystal and Lily are the only characters with portraits, the novel took care to depict Crystal’s online life by not only showing her phone screen, but also through a well-thought out user interface for her online witchcraft forum. When Crystal is reading online posts and posting herself, we see her phone screen along with the posts. The text of the in-game social posts is always easy to read – even if it were not also repeated in the regular dialogue box. There is also a phone call overlay for a couple of instances when Crystal is on the phone with her online friend Claire.
The novel has three CG scenes, or more generally put, screens with unique backgrounds where the characters are part of the background instead of regular sprites. These scenes are extended – for example there is a long one early in the game when Crystal is making her potion, which changes each time Crystal adds a new ingredient and then observes the result. This first scene is good – granting my complaint about Crystal’s woodland creature smile. My favorite of the three is actually the last scene, which introduces an additional character – but I will not go into unnecessary story detail about it.
The text box occupies the bottom quarter of the screen and is mostly transparent. There are some scenes where Crystal (or Lily) have a second portrait in the left corner of the text box. Crystal’s text box portrait most often appears in CG scenes or when she is talking about what she is reading on her phone. I will note one minor quibble with the CG scenes when Crystal’s text box expression does not match her background expression – I had a similar critique of Red Shift, another somewhat spooky freeware visual novel I reviewed.
While I stated earlier that Crystal and Lily are the only characters with full portraits, there is a third important (and disembodied) character who has a text box portrait. For reasons you will see if you read the novel – the disembodied character portrait is not too artistically demanding.
The text box does highlight one minor aesthetic disappointment: The font choices. The speaking character’s name is written in a serif font in all caps. The dialogue uses a painfully generic sans-serif font. I do not think the fonts complement each other well and neither really fits the playful Halloween theme of the piece. Such trade-offs are inevitable in a small project created in a short time period. For example, another freeware indie visual novel on Itch.io that i reviewed, EDDA Café, has a very unique and well-designed user interface (one of the more fun visual novel text boxes you will come across), but only a single pose for all of its characters. Here, Crystal has a great variety of poses but the text box design is half-baked. If Devikomi ever works on a re-mastered Crystal, I would recommend looking into a more thematic text box design.
One positive text box point is how dialogue and narration are handled. There are numerous points when dialogue and narration are simultaneously visible in the text box . The novel distinguishes by making the narration text slightly pale compared to the dialogue text. This approach works reasonably well.
There is a small number of music tracks. For better or worse, none of the music tracks stood out to me. They were pleasant enough but did not add much to the overall experience. I do not have a great ear for music quality assessments – but I did have a nagging feeling that the sound quality could have been more optimized, but that is just my subjective, non-expert take
One character – the one I noted with a text box portrait – is voiced. I will submit that the voice acting was solid and conveyed the dry humor that the script was going for.
Technical overview
Crystal the Witch comes with a very conventional set of options for modifying the text speed and in-game volume. As one would expect, it has save and load functionality, but I doubt that most readers will need more than one session to read to the end. One thing I did appreciate was how the novel handles text history. In most of the novels I review, when you scroll backwards through the text, you can see the previous text but the scene does not change. For example, if my character is smiling in a scene and I go back to a point where that same character had an angry expression, I would see the former text but the visual would not change. In Crystal, scrolling through text history also scrolls through visual history. I fell back on that functionality at a couple of points for collecting screenshots.
There are no post-completion extras but fans of the novel can download free wallpapers from the game’s page on Itch.io.
Writing and Story Overview
As a threshold matter, we should go into the story and writing review with the understanding that Crystal the Witch is intended to be a fun, lighthearted project, and that its script does not invite the sort of analysis of a May Sky, which I broke down in four parts, or The Dandelion Girl, which adapted a classic science fiction short story into a visual novel.
The story makes clear in the early going that we are not supposed to take Crystal too seriously. She has in-depth conversations with her cat, but the reader has good cause to doubt that her ability to speak cat is any greater than your average cat owner’s. When she starts making her potion, she all but admits that she is following instructions without fully understanding them as she fails to explain the rationales for different steps. When Crystal is corrected online, she admits that she is insecure about being outed as a beginner and responds in a comically immature and nevertheless mean-spirited way. While I do not want to go into unnecessary detail about the later events in the novel, I will note that Crystal ends up having an extended conversation with a fourth-wall breaking disembodied voice/shadow, and this additional character is open about highlighting Crystal’s myriad character flaws for anyone who may have missed them.
However, while Crystal regularly be-clowns herself and her online behavior leaves much to be desired – the novel makes a point of highlighting one sympathetic aspect of our deeply flawed protagonist. Crystal did not get into witchcraft or having an online presence solely for internet clout. While she is proverbially stomping her foot after a well-meaning forum poster pointed out what she had apparently done wrong in her potion prep, Crystal notes to herself that she had made friends in the witchcraft community and was afraid that she would lose her online friends if they realized that she was not as knowledgeable as she wanted to present herself. This fear is underscored by the fact that Crystal had not yet met her closest friend in the community in person. To be sure, Crystal has what can charitably be described as bratty tendencies, but her lesser behaviors are not driven by pure vanity. By the same token, one can see however well-intentioned the community member may have been in pointing out Crystal’s error, one can unintentionally give the wrong impression in purely text-based online conversations on a public forum.
There is a message in Crystal the Witch about online communication and communities. Moreover, the second half of Crystal forces our often dense protagonist to confront her immaturity and, by extension, some of the reasons she may have trouble making and keeping friends.
But while we can extract the main message from Crystal the Witch, it is undercut by a script that is not tightly written.
The first section of the novel left it ambiguous how seriously I was supposed to take the existence of witchcraft in the game’s world (that her social forum is WitchForums.gov is admittedly an early clue). There was one line which could be read as suggesting the novel takes place in an ordinary world and that Crystal is just playing a game (as opposed to simply being a maladroit beginner witch). It becomes clear that witchcraft is a real part of the game’s world, but the early chapters of the piece would have done well to trade some of Crystal’s arguments with her cat for a small amount of world-building to give readers a more distinct sense of place.
Despite the fact that not much happens in the early part of the script that I have summarized, I felt like I was being pulled in too many directions. Crystal had a few fun exchanges with her cat, but there were simply too many of them – enough that had I not been reading the novel for the purpose of a review, I may have stopped reading it altogether before reaching its better second half.
The second half of the novel has a clear direction once it establishes the foundation of its conflict – namely, Crystal backing herself into a corner trying to look smart to her online friends while spewing mean posts tot the poster who highlighted her error – and the second half makes for much smoother reading than the first. The twist – that is when Crystal’s world becomes a bit weird – is not well-concealed and most reasonably attentive readers should pick up both on what is happening and how the story will ultimately resolve itself (one could argue even Crystal gets it, although she is remarkably stubborn about admitting it). The final resolution felt slightly rushed, but ultimately succeeded in solidifying the game’s message and giving the dramatic personae good endings.
The writing quality was variable. It usually made for smooth reading but there were a few examples of clunky dialogue, see for example a line from Crystal in the second half: “And request me to commit such atrocities! / These thoughts, none of them are my own!”
That was probably the clunkiest slice of dialogue, but there are lines here and there that caused me to do a double-take (albeit it was smoother on the whole than my previous Itch.io review, Edda Café, not withstanding that Edda is better-written overall). Conversely, the writing quality is generally better in the second half than the first because Crystal arguing with a disembodied voice proved to be more fun than most of her one-sided debates with her cat. I also thought the writers did a particular good job in writing the in-game online posts. Specifically, it was very easy to see both why Crystal took the post noting her error in a bad way given her character but also how the person who wrote the post failed to consider how giving unprompted advice in a public channel, even with the best intentions, can come off poorly.
(Aside: One use of apologised suggests British English here, albeit that was the only case I noticed.)
Grading on a curve, Crystal the Witch does well enough in setting up its main conflict in the first part, using a strange event to force Crystal to deal with her conflict, and then bringing things to a close in a way that actually addresses and resolves said conflict. The piece could have plausibly benefited from tighter scripting and more editing time. It took a little bit too long to get to the point in the first half and neglected some basic setting development that would have given the whole story a firmer sense of place.
Conclusion
Crystal the Witch earns from me a qualified recommendation. I can recommend it for readers who think the petulant Crystal sounds amusing or who find the idea of a light-hearted comedy centered on internet miscommunication with a dash of witchcraft interesting. Between Crystal’s design and the backgrounds it is an overall impressive artistic effort for a first-time project created in a single month. The story has an interesting core and Crystal is usually a fun character, but this is not a particularly tight script and, even granting it does have an idea and bring that idea home, it is not the kind of story that is likely to stick with one long after reading.
I noted in my introduction that I decided to tackle Crystal the Witch to keep with my tradition of reviewing horror visual novels around Halloween. Crystal is unique among my Halloween reviews in that it explicitly references Halloween and it is not a horror game but instead a comedy. In that sense – I suppose it fills a fun visual novel niche of being about Halloween without having any horror elements (there is nothing more than mildly spooky with a wink and a nod).
