Chriscole: The Idol Theatre is a horror FPS influenced by Spanish folklore
Blog Andrew Joseph 25 Jun , 2025 0
CRISOL: The Idol Theatre aims to blend Bioshock with Resident Evil gameplay, a horror FPS influenced by classical Spanish folklore. I climbed past abandoned streets, popped up zombie-like enemies with guns, used my blood to make bullets, hid in abandoned stores, looking for reliable types of staple bolt knives, and avoiding powerful enemies along the way. While Crisol showed more of it during my hands-on demonstration, making it unwavering with the genre’s stamina, its weapon design and unique aesthetics especially made me interested in seeing more.
Exploring a terrible, reimagined Spain called Hispanic, Crier’s world and character design shocked me, especially the gun. Here, your blood is your health and Your ammunition, so reloading each gun will trigger a spinal sting reaction, such as when your pistol bristles with a small needle handle, draw blood from your hands, or when the needle sticks out of the bottom of the double-tube shotgun barrel, waiting for the trade to survive health.
This push forces you to be reluctant to follow both to prevent yourself from wasting and getting stuck. You can pick up a healing syringe to help recover ammo, but Crisol also encourages you to drain blood from dead bystanders, killed by your mysterious enemies to heal and reload.
The gun design itself is cool. They have gold-plated red accents, adding gothic colors, but have no conflict with the environment I saw in the short demo. On the other hand, the environment has little to no character of them. While the trailer promises some cool-looking suits, the dark Hispanic streets I wandered around didn’t go too far off the norm. This is surprising considering how the enemy and guns are designed.
Crisol will not waste any time putting you into practice. Within seconds of picking up the controller, tilt, puppet-like enemies stumbled at me. The low light reveals disturbing details in their approaching masked faces, eventually breaking down under my gunshots. Every enemy I encountered (or at least every enemy I could kill) responded based on which part of the body I was shooting; when I fell down, I crawled without a head and popped up my head. Both bloody guns I've tried have an older feel to them, more like the charm of the original creature Hawk than the strong cracks of the gun found in most modern shooting games, although Crisol's trailer (and weapon wheel) promises a diverse weapon of seemingly diverse savage shooters.
After crossing several city blocks, absorbing blood from the corpse and popping up zombies like crippling my path, I encountered a locked door with a winch. Locked by a padlock with a chain – Classic! Like clockwork, I set out to find the bolt cutter I've found in six survival horror games before. But before I started looking, some kind of huge arcane robot—a pile of blood-soaked bones and gripping machines, crying on the face of a woman—picked me up and threw me up.
The beast brought my street (conveniently) to the hardware store window, but once my pigeons came in, I couldn't touch me. Now, I grabbed every coin from the bolt cutter and cash register from the back warehouse and set out to grab the chain that kept me safe. But the moment my foot hit the dirt road, the beast returned to my heels and threw the road that threatened me as it chased me.
Squat down to minimize my noise, I found a shortcut through a fish shop, cutting through the store, cutting the chain and shaking on the winch to open the door in front of me, making a bunch of noise at one end. I heard the creature sprinting on me, just driving it away in a quick event, hoping I could squeeze instead of running back to cover. The door opened enough time; I rushed to the courtyard to be safe, and the door closed before the attackers caught me.
This puzzle-like invisibility part, while simple, adds a lot to my demo. I can see that if I end up needing to avoid larger enemies while popping up smaller, stopable enemies, this approach can evolve into a mix of stealth and shooting. I hope Crisol doubles in these two different kinds of survival horrors, creating tension between bloody battles and high-risk invisibility in the full release.
While I really like the demo, I feel like I haven't seen anything new except for the bloody, healthy eclectics and some really cool weapons and enemy designs. I'm sure as the game becomes more complex, puzzles and progress will begin to separate from the existential crisis. But I didn't see much in this demo, which was obviously early in the campaign. Still, I have a Crisol feeling: The Idol Theatre is worth a try, with a unique vision of survival horror with Spanish talent.