On what difficulty should you play Crisol: Theater of Idols?

If you’re jumping into Crisol: Theater of Idols, the chilling first-person survival horror game by Vermila Studios, you might be wondering which difficulty you should play it on. With a running time of around 10-15 hours, it’s not short after all, and your choice will greatly determine your experience with the game. So, which difficulty should you opt for?

When you start Crisol: Theater of Idols, three difficulty levels are available: Novice, Penitent and Martyr. They’re essentially Easy, Normal and Hard, with each one tweaking a variety of game parameters to make your experience more or less challenging. Your choice determines how lethal your enemies will be, for example, as well as how plentiful resources are throughout your playful.

With all that in mind, if you’re brand new games in general, or at least survival horrors, you might want to consider playing Crisol: Theater of Idols on Novice difficulty, which is essentially the game’s story mode. On this mode resources are plentiful and enemies don’t pose all that much of a threat unless you let yourself get swarmed and surrounded. It does detract a little from the game’s central mechanic, however, in which you need to expend your blood – your health – in order to reload your weapons and allow you to fight.

Most players, then, should play Crisol: Theater of Souls on its default difficulty, Penitent, the first time around, which offers a more balanced and rewarding experience. It’ll be challenging in places, but it should be manageable for the most part, and you’ll have to think a little more when it comes to enemy encounters. Is it worth sacrificing your blood in order to shoot them, or can you just run past them and preserve your valuable health?

Martyr, the hardest difficulty option here, is for those who want a serious challenge. As well as enemies being tougher to defeat, you’ll find yourself needing to sacrifice more blood in order to power your weapons. As such, you’ll want to avoid as many encounters as possible. On top of that, the game’s autosave system is disabled, meaning you’ll have to rely on manually saving your progress at crystal balls that you occasionally find. All in all you’ll be in for a tough time, so you might want to save it until you’re more familiar with the game.

In any case, if you’re wanting to fully complete Crisol: Theater of Idols, you’ll need to complete it on Martyr difficulty eventually as there’s an achievement/trophy for doing so. There are no difficulty-related achievements/trophies other than that, though, so you’re mostly free to play how you wish. In fact, the game even allows you to create your own difficulty level if you’d like, tweaking things like enemy health, damage taken and even enemy AI to suit your preferences.