Lesson 1: Some Terminology

Here I'll tell you what I mean when I say stuff like "Use fibers to catch and immobilize crysts after deploying an nbomb." ;)

Above you'll see a rather typical Crystalise gameplay screenshot annoted with some numbers. Those mean:

1. The colored square, Alis. This is you. Identify with Alis. Feel Alis. BE Alis.
2. An active Cryst. These are your enemies.
3. Inactive Crysts.
4. The blue lines I simply call the Circle, though it is hardly circular. You create it and move on it - most of the time.
5. The stop-bar. As long as this is filled, you can use the L button to stop Alis' movement.
6. The turbo-bar. Similar to the above, but for speedup.
7. The time bar. Shows your remaining time and changes color from green to red. This is your real enemy.
8. Your arsenal of nbombs, usable with the circle button.

Lesson 2: Fibers

In Crystalise, you create Fibers in an attempt to close the Circle in such a way that a sufficiently high number of crysts is outside the new Circle. That didn't make much sense to you? Thought so!

Here's an illustrated guide:

Some more explanation:

1. A fiber in the process of being created .
2. That's a special boss cryst.

Here, the player (that would be me) is trying to enclose two crysts and immobilze them that way. The next screenshot shows the result of this action:

As you can see, this worked out. Obviously, if a Cryst touches a Fiber, it will be destroyed and you'll have to try again. There are no other penalties for losing a Fiber. Note that you can only move in very specific ways while creating a Fiber. This is by design.

Lesson 3: NBombs

Your only weapon besides your mobility are nbombs, of which you'll have a number at the start of the game depending on the difficulty. You'll also receive one every 5000 points.

By using an nbomb (with the Circle button) you can freeze all live Crysts for some amount of time, making them easier to enclose. They'll turn yellow to indicate their status.

Lesson 4: Levels & Game Over

The game is composed of a series of increasingly difficult levels. There is no "final level", but at some point it will become impossible for even the best player to continue.

There are 2 special rules that increase variety and - at times - difficulty:

• Every third level uses special crysts, which may be faster, bigger, smaller, more numerous etc.
• Every fifth level contains a boss, which has the potential to be both bigger and faster than ordinary crysts.

At some point your time will run out and you will be faced with this:

In case you made it into the high scores list, you may chose to change your name with the triangle button:

Your highscore will be saved automatically once you close the "Game Over" window, and you'll return to the main menu.

Lesson 5: Scoring Big

There are many ways to accumulate score in Crystalise:

• Each enclosed Cryst earns you some amount of points based on its size and speed.
• You get some small amount of points continuosly as long as you're not on the circle.
• At the end of each level you will get some points depending on the size of the area remaining in the circle and the remaining time.
• You also get an additional relative progress bonus on the points aquired in a level depending on how far you've come.

Do your best, I'm sure you can handily beat me - though I have to add that the game was still much harder when I reached that score :P