CRALON Review from Pithead Studio Ex piranha bytes

CRALON, originally released on Steam on the 17th April of 2026.

The version i am reviewing today is what Pithead Studio called the V2 or 2.0... Frankly it should have been called "patch 2...", because a V2 or 2.0 version implies a full patching of the game, and THAT WAS FAR FROM THE CASE 😏

CRALON REVIEW FROM PITHEAD STUDIO

I have seen all kinds of shit on the social medias since the release of Cralon...

1. People said Cralon was a Catastrophe!
2. People said it was worthy of a student's project, but certainly not from an ex-employee of PB!
3. People said Bjorn was living on its moon and was far away from the expectations of the real people!
4. I have even read that Jenny was under the influence of Bjorn and had the Stockholm syndrom 🤣

Frankly these days... Due to the social medias which have played a high part on mass corrupting our minds, people have no limits anymore. They can say all the shit they want under the banner of "freedom of speech". They can launch personal attacks, slander from morning to evening behind the anonimity of their screens, and without any penalties in the end.

And between you and me that's not the kind of Fan / Customer you want in any industries out there.

As i am sure the only Influence Jenny have been impacted with... is the Syndrom of Love for her husband Bjorn 🥰 And i will just add that many of the haters behind their screens, should hurry and get out of the basement of their parents, find a real life job, find someone they love, build a family... And stop their childish behavior to adopt an adult one.

CRALON REVIEW FROM PITHEAD STUDIO

Now that i have covered the chaotic release of the game, with a mixed reception (on steam the average is 3 stars on 5), let's speak about Cralon now! I have played to Cralon for around 25 hours, i took my time to complete it, as i really enjoyed it and nobody paid me to write this review. (anyway no one knows me 😂). But even as a Fan i will say what i liked and what i would have liked to see! As for their future games, maybe the Pankratz couple will read this review one day 😎

Okay... first problem of Cralon is the Options Menu 🙃

The options menu of Cralon is very limited! Frankly it looks like a game menu which was ported from the Playstation console... Where of course we can't adjust the graphics, we can't rebind the keys for the controller, as everything has already been designed to play a certain way. And sorry but even the Weapon Parry was not available on controllers right from the start... It wasn't implemented before the V2 version, and that's why above i said it shouldn't have been called 2.0 version.

This feature should have been added in the game right from the start... it's a Basic one.

In Cralon you have access to a few Melee Weapons, and just one kind of Range weapon... The Crossbow.

I like the concept of using the basic weapons you find in a lost mine... But first issue, the CLUB is definitely the best weapon in the game, and you can see it right from the start as it can be improved several times, in contrary to the other weapons. Every creatures have their weaknesses, but the Club will stay the best overall weapon. And second issue, the crossbow can't be improved which in the end makes it useless, as the damage it will do will be negligible.

The part which i loved in the old PB games, Exploration is rewarded! 🥰 Look everywhere, leave no stones unturned!

On that part you can see that the work of placing objects on the field was "handmade"! of course the result is a little buggy... We have been used for a long time to "bugs" with the old Piranha Bytes studio, to the point we could even say that PB was the little german cousin of Bethesda 😅 But the objects placements look REAL, there is no Artificial Intelligence here... It's not like in the elder's scrolls where when you have visited 5 dungeons, you have visited them all!

So Kudos on the "does it look real ?" part, because from my point of view it's a success 👍

Is it a sleeping bag ? Anyway... it's not usable...

Yeah... another issue of Cralon are the "useless objects"... There are tons of them! You can interact with a lot of tea-pots which are 100% of the time useless... For your next game, please focus on things we can actually use... otherwise it's just wasting both your time as a designer, and our time as we 're going to search for "what use is this object has been placed here for" ?!?

Hey... Yeah i am a Fan, but if there is room for improvement, i am going to say it! 😜

↓ Click! for a Discount ↓

CRALON REVIEW FROM PITHEAD STUDIO

Let's speak about fighting the creatures of the mine now...

Hold down your horses... There are not so many different enemies to fight... I think i have counted 6 different models, with of course a few variations. But again the focus of Cralon is about fighting your fears in the darkness... And i guess they had to reduce the amount of models to the minimum, in order to stay in the "theme".

As you can see, they focused on the "creatures of the dark"... Dark Red ambiance and Fear of spiders 😈

Funny thing... It reminds me about the little Reel (video) on Facebook at the top of this review, where Bjorn is seen singing "Fear of the Dark" from the Iron Maiden metal band, and Jenny is on the front row supporting her man. Was Bjorn inspired by this music to create this game ? 😜 When i think to it... There must be some relation.

Now on the fighting part... It depends in which difficulty you're playing, and i recommend the hardest one, but you have the ability to parry for just like 2 seconds. You can't hold the button to stay in "eternal parry" mode... You have to time it at the right moment. Many monsters do 2 attacks, and even ranged attacks like fireballs, poison gas or lightning strikes have like 2 timed strikes. So if you time your parry wrong, you'll parry the first strike, but the second will pass!

If you play in the hardest mode, you'll quickly notice that you'll have to kite mobs to survive. That means like in the old grid-based dungeon crawlers to fight going backwards, in order to land a hit and avoid the one from your enemy. This will for sure increase the lifetime of the game by 5 hours lol! Because running backwards is not always easy.

Bats and Rats, all of the primal fears someone would have in the darkness of a lost mine 😈

The game is DARK and that's why you'll make an INTENSIVE USE of your Flashlight!

Now about the Hit box... Many players complained about it! You have to know that hitting something doesn't mean a guaranteed hit... It has nothing to do with Hit box, it has to do with your % of success in hitting a mob. That percentage is hidden to us the players, but it's not the first time that i have seen it. You can Hit... But you can also Miss!

You can buy (or find) maps at the local trader, and improve some of your stuff using materials on the workbench 😈

↓ Click! for a Discount ↓

CRALON REVIEW FROM PITHEAD STUDIO

Allright, back to... The issues of this game 😅

Yeah... yeah... i assure you i am a real fan! Did i say this game was a catastrophe ? no i didn't 😜

The graphics of the npcs... click on the screenshots below, something is not right... 😮 I don't know... it looks to me there was some 3D modeling melded with Transparent PNG pictures. I understand it's an Indie game, made primarily by Bjorn if i look at the credits... But at some point when we look at the Npcs outlines, something is definitely not right.

When an Npc is friendly, their eyes are green... And when they're not friendly ? You guessed it right they're red! 😏

By the way... i spoke above of the credits. Frankly Bjorn... Your presence in the credits is a "little too much". CEO Creative Director with like 10 short lines of Writing, Design, Cooking, Riding the horse... (that's a joke). Next time please summarize it in 1 or 2 lines like "Jack of all Trades ?", because all it showed was that you were a little too high on your piedestal.

It reminded me about all of those fake job descriptions on Linkedin, where people use CEO at all sauces! Yeah... I am the CEO of the cleaning department! So basically you clean the floor and the toilets ? and maybe replace the paper ? 😂

The dialogs are mainly composed of a fixed background, with different PNG pictures to represent the npc mood.

The Dialogs which are 100% vocalized, and that's a good thing, are...

1. Well written 👍
2. But unfortunately a pain in the ass to listen to...

Why ? Because these are LONG MONOLOGUES where the npcs are speaking to you like if you were a CHILD...

Yes i know you're actually a C.... (no spoiler), but we don't know that yet at the start... so spare us the parental mode.

Most dialogs could have been easily cut in half... For your next game, please implement real discussions. The npcs keep repeating themselves... Like they say 6 sentences in the whole dialog, which all mean exactly the same thing.

Loved the Dark ambiance on the left, and here is your character inventory on the right (quite simple, no attributes).

↓ Click! for a Discount ↓

Cralon Review from Pithead Studio

Okay to finish a quick list of things which would have been great...

1. You have limited the save games slots to 3... why ?!? i had to create backups of my own savegames in the end.
   Savegames corruption is a real thing... And when it happens you're glad to have made several saves.
2. The second and third areas are much bigger than the first one and it was good 👍 But the final level which was described as a fortress was more like a crumbling one... Looks to me the game was rushed in the end.
3. You didn't implement any Quickslots for the use of Healing potions or Courage ones. That means to use them we have to open the inventory, which is not pausing the game, and drink one as fast as we can before being killed.

There was one thing i was glad to discover... There is not enough loot to buy everything at the trader 😁 It changes from all these games where we finish rich with too much money. Won't be the case there, you'll have to make choices.

The official trader on the left, and on the right fighting one of your fears in a Red Dark ambiance 😈

Let's be honest, Cralon could even be called an Alpha release... Though it's far to be a Catastrophe. There are no game breaking bugs, and if you happen to stumble on one bug... Just quit the game and reload and everything will work again.

I found one of those... The quick save or any savegame wouldn't work anymore 🙃 I just relaunched the game.

But when you release a patch Bjorn... Don't call it a 2.0 or V2, it looks like you have done a TREMENDOUS job, when in fact you have just worked a few hours to fix a few things. When a company release a V2 version of their games, the game itself is completely patched, or reworked from the inside. Don't exagerate your words, because your fans will see it.

Finally... when you do a Video on Youtube to answer your community...

A simple "Yes you're right we should have released it later", or "we made a mistake" was all some fans were asking for to calm down. Don't try to keep your head high in every situations... You sometimes have to lower the head to pass a low branch, in order to proudly rise it again later. If you don't, you might stay where you are and prevent you from improving.

I am sure from your past years, you have all the money you need in your life... And whatever the success of Cralon, it's not going to impact your daily life. Just listen a little more to the feedback of your customers in the future 😇

Now i am waiting for Cralon 2 or whatever game you'll decide to work on... If you decide to continue, that is.

Cheers from France !

+ An ideal little game for Nostalgics of Piranha Bytes.
+ Challenging in Very Hard, count hours of die and retry!
+ It's a Biased review as i used to be a BIG FAN of Gothic.

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- Next time, please don't release an Alpha version
- Again fixing a few bugs IS NOT a V2 or 2.0 version
- Please enforce ENGLISH on your Steam Community
(it's a pain in the ass for non germans to use the translator)