Gameplay loops are the core to a lot of indie titles that focus on ending and starting again, and despite not being a roguelike at all, CrossCode still adds a little of that melting pot magic to its already overflowing combination. This back and forth, hours of grinding and questing, with usually a couple hours deep in a dungeon to spending a few more doing sidequests, killing mobs of enemies, and grinding out enough materials for the next tier of equipment, all creates a flow. There is so much densely packed variety that nothing ever got old, and while it’s tough, I was at the mercy of brilliant and thoughtful puzzle design. With it, you’ll use angular surfaces, multiple elements, and trick shots to activate switches, move objects, freeze and melt obstacles, and aggravate enemies. Each dungeon is a dense and thoughtful exploration of concepts through back-to-back puzzle rooms, more a Portal pace than a Zelda one, and most of the puzzles use the same mechanic: your projectile shot that can ricochet off walls. The five dungeons across CrossWorlds all focus on different hooks, the four elemental powers you pick up throughout the game.
Outside of the design of the overworld, pulling you in every which way to find its secrets, are the really excellent puzzle and dungeon design. It suspends that loop of running and exploring the world with just the right level of confusion and challenge. It may seem insane, but it adds a cohesion to the level design you get it after you play for long enough, and that visual language is classic comfort food. This is where that PSone awkwardness comes in, because often it’s hard to tell how high or low platforms are and where you may need to be to get to them, but it’s also extremely authentic. A checklist in every level is to find all the chests throughout, and these range from out in the open to specific paths that require you to climb and jump across several screens just to be at the right height to make a tricky jump to a chest with very valuable loot in it. Going through the environment is a treat, just because there are little nooks and crannies everywhere. In one such specific way does it harken to Alundra so much, and that’s with just wonderful three-dimensional level design. In a similar way to Shovel Knight, CrossCode makes me want to believe it was released back in 1998 just alongside Alundra, and feels as much like a classic from then as it does today. There are layers of Zelda, Phantasy Star, and Alundra all throughout the design, and it all comes across as something original a cut of its own, more interesting quilt. It has adorable, familiar, and friendly-made-terrifying enemies like Snowmen with Bazookas and hedgehogs with spikes called Hedgehags. It has that classic Sega-Saturn style music that gets stuck in your head.
#Crosscode a new home ending full#
It delivers both on being a great mesh of the things I mentioned above, and also the style of world it’s setting provides: an MMO Island full of grindy sidequests and colorful vistas. It’s a top down pixel-based game, and today that’s not really anything to bat an eye at, but this game channels that specific PSone energy I’ve really wanted any standout indie to do for a long time.
On a personal level, CrossCode feels like a spiritual successor to Alundra. These two games are in an awkward space, but were some of the earliest 2D games to really push boundaries with style of form.Īll of this: the balance of modern and old, comes to meet that lost PSone awkwardness with CrossCode. It wasn’t just Symphony of the Night two classics that stand out to me are Alundra and Paper Mario, across the PlayStation and N64 respectively. They were using older technology on more powerful hardware to manufacture pretty interesting results. That early era of 3D games was full of genre-defining and style-defining games, but some folks were still making top down or pixel-art games, and those titles are very awkward or ancient in their execution, but this turned them into of-the-era indie games, by today’s comparison. There is a specific flavor of PSone game that gets lost in the shuffle, and it’s that too-late-to-the-party pixel art game on CD. There is an awkwardness and stiffness that is authentic to nailing that aesthetic, and I think there is a bit of trepidation and certainly challenge in nailing that balance. Something like Shovel Knight is the prime example of this, combining just enough of the old with the new to transcend into something akin to a modern classic.
There is a special sweet spot with combining what you remember to be fun game ideas with what actually are modern-feeling and fun game ideas.
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