Do you like stories? Combat? Puzzles? Laser bridges? Slaughtering infinite populations of hedgehogs? Then you’ll love CrossCode. If you somehow like none of those? You’ll still love CrossCode.
…As long as you’re good at puzzles. I should have probably started with that. You need to be good at puzzles.
CrossCode is a top-down, retro-inspired action RPG with fast-paced combat, engaging puzzles, and the best story of any game I’ve ever played. Developed by Radical Fish Games, it was fully released on September 20th, 2018, although several demos were released in the prior years.
You play as Lea, a mute girl who has been logged into a game called CrossWorlds in order to regain her lost memories. CrossWorlds is a VRMMORPG set on a distant moon called the Raritan Gem, known in the world of CrossWorlds as Shadoon. Players connect to avatars on the Raritan Gem to explore the vast world of CrossWorlds, navigating sprawling environments and exploring grand dungeons as part of Operation Trackwalker, a project that tasks them with participating in an ancient game called the Track of the Ancients.
The first thing I’ll mention is the visuals. To put it simply, the game is beautiful. The environments look incredible, and the fake players are so realistic that you’ll sometimes forget you’re playing a single-player game. To add to that, the game’s soundtrack is filled with some of the best songs I’ve ever heard. If you have headphones, be sure to use them for CrossCode, as the audio enhances the game’s immersive experience.
CrossCode’s puzzles are challenging, but they’re not unfairly difficult. Throughout a dungeon, you’ll learn the mechanics of a new element and how it interacts with objects and enemies. Once you’ve learned everything about that element, you’ll have to do the dungeon’s final puzzle, which combines everything you’ve learned into one single puzzle multiple times the size of your screen. These puzzles, while difficult, feel incredibly rewarding to clear, and prepare you for the bosses that come after, which also function as puzzles.
Despite all this, the best part of CrossCode by far (minus the story, which I won’t spoil) is the combat. There’s so much that goes into combat (equipment, circuits, etc) but those are better learned by experience, so I’ll just go over the combat itself. You have a melee attack, a ranged attack, a block, and a dash, each of which can be chained together, imbued with elemental power, or charged into a combat art. This devastating attack can be charged from level 1 to level 3 for varying levels of destruction, varying further depending on the move and element used. Sometimes, sheer power isn’t enough to defeat an enemy, and you’ll have to find a way to break them, lowering their defence in order to deal big damage.
If I were to say anything else about CrossCode, I’d risk spoiling the story and other parts of the game, which are best experienced blind. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, the web demo is available here, and the full game is available on Steam, as well as on Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox. If you decide to buy CrossCode on Steam, it’s 70% off during each seasonal sale.