CrossCode

I feel the term "hidden gem" has kinda lost a bit of its meaning over the last couple of years. You see people using the term for games that, sure, are gems, but are certainly not hidden. One of the big offenders of this that comes to mind for me is Celeste. Sure, the game is an extremely well crafted experience, but I would hardly call it "hidden". That being said, I feel CrossCode is an amazing example of a hidden gem. I discovered this one after I was recommended the demo for this team's upcoming game Alabaster Dawn. After completing the two hours it had in store, I was hooked, and decided to look through the devs previous work. I picked up the game with it's DLC on sale for $8. 118 hours later, I can tell you now, that was probably the best $8 I've ever spent. CrossCode has easily wormed it's way into my top 10 indies. In CrossCode, you play through an in-universe MMO titled CrossWorlds. Not only do you get the beautifully written lore of the MMO itself, but you also learn more and more about the original dev team and the larger company behind CrossWorlds. The cast of characters on display here are also extremely charming and memorable. My favorite of which would probably be the main protagonist, Lea. Despite her vocabulary being very limited, Lea's interactions with all of the other characters always feel very real. One of my favorite interactions is a bit over halfway into the game between Lea and Emilie, one of the party member that joins you on your journey. Without getting into spoilers, there's a pretty big event that causes a small rift between the two. When the innevitable scene of them making up eventually comes, the emotion comes across beautifully even though Lea mainly says one word repeatedly throughout. As for gameplay, CrossCode exceeds here too. While I will say, despite there being some sense of progression, none of the abilites you recieve feel like major game changers to me. However, CrossCode's combat and puzzles were able to keep me engaged from beginning to end. When it comes to combat, you have four main abilities: melee, ranged, shield, and dash. All of these can be upgraded as well with special moves to deal more damage. While the combat looks pretty simple on the surface and doesn't ask too much of you early on, it takes a lot to truly master it. The puzzles also, as I got later and later into the game, constantly had me scratching my head, sometimes sitting in the same spot for 5-10 minutes trying to figure out what I was supposed to do. Despite the game not being too demanding, you should still expect to die and struggle a bit along the way. CrossCode is an extremely well crafted action RPG, and an AMAZING first outting from Radical Fish. I do have my fair share of critiques, mainly with the pacing and certain beats of the story, but they're not enough to detract from the rest of the experience. If you consider picking up the game, I highly recommend picking up the bundle with the A New Home epilogue DLC. It does an amazing job tying up a lot of the loose ends from the base game. Overall, I'm extremely excited to see what this team cooks up with Alabaster Dawn and beyond.

I hate that this is the review I'm leaving. This game could literally be the best game ever, but the puzzles require such an insane amount of twitch timing and aiming that It became too exhausting for me to finish. I hate that.

I would admit that during my high school days I pirated this game (because it looked cool and I was still broke at the time) and finished it and deemed it one of my favorite games. I don't know if this is an apology but I bought it full price and finished it with 100% achievements and also bought another copy to my friend for him to experience PEAK and as of this time, I still regard this as one of the best games that I have ever played. That is all Thank you and I am excited for the next game in development and yes, I have bought Alabaster Dawn since its release. EDIT: I have bought the DLC as well and loved every bit of it.

I have never played a game that pulled my heartstrings so much. I'm not much of an emotional guy but the story itself was just, amazing. CrossCode is a hidden gem in a pile of shiny rocks. Lea, Sergey, Emilie, C'Tron, Apollo, every character is full of life. The diagloue feels real and heartfelt along with being just as funny when talking or seeing the dialogue between NPCs. CrossCode will always have a place in my heart ever since I found the demo when going through one of those "Bored Button" websites. Radical Fish Games, let me just say, even if you most likely wont see this: Thank you for making this masterpiece of a game.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this game. I think this game has more positive reviews than it deserves, and the reason why is simple. Players want to like this game. It does a lot of things right. The devs clearly put a lot of time and effort into the game, and it is pretty unique. However, the game has several flaws made it too frustrating to continue. I probably got about 40% of the way through the game. There are some great moments, but there are long periods of frustration and gratuitous gameplay that make it not worth sticking around. Platforming- This game has tons and tons of platforming in it. Basically every screen in every overworld area has different elevations of platforms that have items to collect on them. Unfortunately, the forced perspective of the camera makes it impossible to tell the heights of platforms at a glance. You cannot just look at the screen and determine if another platform is the same height as the one you are on, especially if the platform is south of you. This sounds like I need to get glasses, but it is true. You frequently have to stop and charge up your ranged attack to see if the reticle passes over platforms to see if you can jump on them. Look up a video of someone going through the desert or jungle biome, and you will see what I mean. This is simply unacceptable with how much focus there is on platforming. It quickly becomes annoying with the sheer amount of platforming alone, even without the issues with the perspective. It makes exploring the overworld a chore. Also, the platforming ends up becoming a boring find it game of trying to find a ledge that you can climb up to get to an item. Often you have to go across multiple screens of platforming to get your reward, and it gets boring fast. Most of the non-dungeon areas aren't even that long. It could probably take about 15 mins to go from point A to point B, but if you want to get the items there, it takes way longer because you have to run around to find a ledge to jump on. Again, look up a video on item hunting in the jungle and desert, and you will see what I mean. It is really bad. Pacing- You get no progress of the story until about 30% of the way through the game. The story actually gets good, but there is nothing for so long at the beginning. Another problem with the pacing is that the game does not have a good mix of puzzles, battles, and platforming. The dungeons are about 75% puzzles, and they repeat the same mechanics over and over until you are sick of them. As for the combat, the game wants you to chain together kills for better loot, but it forces you to choose between platforming to get items and farming kills. I often run through an area killing everything I see, then backtrack through the area to do the platforming to get items. The gameplay doesn't flow together very well. Also, everything just goes on too long. Something that starts out as fun goes on and on until you get sick of it and want it to be over. It's this way with the puzzles, the dungeons, and most of the regular areas. They game beats the content to death instead of having a good balance. Puzzles- If you don't like puzzles, don't play this game. Seriously, the dungeons are way more focused on puzzles than combat. The puzzles get boring and frustrating because they start to get repetitive, and it doesn't feel rewarding completing them sometimes. The puzzles often have components that only last a short amount of time and they also frequently require precise aim. This got frustrating after a while because most puzzles so far weren't hard to solve, the challenge is in the execution of the puzzles. The tight timing and accuracy requirements make it feel more like a time trial than a puzzle. If you are going to play this game, I recommend playing with mouse and keyboard to do the puzzles. The controller is harder to aim over long distances, and precision aim in very short time windows is frequently required. There are some settings that can increase the time windows to make it less annoying. I am not against puzzles, I like zelda dungeons, and I beat talos principle reawakened and all dlc without looking anything up. This game just doesn't do the puzzles well, in my opinion. I'm sure I have spent a lot more time trying to execute the sequences to complete puzzles than the time I spent trying to figure out what to do. Plus, some puzzles have multiple steps that must be done quickly and in succession. If you miss a shot or take too long, you have to start from the beginning. It gets very annoying. I regularly felt relieved that I was done with a puzzle instead of happy that I solved it. Then the next room contained yet another puzzle with basically the same mechanics. Combat- I think the combat is above average overall. Enemies on the world maps are ok for the most part. Some fly away and fire a bunch of projectiles at you while they cannot be hit. It can be annoying sometimes. The bosses so far have been good. There are expansive skill trees and moves you can learn. A lot of enemies have to be broken, which means you have to hit them while they are charging an attack or in a moment of weakness. This stuns them and allows them to take way more damage. The bosses I fought so far don't take any damage when they are not broken. For boss fights you you break them, damage them until they hit the next phase, then repeat. I thought this was ok, but maybe some people wouldn't like this. It doesn't feel like you are trying to dodge and attack back and forth in the fights. You're usually dodging a few attacks until they use the one that allows you to break them, and then burst them down to their next phase. The game doesn't seem to require you to be good at combat except for the pvp battles. There are only a few of them, but I thought they were frustrating. You fight another character that has your abilities, but he chains together attacks and dodges in ways that you cannot. These fights are much harder than any other enemies in the game, and you cannot practice for pvp battles. When you get to a point in the story that has a pvp battle, you go first to 5 wins, and then it's over. You cannot rematch, and you cannot practice. It was frustrating for me because I wanted to improve. I wanted to get better and win, but the game doesn't allow you to do that. You breeze through the combat with regular enemies so you don't have to really learn it. Then you face a much stronger enemy and you only get one shot at it. The good- There are some great moments in this game. The boss fights were fun and the story picked up eventually. Sometimes I was excited to see where the story was going, or to progress in the dungeon. Unfortunately, these moments were far outweighed by periods of frustration and wanting to be done with repetitive and tedious portions of the game. It began to feel like a chore.

I followed the development of this game since it was first announced. Played the demo, and knew that once the full release would come out it would be one of the best games I ever played. I played it first to completion before the DLC came out, and finishing it I was catatonic for a week, just amazed at how it delivered on everything I hoped. Now I played it again, and even knowing the plot points, I was once again brought to tears at some of the reveals. Playing the DLC this time around, I am once again amazed. The announcement of Alabaster Dawn, and the clear parallels in gameplay are nothing to me if not a promise that the next game is just going to be just as amazing as this game is. Honestly, that CrossCode does not have the same status as Stardew Valley, Undertale, or Slay the Spire is mind boggling to me.

I don't recommend this game unless you are a big fan of this genre. I have played a lot of video games for over 10 years and some of it is hard for me (although I don't really play rpgs). It is clear the devs made a game for themselves because they love this genre. However, the effects of that are as follows: -The dungeons take a very long time to complete, multiple hours long, including the first dungeon. -There is a very long tutorial because there are so many game mechanics. -The player must execute up to 4 of these game mechanics at once in order to complete the puzzles in the first dungeon, and do it very quickly. I have finished the Bergen cave dungeon at the time of reviewing this, it seems like the only thing worth doing is the main story, the side quests and side content are mostly boring grind, but there are big rewards for some of them. Trying to find the hidden item in each area is sometimes fun as well. The Bergen Cave dungeon has puzzles aren't too difficult mentally, but some of them require a really fast execution, so much so that I couldn't figure out a puzzle and had to look up a guide. This is mostly because I didn't realize that I had to do something about twice as fast and thought it was impossible until I read the guide. I recommend slowing down the puzzle speed to 75%, the devs are turbo-gamers and they made this game for an highly skilled audience. There were also places that I didn't find initially simply because the rooms were too dark, that is just bad design. The combat is very fun, deep, and has a huge skill tree with many different branches and lots of different abilities to choose from.

My favorite game of all time. every aspect is perfect to me, the combat, the puzzles, the dialog, the music, the art, everything. my love for this game is boundless. i will always love you crosscode

It sure has a stunning art direction but putting a slog of a dungeon about shooting things at awkward angles to have them slide on ice platforms dozens upon dozens of times before the story gives you much reason to care about the whole thing is a gambit that really didn't pay off for me.