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My Thoughts On: CrossCode

As Steam’s 2023 Summer Sale rolled around, I was itching to grab at least one game before the sale came to a close. I had heard of CrossCode from a YouTube video a while ago and kept it in the back of my mind until a sale rolled around. After weighing up any other potential games I’d like to grab instead, I settled on CrossCode. Lo and behold, I was beyond pleasantly surprised with my experience and enjoyed it more than I imagined I would. I wouldn’t hesitate to call it one of my favourite games I’ve played this year, which says a lot considering I had just spent an ungodly amount of hours in Tears of the Kingdom just a couple of months ago.

Crosscode is an Action RPG developed by Radical Fish Games. Originally a hobby project, CrossCode was successfully funded on IndieGogo and fully released in 2018, following a 3-year tenure in early access. In 2021, the game would receive a paid DLC, adding a significant amount of post-game content. This lengthy development time has resulted in an extremely polished product that has clearly had so much love, dedication and care put into it. I’ve tried to keep this little write-up extremely light on spoilers in case a wandering soul finds their way here and decides to play the game themselves.

CrossCode is set in a sort of faux-MMO. Games about games aren’t rare nowadays but CrossCode’s take is well executed. The setting can be difficult to explain in summary, and is easier to get the jist of when playing the game yourself, but I’ll try my hand. CrossCode takes place in CrossWorlds, an MMO that exists in the far future. Instead of traditional MMOs as we understand them, CrossWorlds is not in fact virtual. CrossWorlds itself takes place on a terraformed moon and players don headgear, much like virtual reality headsets that we know today, allowing them to control their characters, called avatars.  A great deal of effort was put into maintaining the illusion of a highly populated MMO world. The protagonist, Lea, is a player logged into this game herself. Your party members are in-universe players and behave as such. You’ll see other players running about the world and chatting about the game and the experiences they’ve had within it. This MMO-based world allows the game to toy around with genre convention, engage in meta humour, subvert player expectations and tell a story that is entirely unique to the setting.

CrossCode’s visuals are a clear homage to the art found in SNES classics. Player and party sprites are cute and charming, but appropriately readable. Effects for powerful abilities are striking and flashy, while sprites for large and dangerous boss monsters ooze with menacing detail. Spritework for the game’s numerous locales is delightfully vibrant, a particular favourite of mine being Sapphire Ridge. Pictured below is Autumn’s Rise, the game’s first major area.

I heavily enjoyed CrossCode’s soundtrack, composed by Deniz Akbulut. Battle themes are upbeat and electric, matching the pace and energy of the game’s combat. Dungeon themes on the opposite end, are moody, thought-provoking tracks, acting as appropriate backdrops to the game’s unrelenting puzzles. Tense story beats have appropriate tracks that set the mood wonderfully. Particular favourites of mine are Autumn’s Rise and Lea!. Autumn’s Rise is the track for the game’s introductory area of the same name. It is welcoming and upbeat, with a palpable air of discovery and excitement, serving as the perfect introduction to CrossCode’s journey. Lea!, as its name implies, is the protagonist's main theme. A calming and pleasant track that finds its motif used in several other places in the game’s OST. Keep a keen ear out!

CrossCode’s moment-to-moment gameplay is extremely polished, with Lea being incredibly responsive and easy to control. Lea's base arsenal consists of a chargeable, bouncing projectile and a melee combo, as well as a dodge and guard. The depth of this combat system can be found in the game’s skill tree and element system. Its skill tree allows players to upgrade certain attributes and unlock stronger forms of Lea’s four base abilities named combat arts. These combat arts make use of an ‘SP’ meter, with stronger arts requiring more SP to use. SP slowly restores on its own, but does so even faster when dealing damage to enemies. This motivates the player to stay active in combat, always building up SP in order to continually throw out powerful offensive or defensive abilities. Elemental modes allow Lea to swap between a number of elements on the fly, altering her current stats and damage type. Each element offers an entirely new set of combat arts, resulting in a large amount of options at Lea’s disposal at any moment during a fight. This also makes unlocking each of the game’s elements exciting, as each element introduces further variety in both combat and puzzle solving. Combat itself is fast and frenetic, requiring quick thinking and understanding of both enemy attacks and weaknesses to come out on top. Enemy encounters specifically were a highlight, with each enemy type having unique behaviours and their own individual strategies in order to take them down. This ranges from attacking them during an indicated phase of vulnerability, attacking a specific part of their body or building up a stagger meter by attacking with an element the enemy is weak to (and many more!). CrossCode also offers numerous pieces of equipment that offer certain modifiers to Lea’s skillset that allows the player to further specialise and build to their tastes. However, seeking out specific pieces of gear can require some extended material grinding. I generally ignored extensive trading and only picked up gear that I already had the materials for regardless, but after finishing the main story and picking out select pieces of gear I wanted to craft in order to tackle some post-game content, I did have to spend some time running around to grind out the necessary materials.

CrossCode's dungeons wear the game’s 2D Zelda inspiration on its sleeve, with large, labyrinthine structures, featuring puzzles, enemies, locked doors and a final 'boss' key the player must collect to face the temple's last challenge. CrossCode does a phenomenal job at introducing a temple's major mechanics and continuously building on them as the temple progresses. What goes from a single, simple interaction will eventually become an entire web of puzzle elements that weave together to create a challenging, but satisfying experience. Many puzzles will require tight and consistent execution beyond figuring out the solution. A temple's primary puzzle mechanics will also be used in enemy rooms, as well as the temple's boss, wrapping the experience up with a nice little bow. The amount of unique and varied interactions present in CrossCode’s dungeons is staggering, especially considering that Lea’s primary method of solving puzzles is solely through the use of her bouncing, ranged projectile. Admittedly, while I feel CrossCode's temples are very well executed in terms of their design, I did find myself fatigued at times. Dungeons are long and involved, and the ever-increasing complexity of a dungeon's puzzles often left me tired. Although  I may be partly to blame since I was playing such large bursts, I’d probably feel different had I taken the game slower! Still, I never felt the puzzles themselves to be poorly designed. CrossCode has a certain ‘language’ to its puzzle design that made it easy for me to get the idea of what a room was asking of me. This didn’t mean I solved each puzzle with any semblance of swiftness, but upon entering a room and getting past the initial shock of, “Wow that’s a lot of things”, scanning the room and the puzzle elements it contains made my brain begin churning with various ideas. Following this, I enjoyed experimenting with what was available in a room, slowly putting together what the puzzle’s final solution may be. This concludes with solving the puzzle itself, which as mentioned previously, is an execution test, requiring me to put my potential solution to work with well-timed and precisely-aimed projectiles. I fell into this engaging loop of ‘scan’, ‘experiment’ and then ‘solve’, feeling very satisfied after each room I cleared. Besides the puzzles themselves, the developers included visual aids like floor markings to be a subtle guiding hand for a player. I’ve only done a single playthrough, but I look forward to running the dungeons once more with the experience I’ve now garnered. Related to puzzles, CrossCode offers accessibility options that allow the player to tune puzzle speed to their liking. While I never found myself making use of this feature, it is appreciated for players that have difficulty with or aren’t interested in its puzzle gameplay.

The rest of CrossCode’s gameplay is found in exploring its vast locales. Areas consist of many rooms filled to the brim with enemies and collectibles. Players can blast away flora for materials and hop across terrain. The game offers many chests which contain valuables outside the player's reach that require platforming across an area’s geography to reach higher up ledges. Also littered across these areas are numerous mini-puzzles. While not as substantial as their dungeon counterparts, they offer a distraction from combat and platforming, often leading the way to chests and opening up shortcuts to make navigation simpler. One of my few qualms with CrossCode is found here. The game’s isometric perspective means judging heights and distance for jumps can be unintuitive. By the latter half, I found myself ignoring some of the more deviously placed chests because I just didn’t have the patience to seek out one specific ledge I needed to climb up and then fall off three times on the way to the chest by misjudging my jumps.  

Much like any RPG, CrossCode features a bevy of sidequests alongside its main content. RPGs regularly fall subject to menial and tedious sidequests and I was happy to find that CrossCode’s were generally enjoyable. This isn’t to say the game is free from the usual affair of “Bring me 7 yum-yum apples”, but several sidequests offer entirely unique content and interesting spins on existing mechanics, especially further into the game. They’re still rather inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but I found them worth playing through for the extra dialogue involving Lea and her current party, on top of the extra bits of gameplay they provide.

CrossCode's protagonist, Lea, is subject to much praise. Silent protagonists are not at all uncommon in games, especially RPGs, characterised by, of course, their silence. Usually, the intent is for the silent protagonist to act as a sort of vessel for the player to interact with the game and make what they will of their experience with its world and characters. This does not mean silent protagonists are entirely devoid of character, there'll usually be some tidbits of information and personality that the player can come to learn. For the most part, though, the silent protagonist’s fellow party members will usually do the heavy-lifting in terms of dialogue. CrossCode's Lea approaches the trope differently in that her silence is an important aspect of her character and underpins many of the interactions she has with those around her. Upon awakening, Lea learns that she is incapable of speaking due to her avatar's speech control module malfunctioning. Exceptions lie in a few ‘hard-coded’ words she has available to her, like the simple and iconic, “Hi!”. While she may not have much in the way of words, she is extremely expressive, owing to the game’s numerous, vibrant portrait sprites, each beaming with personality and charm. The game is rather dialogue heavy, and Lea will be meeting and starting up conversation with many characters on her journey. She is incredibly reactive and will regularly make her thoughts known through body language and expression. For example, exasperation when tasked to do something trivial, joy when greeting a friend and a palpable smugness when she succeeds. She is motivated, friendly and competitive, with a slight ego and an occasional knack for tomfoolery. Furthermore, Lea’s limited vocabulary results in her needing to be creative in the way she uses the words she has available to her. As a whole, Lea is a phenomenal protagonist that makes CrossCode all the more memorable and compelling.

As for the game’s other characters, CrossCode is an a unique position in that your traditional RPG party members are other players within CrossCode’s MMO setting. This results in party interaction that is intended to mimic that of banter between friends during an online play session. While travelling around the game world, party members will comment on the design of an area you’ve found yourselves in, the absurdity of the enemies you’re fighting and much more. To further cement the online party experience, party members, of course, lead real lives outside of the game and will mention goings-on in their days. Some may even need to log-out of the game after a long play session, leaving Lea to her own devices. Much like Lea, there are an abundance of portrait sprites for each party member, with an equivalent amount of care and detail put into each. In combat, party members are AI controlled, running about and fighting enemies independently. This lack of control and the way in which the AI for party members functions holds up the illusion of party members being players themselves. I enjoyed that as Lea’s skillset grows ever-larger, her party members will follow suit, choosing upgrades for themselves and purchasing their own new equipment. The party system and the way characters interact during exploration are effective in evoking that feeling of forging connections through online gaming and running through vast virtual words with newfound friends.

I’d prefer to keep thoughts on the game’s narrative to a minimum but as mentioned earlier. It is rather slow to start, but uses this time to get the player accustomed to its unorthodox setting and allow time for Lea to come into her own and forge bonds with others. I found myself eager and excited for major story beats, which the game certainly delivers. There is a particularly stellar extended story sequence that has still stuck with me weeks after completing the game. I did find the game to have some pacing issues, more particularly in a section with minimal story content and three large dungeons back-to-back. The player is able to complete side-quests and the like between these dungeons, but it is a rather long stretch and I did find myself yearning for a more substantial reprieve from the barrage of puzzles. However, this section of the game followed rather heavy and extensive story content so it is effective in allowing the player, and Lea, to decompress.

I would recommend CrossCode to anyone that enjoys smooth, fast-paced top-down combat and tough, execution-based puzzles on top of an intriguing narrative with fun characters and exciting story beats. It saddens me that it has fallen off the wayside in the wider indie gaming sphere. I feel it truly does deserve to be heralded in the same light as its more well-known indie contemporaries. CrossCode is a phenomenal first outing for Radical Fish Games and I’m looking forward to their next title, currently in development under the name of Project Terra.

#crosscode #review #rpg #chrono