CrossCode Review

CrossCode is one of those perennial games. One where I've known for a very long time that I wanted to play. This, from what I can gather, is a pretty common sentiment. I wonder, then, why it has taken me eight years to get to it. And even more so, why it feels like people who recommend the game don't really do so with as much urgency as they might for other games. CrossCode is, for better and worse, a game that is somewhat over-developed for its scope. Something that I feel runs contrary to many other games that feel over-scoped for their development.

This review comes after spending roughly 45 hours with the game and completing the main story. This review will spoil major events in the story and I believe those events are worth experiencing on your own.

The bottom line for this review is that the game is very good, especially in its story and characters. It does overstay its welcome in some of the other aspects, but is still very much worth experiencing and I do recommend it. If you decide to play it, make good use of the accessibility options to set puzzle speed to 50% and enemy damage to 50%.

While I don't overtly spoil major beats of the game, I won't be marking any spoilers ahead, so be warned.

CrossCode is, at its heart, a lot of different things and it does many of them well. It's a single player action-RPG set inside a fictional full-dive VR MMO. The avatars, enemies, and challenges posed by the MMO design take place in the real world in the fiction of the game. All of those game elements are constructed from an extremely lightweight and fragile form of matter that can be programmed and controlled as if it were a computer program. You inhabit Lea, a player of this VR MMO called CrossWorlds. Unlike most players, however, Lea can only be conscious inside of the game world. She's aided by a team that exist outside of the game, as well as other players inside in order to recover her lost memory and complete the objectives of the game.

The game plays like a typical ActionRPG. You have dedicated melee and ranged attacks, as well as special moves that can be triggered for each. As you explore and level up, you get more options to deal with enemies. While I enjoyed the action all the way through, I did feel like the balance for the game was a little bit off. Enemies tended to feel pretty spongey and they tended to hit very hard. I consistently found myself trying to dodge away from attacks with a wide area of effect only to be hit by them anyway. Similarly, the guard didn't feel that useful because blocking attacks didn't block all damage. In order to alleviate my frustration, I ended up using the assist settings to set enemy attack damage to 50% and it felt much less punishing. It feels like the game was almost playtested too much by the same group of people and they got too good at the game, so the difficulty baseline was just too high. There's also an attack frequency slider that I didn't end up touching, but you may find it useful especially for some of the more difficult boss fights.

Another large part of the game is puzzles. In each of the game's dungeons, there are puzzles themed around unique gimmicks and the elemental abilities that are acquired in each one. These are the things that truly tested my patience. Each dungeon felt much longer than it needed to be and the puzzle design required execution of the solution each time, rather than being the kind of puzzle where the second the player understands the solution, it can be enacted simply. In an attempt to alleviate the execution difficulty, there's another assist setting to reduce puzzle speed. This reduces the speed of puzzle elements to give you additional time to position yourself and react. I found that this setting was essentially required. There was no way for me to complete the game without it. I also felt that the puzzles themselves often consisted of so many elements that they became too noisy for me and difficult to solve because there was just too many elements in play. The puzzles are also extremely prescriptively designed. While the solutions may be creative, there's really only ever one solution to each puzzle. It didn't feel like I was learning new and interesting applications of Lea's abilities. Rather, I felt like I was trying to read the game designer's intent. While I didn't love most of the standard puzzles, I truly hated the maze puzzles at the end of each dungeon. These consist of sending a projectile attack along a set trajectory while manipulating obstacles in the projectile's path so that the projectile bounces off of all of the prescribed walls and pillars before reaching a goal location. None of these were truly difficult, but they were time consuming and annoying. So much so that both Lea and her companion throughout the game, Sergey, show obvious disgust at the final one that is at the end of the final dungeon. If you as a developer make your characters show obvious disgust at this puzzle, it probably shouldn't be in the game.

That's where my negative criticism ends, however. The next few paragraphs are the gush zone for me. The cast of this game are wonderful. Lea, despite being a mute protagonist at the beginning of the game, immediately shows a lot of personality. She gains some vocabulary through the course of the game, but even including some gestures means she can only communicate about a dozen words or so by the ending. The other characters do a lot of conversational lifting, but there is never an assumption that Lea is communicating anything extra offscreen like you see with other silent protagonists. She is definitely an authored character, not a blank slate. The supporting cast is very well developed as well. Sergey, Lea's guide and advocate outside of the game world, is not the most exciting person, but that feels very real to his character. He's on the sidelines the whole time, managing your status and helping you navigate the game world. While he is your constant companion, I feel like the other players in the game, especially Emilie, are the true stars. I found the moments of conflict, reconciliation and revelation to be exceptional. I really love this cast more than I have a cast of... basically any other RPG? Like they all have their own "deal" without being overly archetypical. They all have personality without being dominated by one interest. I feel like the game wouldn't work even a little bit without them.

The narrative that these excellent characters support is one that I feel like ebbs and flows in a nice way. For much of the game, you are simply playing along, going through the MMO quests, interacting with other players, and slowly building back glimpses of Lea's memories. An uncharitable reading of this section would be that nothing is really happening. I like to think of it as letting you sink into the world and get to know the side characters so that when you reach the last third of the game everything hits so much harder. I want to note before I continue that this game's release in 2018 predates the rise of generative AI models. The game's view of artificial intelligence is a lot more positive and interesting than the current hellscape that we find ourselves in. The game's handling of these themes makes me much more interested in the game's DLC, which promises to answer a lot of my lingering questions about the plot and about this world. Who is the "she" that Gautham and Satoshi mention in the main game? What happens to Lea and the other AIs stuck in the Vermilion Wasteland? What happens when they meet their originals? Are there more AIs that we don't know about? If this were any other game with a more streamlined set of mechanics and fewer puzzles, I would dive into the DLC immediately and carry on playing the game to its final end. As it stands, I need a bit of a break, but I'm very much interested in coming back to this and completing it at some point in the future.

At the end of the day, I feel like CrossCode does a lot that I really love and hope carries forward into Radical Fish's next game, Alabaster Dawn. If they can tune it to be a little more forgiving and maybe drop the huge, tedious puzzles, I think they have a certified hit on their hands.