You Should be Playing This: CrossCode

The advent of the American highway system spurred the rise of the national restaurant chain. Not only did they offer familiar—often identical—products, but their large, splashy branding drew eyes from the highway. Small restaurants aren’t putting huge logos up in tall metal poles. It takes a lot more work and a bit more bravery to sample the local flavor.

The video game market space is having its own highway moment. It is a hard sell spending your time or your money on a complete unknown—if an ephemeral experience like lunch has too high an activation cost, how can people be expected to drop triple the amount of money or fifty times the hours on a video game experience they know nothing about?

CastleQuest went live on Twitch. Catch up on their CrossCode VOD now.

CrossCode crossed my path, well, I have no idea how. Or when. I wish I could pinpoint the moment I knew I wanted it, or even how I heard about it, so I could make the same pitch to others. Perhaps it is the Secret of Mana vibes. I haven’t kept up on Indie game development, and before my daughter was born I had been struggling through a pile of games I mostly like while not really playing much at all (now I play almost nothing except CrossCode). But I wishlisted it, I stared at it, and then I just went ahead and dropped the $20.00 on it. No regrets at all.

The movement, the puzzles, and the combat are so enjoyable. The major conceit—that you’re playing an MMO—allows some sideways commentary on video games in a way that’s really cute. The major dungeons are long and pretty tricky, so the of course feel like a modern meditation on Zelda II: Adventures of Link palaces.

Zelda 2, the Pinkerton of Zelda games (not the best but you get nerd cred if you say you love it). — Zelda 2, the *Pinkerton* of Zelda games (not the best but you get nerd cred if you say you love it).

There is a moment after the end of the Second Palace that is a nice metonym for the vast amount of care put into the game: A bunch of characters are hanging around, reveling in their triumph, and one of them asks their fellow adventurer how many chests they had still uncollected (your map logs how many chests there are total as well as the number you’ve found, so it stands to reason other “players” have access to the same information. Verisimilitude!). Through a series of text boxes, the character suggests that there is a particularly tricky one that eludes most players—this casual chatting builds out the world as a real MMO space. Add in the fact that you’re just overhearing a more experienced player handing out a tip to their bud, and it’s a really great way to give the player metagame information in a way that adds to the experience. Finally, it will lead you to something you could have noticed on your own, but probably didn’t, and the hint isn’t a solution but just a suggestion to start the puzzle. There’s a real and excellent sense of accomplishment finding a strongly hidden treasure chest—that might require an FAQ in another game—and it stayed within the bounds of reality as presented by the game. I really appreciated it, even if I spent a large handful of minutes fumbling around before I realized what to do.

All of CrossCode feels like this. Everything you do is actually fun to do (except fight the skeleton sand sharks, sorry). The goober characters you spend time with are really delightful in ways that I did not expect, and when they weren’t around I ended up being a little sad. The MMO story-within-a-story is fun, the framing device that drives the actual game plot is an interesting mystery, and the main character Lea is a knowing wink to the silent protagonist trope in a way that allows her to be expressive rather than an inexplicable blank slate. Many rewards, objects, and enemies are metatextual references to videogame history: from challenge bosses that reference known game icons (a recolored hedgehog enemy drops a golden ring & chilidog, for example; three golden triangles are needed to forge a strong weapon), to unwinnable battles that actually seem quite winnable, to things not being quite what they seem.

I knew I found a game I could love when it never occurred to me to a save-scum after barely losing a duel to my self-proclaimed rival. He earned it, I couldn’t take that away from him, even if he is a slightly annoying dingdong.

The story—which is multifaceted and serves up some early twists that seems obvious and serve to obfuscate later twists that offer moments of quiet surprise—aside, the beating heart of CrossCode is that it is fun to play. The gameplay is fun, straight up fun. I love exploring a new area, opening up all the shortcuts in à la Dark Souls, scooping up the treasure chests, talking to out-of-the-way NPCs. When it comes time to combat, I am reminded of my favorite action combat of all time, the Elementalist from Guild Wars 2 (circa 2013, gameplay may have changed): you’re moving around, throwing out attacks, switching elements on the fly. And the elemental powers aren’t just different-colored sparklies—they have their own upgrade paths so they can be as dissimilar in playstyle to each other as you prefer.

General gameplay takes out all the bad bits from most games. The enemies are aggro on attack, so you can just run around exploring and not battling, if you feel like it. I am so grateful for that choice: you don’t need to “clear the screen” before you can explore, and leveling is not balanced around knowing you’d be forced to constantly grind foes if you want to see everything. Another way CrossCode respects your time as a player is the battle rank: if you’re hunting for certain item drops, your chances of getting them increases by not pausing between battles. It’s really nice to be able to fight when you want, not when the game wants you to. It never feels like work, and the bosses that are supposed to be a bit of a challenge remain so due to their patterns, not simply their stats. Much respect to that level of balanced design.

I have no complaints with this game. It’s pretty long. There is almost point where it might be…too…long, but only because it felt like there was a clear story resolution about to happen. But I also didn’t want it to end at that point, so it’s more like a mid-season break than an ending. I can already see myself playing through it again. CrossCode is the closest thing to the version of Secret of Mana you hold in your memory, rather than the warts-and-all actual SNES cart if you plugged it in today.

CrossCode a really fun game, and I think anyone that grew up with action RPGs should take this chance to bite on some risk-free local flavor. I took the unmarked highway exit to grab something new, and that has made all the difference.