TL;DR CROSSCODE IS EASILY A 9 OUT OF 10 GAME, CHECK IT OUT.

Crosscode is a neat mishmash of a lot of things. You got pixel art that's actually great and not lazy because there was art direction that wasn't terrible. There's a story that was interesting enough that I was theorizing from start to finish, wondering about what-ifs and where it would go. The system they made for combat is really fun, and the abilities you unlock as you progress down the skill trees (which are bonkers, but in a good way) allow you to do some really over the top stuff, and conveys the feeling that you're getting stronger in tangible ways beyond "AW YEAH BIGGER NUMBERS".

Without going into spoiler territory Crosscode's story involves MMOs and online relationships, AND A WHOLE BUNCH OF OTHER COOL STUFF I'M NOT GONNA SPOIL BECAUSE WOW. At times the story shifts from fun and lighthearted to suddenly getting VERY SERIOUS, and I am VERY glad I was able to go into this completely blind because it sucked me in enough that I would be at work wondering what the hell was going to happen looking forward to playing it more to find out.

The core Crosscode's gameplay involves fast paced combat, quests, jumping puzzles, and puzzles involving abilities you get over the course of the game. The combat is the clear strength of this game, dodging just before an enemy attack lands is satisfying, there's enough enemy variety that combat doesn't get boring as the game progresses. There's plenty of special moves that you can pick up, but you cant get all of them at once so you have to make choices about what you want (that you can go back and redo with skill tree resets, which you get a bunch of throughout the game, none of which I HAD to use). The boss fights are by far the highlights of this game, with the combat, art, and music all combining to make a pretty cool experience, I feel confident in saying that there is not ONE bad boss fight.

The Quests feel like fun attempts at emulating MMO quests. I mean the "Hey go kill a bunch of [STUFF] for me please" stuff is in there, but those are bundled in with a bunch of other things as a way to introduce you to new areas, and you were gonna be fighting those anyway. Some quests are cut and dry fetch quests, and they aren't exactly spectacular, but they're made up in a way where its possible for you to already have the stuff you need to turn it. Some of the best quests are actually fun mini-games, changing up the game by turning it into a tower defense game, or a turret section, or a timed survival section, which can all be replayed later for fun. The major quest lines that span a significant chunk of the game actually provide rewards that are worth it, and have fun conclusions.

The puzzles aren't where the games strengths lie, and while I know part of me feeling this way is because I got frustrated with more than a few because my brain is a shriveled husk, running around trying to figure out how to get up to a platform to do a sequence of jumps (where if you fall you have to backtrack all the way back to previous areas in some cases), or trying to use abilities you've gained to move something from point A to point B to open a door is at serious odds with the rest of the game, to the point where at a major story point in the game, where loads of things are happening, and the game goes "Okay time for some puzzles!" and the momentum comes to a screaming halt. At no point in the game did I go "Oh yeah, no more of that boring combat, gimmie those PUZZLES!". There's a setting to tone down puzzle speed, but it feels too much like a "give up" button. Like I said earlier: part of these feelings come from frustration, but I also think that the guy over at Radical Fish Games with the giant 500 IQ glowing brain could maybe back it off just a little bit).

The music is great, phenomenal even. The combat tracks never get boring, the dungeon tracks are great and are all distinct from each other. Each town has its own theme that fits the area its in, boss fight music is suitably intense. You could easily leave some of the overworld music on a loop in the background while you do other things. Appropriately, the best moments in the game get some of the best tracks, theres not much else to say: they hit it out of the park in the sound department.

I feel like the game could've leaned into the whole gimmick of "This takes place in an MMO!" a little more. For big story beats, and SPOILERS they do, but there could've been more. You don't see a single gold seller speaking in broken english spamming shady website links, you don't see a single avatar stripped down to their underwear dancing on a mailbox, only one character comes close to ♥♥♥♥ talking a specific class and he wasn't nearly mean enough to make it seem real. No one gets called a casual, and there aren't any annoying unattended children spamming chat. There are some inane conversations out there that you can listen in on, which are certainly true to life of MMOs, but they aren't inane enough. I once had to listen to a conversation about pro-wrestling in general chat in WoW, nothing in this game got that dumb.

My only REAL nitpicks with this game besides the aforementioned puzzle stuff are some confusion about depth perception, where it can be hard to tell how high something is, given the games camera angle. You can go for a jump that seems completely doable, but whoops that cliff you were jumping for is actually way too high for you to reach. Technically you can check each jump before you do it, but that's tedious, and counter intuitive given that sometimes the game wants you do jumping sections under a timer. Speaking of timers, each dungeon is presented as a "race" with another character, which should be fun, but instead it just compounds frustration with puzzles and difficult fights because on top of the already bad feelings of "Oh man I'm bad at the video game!" you're LOSING THE RACE NOW AAAAA.

My minor complaints don't mean that this isn't an amazing game though. I received this as a gift from a friend after something possessed me to put it on my wishlist (I cant remember why I did it, but I'm glad I did). I'm looking forward to seeing what else these game devs make, because if they put the same effort into what they make next as they did with Crosscode, I'm sure it'll be rad.

THIS IS A GOOD GAME, GO BUY IT.