For full transparency, this game was made by a very close & treasured friend of mine almost primarily by himself (with some assistance from others). That being said, I played this game mostly blind.
Cross Quest offers a familiar gameplay styling that pays tribute to early JRPG titles, most notably ones you'd find on the Gameboy, and follows the quaint adventures of a young impressionable man: Steve Cross. The general loop is generally unobtrusive: encounter & slay a variety of charming monsters, gather items, and earn enough experience points to make your way to the next major story beat. You can earn new actions to perform in battle by visiting Chapels, which double as save points, a slight departure from the genre standard of gaining abilities through leveling up- however, it still ends up accomplishing the same thing in the end, as abilities are still gained through natural game progression. Nothing in the game's brief 5 hour runtime (note: my account says I played it for 2.6 hours, but I actually transferred my original save file from the itch.io release to the steam one.) is too particularly difficult, and EXP shares are plentiful enough towards the end that grinding for levels isn't so much of a burden as one may expect. In fact, a lot of the difficulty of the game is entirely dependent on what level you're at when facing enemies, are there isn't much in the ways of combat variety, and leveling up resets the only values important to your character, so managing your health is more of an issue of managing when you're going to level up when exploring, and recovery items can largely be ignored. Harkening back to the genesis of the JRPG genre, Cross Quest sees you controlling only one party member: Steve Cross, and at no point are you accompanied by any other playable characters, meaning all of your strategy is made in one decision per turn, and all your enemy encounters are in a 1v1 format, no hordes or groups here. This lack of additional party members I don't think hurts the game on paper, but due to the game's balancing and lacking combat variety, a lot of encounters end up boiling down to mashing the fight option, as it is the most effective and least expensive battle option in almost every scuffle. The map design is straight-forward for the most part, directly guiding you in linear fashion from one location to another, this is fine, but the map does open up quite a bit near the end, and it becomes a bit confusing since the title's gameplay language up until that point never made you guess where the next step was.
The Story, to me, is charming light romp. Steve himself is delightfully naive and proud, believing himself to be a sort of holy crusader in a land poisoned by sin. While the game is quite short, you do encounter a small variety of unique characters, all of which are given enough personality to stick out- without lagging the pace of the game too much. While I like Steve here, I fear the most interesting pieces for Steve's character arc comes at the end of the game, [spoiler] which ends on a cliffhanger, teasing future projects.[/spoiler] I feel Steve needs to be challenged more in his story, or maybe he needs more time to reflect on certain events.
This is a very personal thing where my bias shines the brightest: but Cross Quest is chalk full of direct homages to music I've grown up with and bonded with the creator of this game over. This may not mean anything to anyone else, but I was personally delighted by seeing references to bands I love, Cross Quest secretly doubling as musical trivia for myself. These references are present in both text and art, which while I'm infamously not the biggest fan of the original gameboy's aesthetics, I am a fan of most common monster designs in this game. It's kind of like playing Dragon Quest and becoming familiar the charming spread of enemies those games are famous for.
Ultimately: I'm glad I finished this, and It's surreal that I can write a review for it on a legitimate storefront. I would encourage anyone I know to at least give it a shot, It goes on sale for less than a dollar, that's cheaper than a Hotdog. It's cute and inoffensive, like when video games were defined by little more than Jumping Frogs.
...Albuquerque.
