CrossCode

如果你和我一样在高低落差那里劝退，那你将错过这款神作

見下ろし型のアクションゲーム 広大なマップを走り回って探索しているだけで楽しいです。 キャラも魅力的でマップ内での掛け合いも楽しかった！ ドット絵のグラフィックも綺麗。 少し神殿内のパズルが多い気はしましたが、それ以外は総じて面白かったです。

I really want to like CrossCode for what it tries to be. One can tell that there is a lot of passion and work of the developers in this game, trying to create an Action RPG inspired by the SNES era of videogaming. I even sometimes believe to sense a hint of RO in it, perhaps due to it's "MMO" setting. The Story sounds promising but needs a while to develop, while the soundtrack is decent. The art style is what you had expect with the promise of inspiring yourself on SNES games. The game has a massive focus on it's puzzle mechanics, often so much that the combat system or actual RPG aspects fade into background noise. Some games are an "Action RPG with occasional Puzzles". CrossCode is a Puzzle Game with occasional RPG elements. For someone who is into puzzles this can work and I went in with the expectation to like the game that way. The game wastes potential here and focuses for most of it's content on puzzles involving climbing up elevation levels in the world design to reach hard to access spots. Unfortunately, due to the art style, the lack of shadows etc. the depth perception in this game is terrible and you will spend most of your playtime looking for a ledge to climb up on to then jump onto another cliff and fall down over not assessing the height or distance of a jump correctly. Ever changing textures palettes probably do not help here. What seems to be the intended solutions on some jumps feels so awkward at times, that it is hard to believe that it is the intended solution. This includes but is not limited to jumps so far one had visually assume that they are impossible based on previous attempts on other cliffs, or weird jumps around corners hugging walls that make you feel like you just did just sequence break something by accident. I do not ask for "Yellow Paint" here, but the developers also miss more subtle ways of giving the player information he can use to approach environmental puzzles with anything but brute force. All of this ties into the Combat occasionally serving as a roadblock that is better handled by getting better gear. That better gear though is either a reward for solving some of the hardest climbing puzzles a region has to offer, or requires materials with some also requiring access to some of the hardest to access spots in a region. Basically the same outcome, whenever you find or trade for your equipment. The optional "overworld" puzzles not feel so optional. Additionally, there may be issues with running the game properly in higher resolutions/fullscreen mode depending on Operating System, which can be fixed by messing with the launch options (--use-angle=vulkan).