[h1]"The Cross" is a throwback horror to the old-school Resident Evil games, with the 1st person of the newest installment, yet missing the heart of what works for either. It's certainly amateurish in a lot of ways, but its graphics and minimal features are the sort of thing one could easily over-look through the lens of nostalgia if only it delivered the same intriguing mansion mystery and thrilling gameplay. Unfortunately, that's not really the case. The Cross is an easy pass at the $15 retail; though genre-lovers might find its flaws more forgivable when heavily discounted. [/h1]
The game opens with a rather effective video that could've come directly off the original PlayStation, both regarding the stylistic choices as well as graphics/shading befitting the first DinoCrisis game. That might sound negative isolated from context, but both aspects are truly positive elements working in the games favor to evoke another era and style of gaming.
Your nightmare starts off reminiscent of Silent Hill's random foggy night car-crashes, where here too the protagonist is split up from their family at the first sign of something otherworldly. Yet unlike that era of survival horror, they fail to follow up on the opening video with some sort of interaction that makes sure to hook you into the story as your character. You just sort of find yourself there going after your daughter and wandering around wherever, occasionally finding vague notes relating to whatever.
Eventually you'll find yourself in what's basically The Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil with much wider/longer corridors. The usual fixed location areas exist to save your progress book (doesn't require any resource), then you're off exploring in a few different paths for the right route. Aside from the setting, you'll also see a lot of Resident Evil in the puzzle design, with some being rather overt takes on past puzzles / puzzle-locations. The game items are fairly easy to see sitting out, however it's a real ♥♥♥♥♥ telling what drawers/counters can be opened.
Before entering the mansion, you'll find the knife rather early on and get your first chance at mindless enemy encounters. (You can sneak up on them, but not due to any stealth system, just some bad pathing that sometimes has them running into corners.) This is where you really get an idea what you're in for the rest of the way. The weapons are beyond wonky with practically no sense of weight or movement when using. The knife attack animation isn't really a stab or swipe, it’s more like some kind of gentile forward shrug. I wasn't actually sure if I was hitting the attack button or something else entirely until I got into combat and realized things were dying. Even in combat though, it never feels like you're hitting the enemies… or swinging a weapon at all. The animation makes it hard to predict if you're even in range to hit an enemy, or they're able to hit you for that matter.
Once you start getting into the game, you'll realize though that the biggest issue is actually the game's use of wide, open spaces and long corridors as meaningless filler. It's so excessive that it actually draws attention to its own lack of content as a rather obvious means of stretching out areas with extra time walking down empty corridor X to empty room Y and back again. [It doesn't have Resident Evil's iconic door-transitions, though its sure got a loading animation in between each room, no matter the size]
It might not be so irritating if you could at least sprint through these areas effortlessly, though the game utilizes a stamina meter (even in absence of any enemy presence) so you're further dragged down with walking part of those long vacant spaces. Thankfully there's a map to limit aimless wandering, though gameplay is active while using it and you might get attacked if in a not-so-empty-space. Now that I mention it, there isn’t really any in-game menu/pause screen or controls outside the launch.
The current base price of $15 is unimaginable as a satisfactory purchase, though at the time I'm writing it's discounted to around $3. It's a far more considerable price point, and perhaps one where at least a subset of horror genre aficionados with a proclivity for new takes on the old might find themselves forgiving its many flaws for the general experience. We horror fiends tend to be hardened to a genre that seldom satisfies, willing to tolerate more in pursuit of the parts that do. “The Cross” is steps above the typical gaming horror of walking sims with cheap jump-scares for youtubers to fake scream, though not by many and relative to its own selective audience.
[url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1117120/The_Cross_Horror_Game/?curator_clanid=32660416]You can check out THE CROSS on Steam now.[/url]
[url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32660416-Weird-Wonderful-Game-Watch/]And find more recommendations on our curator page, Weird Wonderful Game Watch. [/URL]
