CrossCode is very far from actually being perfect, it lacks rhythm, some indications, its OST is good but not immemorable, its gameplay is at first difficult to handle… But that is being said in order not to catapult it onto the top too fast. In fact, this game has absolutely everything it needs and any sidestep would have been, in my humble opinion, a mistake. I’ll try here not to tell you anything too accurate, because the best way to be amazed by this game like I was is to play it genuinely. You explore many worlds with flow and fluidity, meeting “real” people on the way through their avatars, competing in solo PvP or in puzzle resolution speed and you even get your hands on four different elements, in addition to the default neutral one.

CrossCode is everywhere filled with references to the genre of MMORPG, although it is purely and only a singleplayer game. This is almost not about precise easter eggs or whatever can be close to a type of fanservice, it’s a lot more about the genes of MMORPG. CrossCode relies on them to spring and blossom. I must admit I never durably played any MMORPG, and yet this genre’s DNA totally showed through this game to me. Be you as uncultivated as I am, CrossCode will have you discover MMORPGs like you could never have if you had approached them the normal way. I mean, with an intimate and very internal point of view, something helped by the futuristic plot of CrossCode and its allowance of mass immersion within a virtual universe, for the characters around you in the game and what it implies for them, and mankind.

Now this game’s gameplay is unique, very sensitive and quite a great work of creativity. Nonetheless, one of the main bases of CrossCode’s challenge is timing and now the gameplay can be a problem. Timing is around what lies half of the difficulty of this game, if it’s not 90% if we combine timing required in puzzles AND fights, which can be either as neat as they can be frustrating depending on your skill and reactivity. I tried for tens of hours to play with a gamepad; that was an error. Mouse + keyboard gameplay appeared to me as less intuitive at first, but like with many games after a bit of practice and you getting enough in touch with it, it becomes beyond compare. And the best mobility you can get when it’s about legwork with a sight from above against giant hedgehogs, or worse. The fights will indeed ask for skill, but are however very doable by anyone with enough determination and coordination, and a build focused on defense if you’re not too good with moving from a corner to its opposite in less than a second without getting lost. In combat, many approaches are possible, each one of them going with a particular sequence of the story which is very long, not counting all the side quests on the top of that. The only thing that may really bug you if you’re not into this are the puzzles. A huge amount of them is based on a tough timing, quick mobilization of miscellaneous skills (the ones in-game) that you maybe have only learned a few minutes ago, and some enemies may even be a puzzle to beat in themselves. The very last dungeons in particular, were, to me, a bit too much. Puzzles intended to be solvable by hand can quickly become only solved by heart, in that they need a very precise execution of shooting from far, dashing, running, activating... Fortunately for some, a feature was later on added to slow down the pace demanded by those puzzles; I can’t tell my opinion on it though, I refused to use it in spite of their difficulty.

Concretely, your not-so-blank character is given birth at the doorstep of the main hub of a game-within-the-game universe. Which game (the first one), will accompany your thinking process throughout the entirety of your journey. I’ll not spoil anything here. Your player quest is about finding out who your character is and why she [[Lea]] has to do what she must do, since light orders are given to her by the same mysterious character who woke her up and speaks in her head. You share this quest with this aforementioned character, which also wears the burden of playing normally in a game she’s not very aware of but can think of from outside the box. A big part of this game’s story is about playing double agent, and not only through the eyes of one sole person which is even not in a certain way. Indeed, the scenario is extremely deep, a lot more than what it seems during the first ten of hours. It involves quite a big reflection of what humanity is, what AIs could become and how far they are from human, here swimming against a potential current tide, and the central role of memory in what makes people humans, or not. Our computers have memory and no personality, now imagine the opposite. This is not Blade Runner, actually it’s a lot closer to an investigation game that takes its marks and is then quickly launched as a goal to be reached aside from what looks like your main quest, but isn’t.

It was hard for me to try to put this game’s richness into words. Not mentioning this richness is unlikely to strike you immediately and it will only do the more you keep to play, the more you tell yourself “Oh this game has THAT MUCH?”. I strongly believe the Radical Fish team, which I secretly hope to be able to meet one day since they only live a few tens of kilometers away from my home, are perfectionist hard-workers, that can never stop to improve their creation until they reach the quality that they had aimed for at first. They sometimes lack a sort of sense of poetry in what could have been possible to do with this game, but nobody can say they work off-handedly. This game is a proof of the love a studio can give to their game. My sole regret will ever be, why can we only be a Spheromancer, and no other class? It’s simple: immersion.