Crossing Souls may still be a game I revisit when I need to be comforted by the sheer joy of its characters, world, references, and music. Fourattic clearly loves the era as much as many of us do, and it shows. For all its references, the callbacks to different pop culture events never feel forced. Crossing Souls is a helluva fun ride, and a game I’d strongly recommend to anyone with a love of He-Man, coin-op arcades, and bitchin’ synth tunes.
Crossing Souls is a good adventure game inspired in the best films and video games of 80'. It's funny, clever and beautiful, but is missing more puzzles, a better combat system and more original story.
If you like the 80s culture, you will find an interactive tribute to it here. As a game, though, it works, although it doesn't do anything outstanding.
Crossing Souls has great style and art direction, and while the plot can be quite cheesy, it’s in a good way. It’s just a shame that poor controls dampen what should be a more enjoyable retro-inspired experience than it is.
Crossing Souls
Back to the 80s
Crossing Souls is a 9 hour long beat em up adventure platforming game where you play as 5 kids at the start of their summer vacation in California during the late 80s…
The game starts out as you playing as chris, going out to gather your friend to meat up with your little brother kevin at the tree house, he has something to show you..
Turns out this thing is a dead body, but you find an object on this body that matt figures out can allow them to ghosts…
Only problem is… of course the military is after this..
Which takes you on a crazy adventure of saving your town and stopping the military from getting this into their hands…
This game actually has a very heavy narrative focus..
The writing and story telling is great..
The actual gameplay itself though at times can be a bit lacking..
You can control all 5 characters, all with their own uses in the world..
However I feel like theyre all pretty under used..
As the focus is on combat rather than traversing levels until later in the game.. only problem is.. these sections don’t really utilize the different abilitites these characters have..
you have chris for climbing, matt for long jumps using his jetpack, charlei for flinging yourself across the map which only happens like 4 times the entire game.. big joe more moving objects and kevin.. kevin cant really do anything for now.. but will later be able to go through walls and portals…
and again,, these different abilities from chaarcters are highly underused…
inbetween these moments is a lot of stamina based combat..
you have to manage your stamina to not become vulnerable in combat.. enemies do drop health but they do crazy damage…
the combat is definitel a challenge..
And there are pick ups around the world for health and stunning enemies, and later bombs…
The progression of this story is actually surprisingly immersive, every chapter feels fresh and mixes the gameplay up,
Sometimes it just straight up beat em up… other times its puzzles, or solving a mystery…
There are also a couple mini games thrown in there to mix up the gameplay as well…
Though these mini games aren’t really fun.. theyre just there..
The game doesn’t ever really start to slow down until the final 2 chapters where the game just starts to feel like its over staying its welcome and youre smacked with the 2 least interesting levels in the entire game.
My biggest complaints with this game however is the difficulty spike at the end… the final section feels near impossible compared to the rest of the game… and the platforming overall here is just not fun, made worse by the fact that checkpoints are all over the place..
Every character has health attached to them.. and there are no refill stations and characters don’t faint.. if one dies they all die and its back to a checkpoint or the last savepoint…
Most of the time this is fine…
But randomly dying deeper into a level can put you futher back than dying somewhere in the middle..
causing you to have to redo all of this games unfun clunky and stiff feeling platforming, that by the way also runs on stamina if youre using the jetpack…
Disappearing platforms make this stop and go extra frustrating.. and the 3d platforming style on a 2d plane doesn’t help.. especially when youre platforming as keving for example.. its nearly impossible to tell if youre over a platform or not…
But these issues feel small compared to what this game does rogjt
Crossing souls is still a really good game with a great story
Its addictive, its fresh, its challenging, and will have the 80s and 90s kids feeling a bit nostalgic
I give Crossing Souls
a 7/10
o jogo em si, é legal, mas, vive a base de esteriótipos, como: o negro alto, forte, e desbocado com mãe autoritária, o nerd oprimido que usa óculos , a caipira com pais ignorantes, e por ai vai. Pensei que o jogo seria realmente uma viagem aos anos 80's mas, foi feito de forma brusca, o conceito foi todo explorando esteriótipos para gerar uma certa ''falsa nostalgia''
o jogo tem mecânicas legais e história interessante mas erra grave no conceito e perde seu potencial.
SummaryIt’s 1986 in California. A group of friends discover a mysterious pink stone that allows to travel between two realms. This gang will live the summer of their lives in an adventure that will get them involved in a government conspiracy. Control five kids with specials skills while fighting and solving puzzles.