Sometimes a game comes along and makes an incredible first impression. Crossing Souls is more the kind of game that walks into a room while delivering the punchline to a racist joke, then trips over a table, sending the foods assembled on it into a ceiling fan that further exacerbates the situation. It’s possible to overcome this bad of a first impression, of course, but to be perfectly honest, I’m not seeing a path to redemption here. The art makes it frustratingly difficult to judge relative distances and figure out where ledges are positioned, the writing is stunningly amateurish and appears focused solely on nostalgia-pandering (which is to say nothing of how dialogue frequently runs onto a second screen by a single word, triggering all of my OCDs), and the combat is boring at best and irritatingly gimmicky at worst.

Dead zones aren’t rocket science

Crossing Souls explicitly tells you that the best way to play it is using a controller, so it’s surprising that this is one of those indie games that totally ignores the necessity of a dead zone for analog sticks. The slightest amount of drift can cause your character to run off in one direction against your will, and there really does appear to be no dead zone whatsoever. The game was so immediately unplayable because of this that I had to hunt down a free program that creates files you can drop into the game folder to manually establish a suitable dead zone. In doing so (and figuring the program out), another flaw of Crossing Souls became apparent: you can’t skip through cutscenes. That could have technically been circumvented in this case by awkwardly moving to a save point rather than starting a new game each time, but it’s worth mentioning regardless because it becomes a problem later on.

(It goes without saying, but I’m not touching the stick at all in the video above.)

This is with the external program’s appropriate dead zones, and it feels so much better. Still, making players hunt down external tools to make your recommended controls actually playable isn’t exactly putting your best foot forward.

Gimmicky character switching

The small handful of playable characters are introduced to you with the efficiency of a slasher movie, and their personalities have about the same amount of depth. There’s Main Guy, Little Brother, Not-Jeff-From-Earthbound (let’s call him Not-Jeff for short), Bruiser, and Love Interest Girl. Those aren’t their actual names, mind you, but they’re certainly the ones that I personally remember, and that really speaks to how little impact they have. Anyway, the gimmick here is that you can switch between characters at any time, and they all have their specialties. Main Guy can climb and jump, Not-Jeff can float and energize panels, Bruiser does the most damage in combat and can move heavy things, Love Interest Girl can dash and catapult herself at predetermined locations, and Little Brother can eventually pass through closed doors. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with this. The problem I have is that they’re all totally incompetent outside of their specialties. Main Guy and Little Brother are the only ones with a decent jump, and forget about trying to use a ladder as anyone but Main Guy. These limitations start to feel like they exist in order to necessitate constantly cycling through everyone, and this quickly wears out its welcome.

Some early gameplay

The gameplay loop here isn’t exactly rewarding. You go through a ton of dialogue, explore a little, then fight some enemies in a kind of vaguely 3D beat-em-up style. Rinse and repeat. The upside is that the animated cutscenes and music here are really good. The downside is that Crossing Souls simply isn’t fun to play, nor is the story remotely engaging. That total disconnect leaves moments that probably should inspire at least a tinge of emotion feeling entirely hollow and meaningless.

Fighting is really strange in this game. There’s a sense of weightlessness that afflicts enemies and allies alike, and that doesn’t combine with the awkward camera perspective to create anything particularly positive. Even weirder, the characters aren’t balanced at all. Not-Jeff is 100% useless in combat. Love Interest Girl has a whip attack that can keep lots of enemies at bay and Main Guy has a bat that isn’t too bad, but there’s no reason to use them when Bruiser can take enemies down in one or two hits. He has more health than the other characters, too.

Everyone eventually has to sneak into school (the game takes place during the summer) to obtain an item, and this is where we get our first taste of Little Brother’s ability to go through doors. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how I was supposed to use him to get everyone else past a locked door, though. I ran around trying to look for cutscene triggers and hidden spaces, but nothing seemed to work.

It turned out that a cabinet that couldn’t be interacted with as the other characters had the key I needed. The locked door was the only one that needed to be passed through, and all of the various ghosts and rooms were just red herrings distracting from the fact that a new item could suddenly be interacted with. That’s not good game design, but sure, whatever. After that is an ill-advised stealth sequence followed immediately by a gimmicky boss fight where you’re not fighting directly, but instead trying to figure out which scripted thing pushes the encounter forward. Oh, and each death requires going through all of the pre-fight dialogue and animations again for some inexplicable reason. Again, cutscenes are unskippable. The minigame after the fight was the only part of Crossing Souls that I’ve enjoyed up to this point, and that’s really only because it’s taken directly from Aladdin’s carpet ride section (the one found in the Genesis version, as memory serves).

I’m seriously tempted to ditch Crossing Souls and play Aladdin instead.

The post Crossing Souls: Progress Log #1 appeared first on Killa Penguin.