Crossing Souls is nostalgia bait, pure and simple. That’s not to say that I don’t see what it was aiming for, but you don’t get points for trying when being stacked up against the ever-growing mass of games that successfully manage to be worthwhile. Much of this game is simply bad—the platforming is bad, the puzzles are bad, the combat is passable at best, and even the graphics manage to create real problems. That’s to say nothing of the minigames and boss fights, either, which range from trivial to outright infuriating. Sometimes you’ll play a game and notice it fraying at the edges, but Crossing Souls is in a more advanced state of disrepair. In fact, the only thing that can be recommended about it is the way it panders hard to 80s nostalgia, but there are only two or three occasions where this is cleverly integrated into the story or gameplay. The other references appear to exist solely to point out that certain things existed, and that’s the laziest form of fan service there is.

The story that wasn’t

Let me make something clear right off the bat: Crossing Souls has great music, and it’s easy to see how one could mistake that for certain scenes being genuinely emotional. If you strip the music away, however, you’re left with a story that’s remarkably contrived and thin, and some parts of it don’t make a whole lot of sense. That’s not to say that a lot doesn’t happen, but there’s a fantastical element at play so ill-defined that it’s hard to get a feeling for what is and isn’t possible. Beyond that, juxtaposing lighthearted Ghostbusters and Poltergeist references with a story that kills off certain party members renders Crossing Souls a notably jarring slide into darkness, though the biggest problem here is that party members are so predictable and unremarkable that it’s hard to feel anything about them one way or another.

The part that most people interested in this game will gravitate toward is its emphasis on referencing 80s pop culture, but this mostly consists of randomly stumbling upon various games, movies, and cassette tapes with titles just different enough to avoid infringing on anyone’s copyright. To be blunt, it’s not enough when a game points at something from the past and, like Chris Farley doing his The Chris Farley Show, says little more than “that was awesome.” It’s only on the rare occasions where Crossing Souls actually ties its references into what’s happening in the story or gameplay that they make sense. The most memorable of these is a boss fight that plays out like a game of Simon between waves of enemies—the boss plays a sequence, and you’re tasked with reproducing it in order to damage him. What makes this work is that there’s an army of ghost children in the area, and Simon was a popular kid’s game from the time period. References like this end up having much more of an impact than the fact that the main character and his brother have an NES with Kid Icarus in their room, which makes their rarity all the more depressing.

Crossing Souls has more of a focus on puzzles and platforming than I expected, though difficulties arise because of the awkward camera angle and limited stamina.

Combat, puzzles, and platforming

It’s difficult to explain what kind of game Crossing Souls actually is, but it’s sort of like a bare bones puzzle-platformer duct taped to an equally thin beat-em-up, with a soupcon of adventure game on top. You wander around and often find yourself looking for keys to unlock doors blocking your forward progress, and when you’re not, you’re platforming and beating up hostile rats and ghosts by button mashing your way to victory. Crossing Souls’ main gimmick is character switching, as you’re given control of a five-person group of friends with their own specialties and have to cycle through them to find the person best suited for each task; one is good at combat, one is good at platforming, one can trigger switches from a distance, etcetera. The problem with this is that characters are good at one or two things and completely inept at everything else, so only the main character can climb up ladders, and you can forget about pushing around even the smallest of obstacles with anyone but the big guy. It doesn’t sound like much, but this quickly wears out its welcome when you have to cycle through everyone every time you encounter a higher platform or small chasm because most of them can’t jump at all.

Another issue is the inclusion of a Dark Souls-like stamina bar. I understand its purpose in the context of the game, as it keeps you from being able to use the character who can hover to bypass huge chunks of the game by limiting his flight time, but it doesn’t serve any purpose on anyone else. Worse, regular actions like jumping, climbing, and attacking deplete stamina, and running out stops you in your tracks (and also makes it impossible to use one of the consumable healing items you pick up along the way). Running out of stamina in the middle of a chase sequence and watching your character stop to take a breather because you jumped too much is blindingly stupid, as is being unable to heal or dodge for the crime of avoiding several consecutive boss attacks. Stamina is a huge annoyance here.

Most of the minigames are terrible experiences, honestly.

I hope you like minigames

There are multiple points in Crossing Souls where the gameplay suddenly tries to cram in something entirely new regardless of whether it fits or not. Of course, we have the obligatory stealth sections which prove every bit as unnatural as token stealth tends to be, but there are also a handful of minigames to contend with. That’s not inherently a bad thing, and one minigame in particular seems to be copied directly from the enjoyable carpet ride section of Aladdin for the Genesis/Mega Drive, but the rest of them aren’t remotely fun. You have the button-mashing minigame that requires hammering a single input uncomfortably fast (this is the spot where many older gamers will be forced to give up), the vertical shooter minigame where the goal is to avoid bullets for a predetermined amount of time (which is made weirdly difficult by the ship’s momentum), and the escape-the-dragon sequence that tasks you with performing awkward platforming while you’re effectively being timed.

Sometimes it wastes your time

A lot of the late-game content feels like padding because of how repetitive it is. Your character selection is limited to two allies by this point, so gameplay consists of little more than platforming and pseudo-stealth between bouts of trivial combat. I’m not sure if doing away with the need to cycle through so many different characters is an improvement or regression, though. Honestly, the easiest example of Crossing Souls wasting time is when everyone finds themselves in an Old West setting. There’s a DeLorean time machine there (nudge nudge, reference reference), and you have to determine the exact date to return to. This necessitates running around and talking to NPC characters several times to narrow down the date range, and since no one remembers much, you eventually have to go through a short mine section and solve a poorly communicated puzzle to find a diary containing the date. It’s busywork.

This chase sequence is incredibly frustrating because the graphics make it impossible to tell whether upcoming platforms are under you or to the side.

Graphics ruin the platforming

I usually talk about graphics and music last, but I already mentioned that Crossing Souls has really good music. That just leaves the graphics, and there’s a lot to say about them. For one thing, the amount of flashing in this game (and in one boss fight in particular) is such overkill that it could easily trigger a medical condition. This flashing doesn’t serve any practical purpose, so there’s no reason for it. The other problem is even more ubiquitous, and that’s the fact that the graphics make it impossible to tell where anything is in relation to anything else. There’s no sense of depth, so it’s impossible to tell if platforms are below you or at the same level and slightly closer to the camera. Expect to regularly miss jumps because it’s difficult to gauge distance, and that’s only if you’re jumping to something that can actually be landed on; I could swear that I’d regularly hit invisible walls, though it’s difficult to tell when the camera causes objects to block your view of the characters. Crossing Souls is a game where you can see a black square in front of you and have no idea whether it’s an impassable wall or a chasm that can be jumped across, and the only way of knowing is through trial and error. That applies to much of the game, really; toward the end, it was only when I jumped into what appeared to be buzzsaws that they were revealed to instead be fans that cause the characters to float. It’s rare for a game’s visuals to sabotage its game mechanics, but that’s sadly the case here.

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