CrossCode is the final game of my Game Pass coverage now that my subscription has been canceled, and it seemed like a sure bet. Its reception on Steam is “overwhelmingly positive,” its graphics are Super Nintendo-inspired, and it supposedly has a strong story focus. I’ve never heard anything negative about CrossCode, and it’s likely that you haven’t, either. Allow me to be the first: this game is boring. The setting is an MMO world despite being a single-player aRPG, and this has caused the quest design to reflect the same kind of boring “kill X number of Y enemy” stuff you’d find in an MMO. “MMO-styled quests” is a phrase usually used in a pejorative way. In CrossCode, the quests are what you’d legitimately see in an MMO.

Granted, the MMO world also has real people inside of it, so it’s an advanced kind of MMO setting, but that doesn’t matter when CrossCode spends hours just spinning its wheels with busywork. I eventually ignored all of the busywork and pushed ahead, only to get wrecked during the next boss fight. That’s kind of the point: you’re disadvantaged if you don’t engage in all of this soulless tedium, and there’s no reason to make a single-player game with such terrible quests when every other facet of the MMO is supposedly advanced. If your setting causes your early gameplay to be garbage, reconsider it.

The area design is also terrible. Height is a consideration and you can’t hit objects at different heights, but the art style doesn’t communicate height particularly well. The starting area is a mess, and the early quest that sends you around to specific people is terrible because half of the people in the world are decorations who can’t be interacted with (including vendor stalls). You take damage from water, but jumping is automatic and I kept falling into bodies of water while trying to jump to a higher area that looked like the next platform. Worst of all, every area looks so similar that I kept losing my bearings and forgetting which room I was in. Maybe CrossCode‘s appeal is as a time sink for people with nothing better to do?

It’s not all bad, though. The combat feels good overall, with your ranged and melee attacks feeling natural, and while dodging doesn’t seem to have invincibility frames and foreground objects occasionally obscure enemies and their attack cues, the whole thing is workable enough. The main character’s ability to speak is broken as part of the story, and the few words that get hard-coded into her cause some amusingly awkward situations. CrossCode‘s puzzles are enjoyable combinations of platforming, timing, and precise ranged attacks to trigger switches. It just leans so hard into the MMO side of the things that it becomes impenetrable to those of us who can’t stand that waste-your-time style of gameplay.

CrossCode – Tedium and a failure to communicate first appeared on Killa Penguin