Crossing Souls

I played it now for 2 hours and I will play more! Also, I run now only through the tutorial. The sound is quite good, for this genre. And I KNOW that it is 8bit graphics, like in the video clips. The cut scenes are painted and it does not need any voiceover. In this game, you have to read. I don´t know why some people are upset. It is more then I saw in the ads. Only the controls are hard for me. Buy it, or try the Demo first. Greetings from Germany M

I really wanted to like this game and generally am always hard headed about completing games I enjoy but I couldn't do it with this one. The random difficulty spikes really disrupted the flow of the pacing, turning into a slog at times. To its credit the game always held my interest via the story and style so I'd always circle back to it, even if it were month later. I finally quite and uninstalled after multiple failed attempts towards the series of boss fights in chapter 8, one of the aforementioned difficulty spikes that just stalled the game entirely for me. To make it worse, you had to watch unskipable dialogue prior to the fight every time. I really wanted to see this game through to the ending but I'll just YouTube it instead. It was almost a good enough recommending to friends but not quite.

The premise here is a story of a summer vacation adventure of a bunch of 80s pre-teen kids, something in the vein of The Goonies, Monster Squad and Super 8. That’s a great idea, and indeed as the game begins it looks like the game will deliver on it and then some. I’m not a fan of pixel graphics, at least not of making pixelated games today, but I can see why this would be the chosen art style for this particular title, and for what it’s worth I think it looks quite good. Oh, there are much, much better looking pixel art games out there, but Crossing Souls’ world still welcomes as a vibrant colourful place that promises it will be a ton of fun to explore as we go on this ride. We get the gang of five main characters, the appropriately clichéd 80s stereotypes – the nerd, the fat kid, the tomboy etc., each with their own particular skills and off we go discovering the town and its surroundings. Quickly enough we get into real trouble as the proper plot starts – we find a dead body holding a mysterious amulet... and it’s pretty much downhill from there. The further we make it into the plot the more pretentious and joyless the it gets. We lose playable characters. Permanently. The further we get, the less we can do. We never get to explore the town much, we never get to feel like it’s really an adventure like in one of those 80s flicks. The game plays decently well as a sort of mix of an adventure game and arcade beat/shoot’em up, but drops the ball for the plot and the characters, and by the time I had only two characters left I just wanted it over with, so tedious it became. And the ending was such a downer, with a nonsensical epilogue to boot, that as I quit the game for the last time I was quite simply pissed off. Perhaps it does not invalidate the few hours of really good fun I had with the game at the beginning, but it’s hard to give a glowing recommendation based on that.

In Crossing Souls [CS] you, your brother, and best buds embark in high adventure that spans beyond the coporeal realm. CS strives and succeeds in emulating the 80's genre of the latch key kids adventure; in addition to encapsulating themes of: friendship, team work, historically/scientifically inaccurate lore, and the value of family and community. CS nailed the pixelated graphics dead on; it looks great. There are 1980's americana nod winks all the way through. CS could be perfect... BUT: Crossing Souls is...well... kinda boring. You play a rotating roster of characters (TMNT on NES had this style of game play). Each character is meant to have a "unique" ability to push along game play. One character can climb, three can effectively jump, one can energize electrical items, there is a strong man, and another chews bubble gum and farts. With these combined abilities, you beat up specters from the neither realm and solve puzzles. There are no skill trees, equipable items, or in game economy. The combat and puzzles are simplistic and rapidly become stale. After I lost initial interest, I would just play to see the cut scenes. Then, not at all. The non-recommend I am handing out is not because the game is intrinsically bad. I think me not liking this game has more to do with timing of its release in relation of my life. In an earlier epoch of my life, a young 6-7yo me would enjoy this game. But I am old, grumpy, and spoiled for choice in a world of rotating seasonal sales and a cornucopia of almost daily modest spindles. More oft' than not Devolver games are a great choice for pixilated digital good times. Ultimately, CS suffers the same problem of other "very positive" Devolver produced titles --they are all high end potential. 6-Potentials /10 (Taken from my Steam account review; 8.5 hours of game play on record)

Three stars if you don't feel nostalgic, but appreciate very well done pixel graphics. And a mere 2.5 stars if neither of the above apply. This is a hard game for me to rate. Having grown up in the 80s, this game felt like a love letter to that era, from the colour palette used, the pop culture references, the cheesy cutscenes emulating worn out VHS tapes. This does a lot well. Even the storyline is fairly well told with a good morale in the end. Sadly, this is also a game. And as a game it really isn't very interesting. There don't seem to be any choices. The puzzles are easy and far between. The platforming/traversal segments are rather easy too, and again don't carry much in the way of challenge. That leaves combat which is functional. It won't win my praise, as it is very basic. But it pulls off what it sets out to do. It just isn't very interesting. At least there is a deal of it. All the rest of the time you spend walking fairly slowly through very good pixelart locales, looking at or interacting with things looking right out of a romanticized version of the 80s and childhood summers (most of the time anyway). A lot of care and affection was clearly put into this. In all, this feels like it shouldn't have been an action game, it should've been a third person walking simulator, which had to put some gameplay stuff in there because, who plays a pixel walking sim? I do not regret having played the game. I might even revisit it later, but it won't be for the game parts.