This game does exploration right. There's no gameplay progression other than your knowledge, and it works extremely well. The sense of discovery I felt with every new thing I found, with every mystery I uncovered, is something I haven't experienced in any other game. The best comparisons I can think in terms of exploration are Subnautica and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, though even those feel vastly different. There are so many little puzzles (discovery and environment puzzles, not like, puzzle puzzles) and moving parts in this game, and they all just fit together flawlessly. Before I even finished the game, I was already trying to convince someone else to play it so I could experience it again.

Without spoiling too much, one of the things that makes the discovery feel so good in this game is how smooth the movement controls are. Once you know what you're doing, you can get where you're trying to go incredibly fast. A little jetpack thrust and some gravitational pull can go a long way.

Also, the music in this game will be stuck in my head for the rest of my life. Seriously, the moment I got to the menu screen, I was hooked.

This is easily within my top 10 favorite games, and probably within my top 5. Heck, it might be number 1. Go into this game blind, you won't regret it.

CrossCode is incredibly good. 50% tricky puzzles, 50% intense and interesting combat, and a compelling story and fun characters to drive you through it all. 50+ hours of gameplay for me after doing a bunch of side quests (all of which I found interesting and fun), but you could probably do it quite a bit faster.

Good thing to note: the puzzles are pretty hard! Definitely often harder than your standard Legend of Zelda puzzles, and they're very plentiful. The dungeons are full of puzzles that often made me sit staring at the screen for a couple minutes trying to figure out what I needed to do, but completing them was always satisfying.

The combat is fantastic. It starts out relatively simple, but as you unlock the elements and special moves and start trying to exploit enemy weaknesses, it gets more complex in a very fun way. Being able to swap between selected special moves for every element allows you to try out a bunch of different strategies without needing to spend anything, and I love that.

The story grabbed me right from the start, and while there are a lot of spots not leading toward the main storyline that didn't feel quite as interesting, the time spent in the world with the other characters helped me feel attached to them and made certain story beats more impactful. Most of the interactions are silly and cute, but a couple emotional parts the game built up to hit pretty hard.

One bit that stands out about CrossCode is the verticality. When moving around, you'll be jumping from platform to platform all the time, and trying to find paths up to higher paths where you can unlock gates, find chests, etc. Since this is a semi-top-down game ("oblique"? Similar style to Link to the Past) determining how high up a platform is can be very difficult at times, and on many occasions I found myself trying to jump to a platform only to realize that it's actually way higher up or lower down than I am. (You can test this by shooting at it first, which helped me in a lot of scenarios where I wasn't quite sure) That said, after I had been playing for several hours, I started to understand how the geometry worked a bit better, and trying to find complex several-screen-long paths up to places that seemed almost unreachable became a fun (if sometimes frustrating) challenge.

Also, the music and sound design are incredible.

Overall, I highly recommend this game. Looking forward to playing the DLC next!


Update: The DLC is also excellent, and expands upon both the story and the gameplay in interesting ways. If you enjoy the base game, I'd say you're almost guaranteed to like the DLC too!