Crossing Souls

It feels like crossing souls was a passion project that was abbandoned relatively early on. It looks very nice and the opening is pretty intersting but everything else falls apart very quickly. For example, while there are multiple playable characters, some of them are way more fleshed out than others and usually you do not have all of them available, so gameplay is more limited than expected. There is also no character advancement or items or anything of this sort that would make any of the barebones movesets more interesting. The story is also way to ambitious for its own good. None of the events have even remotely enough emotional weight to achieve any kind of emotional impact beyond dissapointment. A story like this might work if you spent more time with the characters in other adventures, here it just feels like someone made a finale for a story that was barely told.

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The game starts great! It carries a lot of Stranger Things vibes and adds even more of that glorified American '80s attitude where every character is an over-the-top archetype. But pretty soon, the story tries to get mature and leave its Saturday-morning cartoon roots behind, and imo that’s where it fails. There is way too much stuff crammed in for a cast that bland. A constructed twist here, a tearjerker there, another 'one-scene-and-done' dispute and every single character reacts in exactly the way you would imagine right from the beginning. At one point, a character complains that it’s starting to feel like an RPG and, honestly, that genre would have been better for the story. And since the game relies heavily on its narrative, it would have benefited the overall experience. Gameplay-wise, the game does everything right IF you enjoy minigames. There are a lot of them, and they are unskippable. You should also have a soft spot for tactical boss fights that test your endurance. Besides that, it’s very enjoyable with a good amount of secrets and collectibles. The levels are crammed with detail, homages, and easter eggs. The art style is appealing. The pixel art and the cartoon…

An incredible game covering friendship in the 80s. Topped up with a really fun heartfelt story, great art style, animations and soundtrack.

Ну таке, 50 на 50. Сюжет доволі дорослий, не очікував такого. Думав буде більш щось простеньке і дитяче. А от реалізація як на мене трохи підкачала. Нема такого щоб вчепила гра

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