#fourattic

Crossing Souls

Developer: Fourattic Publisher: Devolver Digital Rrp: £10.99 (Gog.com, Humblebundle and Steam) Released: 13th February 2018 Available on: Gog.com, humblebundle and Steam This game is a dose of 80's nostalgia right into the arm. Not because of the gameplay or the mechanics, those are definitely modern, it's not even the 80's references (although those help). No, it's the story itself, it feels like it was ripped right out of Steven Spielbergs mind having a very E.T and Super8 vibe to it. They even stick to the 80's aesthetic by having animated cutscenes that look like they're ripped straight from a low budget kids show from the era.

The events of the game take place in California, specifically in the town of Tajunga (which I originally thought was fictional but a quick look on Googlemaps seems to show that it isn't), in the year of 1986. You control a party of five kids who get mixed up in a adventure that is far bigger than them. You can swap between the various party members at any time. This is especially useful in combat because attacks and dodging drain stamina and by swapping between the various members of the party you allow them to recover. Each member of the party has their own skills and abilities that can be used in combat and while navigating the world.

Sadly the game does have one major flaw, and that is the lack of a skip feature for the dialogue cutscenes. It becomes quite grating to have to mash '[A]' just to get past the unskippable dialogue that precedes a boss battle. This is becomes especially frustrating when you've already died a few times and just want to cut to the chase.

For the last 3 weeks I’ve been snoozing my alarm to review Crossing Souls. I wanted to finish it before I’d post about it, but I took my merry time so I had to come up with something more than a review. This is my best stupid article yet.

So much time has passed since Crossing Souls’ release that the judgement is firmly out: very positive reviews on Steam, mixed/average response from press. I’d guess it’s because the game starts really strong—absolutely fantastic 1980s atmosphere, stylish cartoony pixel art, dynamic gameplay (you switch between 5 characters, each with their own powers)—but wears itself thin towards the end. It left me with a meh feeling due to its worn-out save-the-world storyline and completely broke my patience with a painful last boss fight. After finally beating the ultimate duel (with literally a quarter of a heart left), the game threw me into another boss scene where I died in 5 seconds. My victorious feeling was so trampled that I saw zero reason to go through the whole grindy ordeal again for the 50th time. I watched the last 5% of the game on YouTube and regretted nothing. 

Like the reviews indicate, there is a lot to love in the game. I too remain with positive feelings, albeit they make my disinterest for the narrative that much more painful.

Which reminds me of another experience that gives me the fuzzies with the 1980s yet isn’t deeper than a save-the-world-from-monsters plotline: Stranger Things. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d think Crossing Souls is a cheap knock-off trying to cash in on Netflix’s popular series. Except Crossing Souls was announced first—if anything, the Spanish action-adventure could have inspired the Duffer brothers. Reality probably lies in the simple fact that they all wanted to pay homage to movies like The Goonies, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Gremlins, Poltergeist …

So what happens when two franchises copy the same source material? A lot of astounding parallels that kept me entertained for the bigger part of the gameplay experience.

Oh yeah, SPOILERS AHEAD.

5 kids

Let’s see: one main guy, one black kid, one tough red-headed girl, one dead(ish) small kid. Check, check, check, check. It’s not a perfect match and I have to stick with season 2 of Stranger Things, but it’s a pretty similar gang.

They’re all lovely kids, with your typical tropes from friendships being tested under harsh circumstances, to everyone being in love with the Smurfette on the team.

2017 was an absolute monster of a year for video games, and it’s starting to appear that January is going to be the only time where we aren’t going to be inundated with new releases to play, and inevitably miss out on. However, there are already more than a few games coming out in 2018 that have my attention and think they should have yours, too. Now bear in mind: This is a pretty PS4 heavy list, for obvious reasons, but if you do some Googling, you’ll find a lot of these are multi-platform releases. The other thing to consider, is while I consider myself a great optimist, I have to be real with myself, so no matter what the developers and publishers tell us, you aren’t going to find games like Death Stranding, Kingdom Hearts III, or The Last of Us Part II on this list, because, let’s face it, they aren’t coming out in 2018. Perhaps, the most frightening part of this list, is most of these games have been confirmed for at least the first half of the year, leaving June through December pretty wide open for us as gamers to have a crowded schedule.

12) The Longest Five Minutes

Coming out of NIS America, The Longest Five Minutes takes a twist on the traditional RPG and starts out at the end, facing off against the game’s final boss, however, your character has lost every memory of their adventure, including their name, abilities, and even why he’s in this battle. Throughout the battle, comments made by his allies, and taunts by the Demon King will trigger flashbacks to help fill in the heroes memory gaps. It comes out in just a few weeks on both Vita and Nintendo Switch and the premise alone put this on my radar.

11) Days Gone

We finally saw what Sony’s Bend Studio has been working on at E3 2016, and while it felt more like a “Lookee how many things we can have on the screen at once” they expounded on the stealth aspects of the game at PSX, showing the game to potentially being somewhere between The Last of Us and Horizon Zero Dawn. It sits so low on my list, partly because it’s Bend’s first release since Uncharted: Golden Abyss, and their first console release since Syphon Filter: Logan’s Shadow, and partly because I’m not 100% sold on this coming out in 2018, but, if I’m over here spoutin’ off Last of Us Part 2 is coming in 2019, then Day’s Gone needs to be hitting shelves in 2018 as to not be cannibalized by a much more established IP. I love the idea of an open world motorcycle game, though, and hopefully, it’s something akin to much under-appreciated Mad Max.

10) The Walking Dead: A Telltale Series The Final Season

It’s pretty firmly established that I love adventure games, and I love Telltale. They hit a home run in 2012 with the first season of The Walking Dead, but while they continue to swing for the fences on various other licensed and popular properties, they haven’t quite fully captured the magic that made The Walking Dead’s first season so special. Sure, Season Two and Season Three had their high points, and Telltale has shown some of the magic in their other games like Tales from the Borderlands, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Batman, but this is their chance to give Clementine, a character we’ve spent six years growing up with, a proper send-off and story, after spending Season Three side-stepping her.

9) God of War

Yo. Real talk, I’m not a God of War guy. I don’t need that much screamy chain man in my life, and frankly, Kratos has just been a dude, to me, that has zero redeeming qualities. Yea, he’s angry because of his tragic backstory, but, like...can you not? Here’s the thing though, Sony Santa Monica has created a tamer, humbled Kratos that seems to have far more to lose. While I think we’re starting to teeter on seeing too much of the game, game director Cory Barlog keeps saying the right things about this installment that has more-than-piqued my interest. And me being interested in a God of War game speaks volumes. 

8) Adventure Time: Pirates of the Enchiridion

Adventure Time is the one franchise that has been itching for a quality game under its banner. We’ve had a handful of various dungeon crawler games, top-down Zelda clones, and adventure games, but they’ve either missed on the art style or totally whiffed on the gameplay. Pirates of the Enchiridion may possibly be the Adventure Time game that the series fans have been clamoring for. It’s an open-world game set in the Land of Ooo, with an original story, multiple playable characters, full-cast voiceover, and sailing. The series is wrapping up soon, and this may be one of the last Adventure Time games we see, so here’s hoping this is the one they get right.

7) Church in the Darkness

I’ve had my eye on Paranoid Productions’ Church in the Darkness for a couple of years now. It’s a top-down, procedurally-generated action/infiltration game set in the 1970s where you’re an ex-law enforcement officer tasked with checking in on your nephew, who has recently joined the Collective Justice Mission cult. Each playthrough promises to be different, down to the characters’ personalities and reactions to you being in the camp. If you want to go full-stealth Metal Gear with it, you can, or if you want to go full guns-blazing, go right ahead. The idea of uncovering more of the story based on your investigating, and the varying degree in which characters respond to you each time you play, leave a lot of opportunities for the game to have mass amounts of replay value.

6) Jurassic World Evolution

Hi. I would like to build my own Jurassic World, please. That’s at least what developer Frontier is promising. While I had no idea Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis even existed until it became too rare to justify purchasing, I did spend a lot of my summer in 2012 tapping away at Jurassic Park Builder on my iPhone. Jurassic World Evolution looks to bring that Jurassic Park-meets-Sim City hybrid back to home consoles. Hopefully “Life finds a way” and this game will be exactly what Jurassic-verse fans have been looking for this summer. Just, please, don’t Animal Crossing this and make me have to play every day or risk being infested with weeds and whatnot. That’ll be the quickest way for me to nope out of this.

5) Crossing Souls

Somewhere between the Burger King Kids Club and Stranger Things lies Fourattic’s Crossing Souls. Set in 1986 in California, Crossing Souls is an action-adventure RPG where five kids make a mysterious discovery that thrusts them into navigating two planes of life and death and begin uncovering a government conspiracy. With five playable characters, each with their own style of combat, puzzles, and 80’s arcade references, Crossing Souls is right up my alley in the indie-game realm.

4) Detroit Become Human

Heavy Rain is one of my all-time favorite games. Hell, it’s tangentially linked to where my YouTube namesake came from. While Beyond: Two Souls wasn’t entirely the follow-up a lot of fans were looking for, I have no problem putting all of Quantic Dreams eggs into the Detroit Become Human basket. Between its Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick-style of story, stunning visuals, and varying degrees of story direction, this seems to be the Quantic Dream getting back on the right track. The big question is what side of their spectrum the story is going to fall on.

3) Dreams

If you listen closely, you can hear the hype-train leaving the station for Dreams. Media Molecule has been a voice in the gaming industry that needs to be heard again. Their style and creativity has been sorely missed, but a few questions remain: Is there a major market for a curation-based platformer, will the customization be as flawlessly executed as we’ve been lead to believe, and will this even hit 2018 despite the developer’s best efforts? It’s hard for me to temper my excitement for a game that has a far more expansive Super Mario Maker feel to it. The in-game campaign may not be the reason to buy the game, so it’s going to be on those that pick up Dreams to keep it alive.

2) Red Dead Redemption 2

I totally missed on Red Dead Redemption. It was at a time where working in gaming retail and feeling that need to play everything, the last thing I wanted to do was play a massive open-world game. Red Dead Redemption 2 feels like my opportunity to atone for this mistake. I loved what I played of Grand Theft Auto V and am dying to see what Rockstar Games has learned from then to now with Red Dead being their first proper current-gen game release. Rockstar has carte-blanche with the gaming industry, so if they came out tomorrow and said, “This is delayed again, and will be delayed a third time” almost everyone would understand. They’re still Scrooge McDucking in their money from GTA-Five, so they don’t need to rush a Red Dead sequel out the door, but they are looking to be the heaviest hitter in 2018 and every developer and publisher has to be waiting for a release date so they know to stay away.

1) Marvel’s Spider-Man

I am absolutely salivating for Insomniac’s Spider-Man to just get a release date. I don’t even need it in my hands yet, I just want to know when I can have it in my hands, and based on recent tweets from the game’s dev-team, we may know sooner rather than later. Not only is this my most anticipated game of 2018, if you were to put a gun to my head and tell me I can only pick one game from this year, I would not even flinch when answering “Marvel’s Spider-Man.” Between the combat, the cinematic uses of QTE’s, to the open environments, I am absolutely sold on this game. The most exciting thing about this release is that, despite what we’ve already seen, I don’t even think we’ve seen a lot of it. Through tweets, and various interviews, I think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg with this game. Outside of a certain popular character’s appearance in the E3 2017 trailer, we already know they play a larger role than just a cameo, leaving me to wonder if we’re getting a Sons of Liberty situation where the what we’ve seen could be a misdirection to what we’re getting. Regardless, Insomniac Games and Spider-Man are an incredible pairing and I cannot wait to get my hands on this.

At the start of the year, I rattled off a handful of games I was most excited for, with Fourattic’s debut title, “Crossing Souls” being one of them. I finally was able to carve out some time to play about an hour of the game.  If you don’t want to miss any streams until I hammer out an actual schedule, follow me on Twitter and Twitch, and subscribe on YouTube to never miss a stream!

Also, thanks for all the support I’ve received while I go out on this endeavor. It means the world as just some guy with a blog who loves video games. Let’s keep the positivity rolling through the rest of 2018!

<3

[Análisis] 'Crossing Souls'

Recordar, es la premisa con que Fourattic de la mano de Devolver Digital nos lleva a una aventura de acción, plataformas y puzzles; con la que haremos un viaje a los 80

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