CrossCode's Puzzles

A worthwhile RPG by virtue of its characters and story, CrossCode is also a solid game in just about every facet of its gameplay.  It’s 1 of those Indie RPGs that shows off the fact that games made by smaller developers can be just as tight, polished, and multi-faceted mechanically as those made by any larger game studio--considerably more so, in fact, given what the modern-day so-called AAA RPG experience looks like, with sloppy, embarrassing garbage like Starfield and Babylon’s Fall as representatives.  And of special note among these gameplay virtues are CrossCode’s puzzles, enough that I’d like to take a moment to just appreciate them with today’s rant.

First of all, the puzzles in CrossCode are pleasingly creative.  While at their foundation they generally come down to either a game of billiards, hitting the right targets at the right moments with precision and careful, analyzed positions, angles, and ricochets, or simple platforming, CrossCode’s creators keep finding new ways to dress up their fundamentals to keep them fresh and different from the start of a 40-hour game right to its end.  They’re always adding and refining new objects and mechanics to the puzzles in ways that build off of the player’s hard-won practical knowledge, but also add new wrinkles and complications to it, and evolving the forms of the player’s billiards-ricochet projectiles with elemental upgrades as the game continues enhances the puzzles’ versatility again and again.  It reminds me of puzzle-heavy RPGs based around player tools, like Wild Arms 1, only unlike WA1 and most of its brethren, there never came a point when this continued introduction and exploration of new tools and mechanics started to feel overplayed or annoying.  In fact, CrossCode’s ability to offer refreshing new spins on its puzzles that walk a skillful line between overuse of the same fundamentals and annoying over-complication is so great, that my favorite puzzle device in the game turned out to be the twist introduced in the final dungeon from the post-game DLC!

But then, walking tightropes is something CrossCode excels at.  In the midst of paying homage to and incorporating aesthetics from its inspirations like classic Phantasy Star, the Playstation 1 era, Final Fantasy, Metroid, and of course several MMORPGs, plus throwing in easter eggs and references to a wide variety of geeky stuff like Hololive VTubers, Temmie-chan, and goddamn Marauder Shields, CrossCode somehow still manages to find a sweet spot of its own, strong identity.  In an era where audiences have started catching on to the fact that simply lampshading a flaw or trope isn’t any better than using that flaw/trope in earnest, CrossCode manages to design a scenario of a game-within-a-game that allows it the adequate wiggle-room to both incorporate and poke fun at the silly parts of video games.  Even its soundtrack is an exercise in finding a positive middle ground, as it incorporates signature bits and pieces of music from foundational games like Secret of Mana, Phantasy Star, and the Kirby series, but transforms them into a new musical entity as a whole.

And the second way in which CrossCode’s puzzles deserve recognition is yet another case of the game managing to hit a very difficult bullseye: their level of challenge.  Typically in an RPG, puzzles lean into an extreme on 1 side or another.  Either they’re by and large a bunch of color-coded, shape-recognition baby stuff, which makes the puzzle element of an RPG much more akin to a chore than a gameplay feature, or it’s a bunch of Alundra 1 or “Palm trees and 8” shit, which quickly becomes frustrating to such a degree that the natural instinct is to simply lose interest in the game.  Or it’s a Legend of Zelda title, and it’s somehow both extremes of ease and difficulty at the same time, with the unpleasantness of each.

Finding that key spot between too easy and the far worse too hard is tricky to pull off even a few times in an RPG...and yet CrossCode manages to do it again, and again, and again, over scores of hours, tons of quests, and more than a dozen areas and dungeons, all of whose content is predominantly made up of puzzle-solving.  Nearly every puzzle in the game held some degree of challenge to figuring out its solution, and yet I almost never felt like I was out of my depth with it.  The solution to any of CrossCode’s puzzles always seems to be within your grasp with a bit of experimental trial-and-error and rational planning, and until you grasp it, you generally never feel completely lost, but rather a sense of expectation that you’re going to be able to figure this out.*  And keep in mind, it’s not like the difficulty of the puzzle element of CrossCode stays static from start to finish; its brainteasers grow in complexity and requisite cleverness as you progress through the game.  So that means that not only does CrossCode know how to walk the line between ease and challenge, it also knows how to do so while scaling itself accurately to the player’s growing experience and ability to parse out solutions as she/he plays.

So yeah, between managing to incorporate exactly as much creativity to stay fresh without getting carried away and tiresomely over-complicated, and striking that happy balance between always being reasonably within a player’s reach but never tiringly facile, CrossCode might very well carry the distinction of being the greatest RPG I’ve ever played in terms of its puzzles.  It’s not an element of the game that I particularly care about, admittedly,** but it’s still clear just how much skill and work has gone into perfecting this part of CrossCode, and kudos to its creators for their efforts in crafting arguably the best puzzle RPG out there!











* Now, whether or not you have the skill and reflexes to actually carry the solution out, that’s sometimes a different matter.  If I ever meet any of the developers of CrossCode in person, the first thing I’m doing after shaking their hand and thanking them for a good, fun game, is slapping them across the face for that final puzzle in Vermillion Tower.


** Brutally honest truth be told, I have to admit that even CrossCode’s masterful suite of puzzles annoyed and bored me.  But that’s because I’m me, and “me” is a person who only cares about the storytelling elements of an RPG and sees all gameplay stuff, from minigames to puzzles to combat, as mostly extraneous filler.  That doesn’t mean that I can’t still recognize, objectively, when 1 of these elements is extremely well-done, even if I don’t myself enjoy it.