CrossCode - Review @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Marsh Davies (Rock, Paper, Shotgun) has reviewed the Early Access game CrossCode - some snippets:

You play as Lea, a spheromancer class avatar – which is a better title than ballromancer at least – and is seemingly a part-flesh, part-virtual body, supposedly manipulated by some distant player. The game being played is CrossWorlds, an MMO which is like Tron mashed with The Crystal Maze and set in Centerparcs. Its hills, lakes and forests form a virtually augmented but otherwise physical space, maintained by a cast of humans who must don special visors to see all aspects of the reality in which you operate.

The MMO itself appears to have an ambiguous though clearly important role in this future culture, and its avatars inspire reactions veering between veneration and revilement. Though exactly who you are is unclear – a dramatic, playable prologue poses a huge number of questions as to your identity and purpose, which the ensuing game doesn’t look like it’s going to answer any time soon, since Lea loses both her memory and her voice. It’s a surprisingly multilayered fiction, which, despite the chirpy caricatures, feels like it might go bleakly Ghost in the Shell at any moment.(...)

There’s more to this world than balls, though. There are items to harvest which can be turned into recipes and traded for weapons or equipment – though this all seems a bit bewilderingly random at present. NPCs have quests for you, too. Currently, one requires you to locate thirty-odd boxes hidden around the rolling hills of Autumn’s Rise, a leafy landscape comprised of 16 substantial contiguous locations and two challenge arenas. This takes the form of a sort of geographical puzzle – the boxes are often easy to spot but hard to reach: Lea can’t scale changes in elevation greater than her own height, though she’ll automatically bound across large gaps between pieces of terrain at the same level. And so you work backwards from the place you want to get to, unravelling the navigable route: a series of rocky stacks that will act as stepping stones; an escarpment you can leap down; a path implied, but hidden from the camera by a row of trees.

I would, however, say that the ingenuity of this sort of puzzle does not survive thirty-odd examples, and the game sorely, sorely needs a way to clearly distinguish between terrain at different heights. One of the features of this sort of perspective is its lack of foreshortening – there’s no way to judge depth and so if a stack of rock is four units tall, but one unit closer to the foreground than a stack of rock that is three units tall, their top surfaces will appear to be adjacent – and, if their height is concealed by another piece of scenery, there is no way to judge whether or not you will be able to jump between them. My ideal fix would be a subtle hue or brightness change for each tier of elevation. (...)