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Crossing Souls is my '80s spirit animal

by: Randy -
More On: Crossing Souls

Darn you, Devolver Digital. Darn you to heck. Now you're just pandering to me. Me specifically. Just because I was an '80s baby, was babysat every weekend by Saturday morning cartoons (back before every piece of western animation looked like Family Guy), and watched Ghostbusters when I was still young enough to have nightmares about Slimer hiding in my closet. I'm also fond, of course, of the enhanced 16-bit retro aesthetic that I hope never, ever goes away in video games.

Crossing Souls made a successful run through Kickstarter in 2014, the wonderfully nostalgic brainchild of developer Fourattic based in Seville, Spain. Crossing Souls is action-adventure with some lite role-playing and puzzle-solving thrown in for good measure. It looks great. Like a cartoon book-ended by commercials full of sugary breakfast cereal. It nails the VHS-tracking look and the Casio keyboard synth sound. While this pixelated opus started beforehand, it can probably send a thank you in advance to recent shows like Stranger Things and games like 2011's Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP.

In Crossing Souls, you're playing a bicycling group of five high school friends. There are high school archetypes aplenty. There's running from the cops. There's E.T.-styled hazmat-suited encounters with government conspiracies. There's ghosts in libraries, an M. Bison military boss, arcades, evil-laughing scientists, and even platforming through the ether with enormous dragons. Looks like a fun adventure. 

Crossing Souls is coming to PC and PlayStation 4.