Crossing Souls opens in the summer of 1986 in Tajunga, California, where five teenagers find a corpse by the river and take the pink stone in its hand. That stone lets them see and talk to the dead. It also drains the life out of anyone who holds it. Fourattic built its whole game on that trade: every trip into the spirit world costs something in the living one.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
The Duat Stone and What It Takes
The friends are Chris, a baseball fan; Kevin, his younger brother; Matt, the bookworm inventor; Big Joe, the muscle with a soft heart; and Charlie, the tomboy. Matt builds a device that lets them control the stone’s power. They do not understand it. Kevin dies when Quincy Queen, a street gang leader, steals the stone. The game makes you carry that loss and then hands you the tool to undo it — except you can’t undo it. You can only talk to what’s left.
Five Kids, Five Ways to Fight
Crossing Souls is an action-adventure game with role-playing and arcade bones. You switch between the five kids on the fly, using each one’s attacks and abilities. You fight local authorities, evil specters and creatures of unknown origin. You collect clues around town and jump between two realms to solve puzzles. The bird’s-eye view keeps the whole town readable, which matters when the game keeps asking you to move between planes of reality.
Major Oh Russ and the Quarantine
The conspiracy lands fast. McKittrick, the dead man by the river, once worked for Major Oh Russ, a former U.S. Army general who organized the recovery of the Duat Stone to control the dead and launch a world invasion. McKittrick rebelled and stole it. Tajunga gets locked down under a quarantine for a contagious disease that is cover for the operation. The four surviving friends escape, fall off a road into a dark forest, and find a military camp of ghost children deceived by an evil ghost. They free the children and go back for their families. Oh Russ already has them.
Big Joe and the Cavern
The escape through the river into the cavern is where Crossing Souls spends its best ideas. Big Joe takes a mortal wound and dies. The remaining trio finds hieroglyphs suggesting the Duat Stone belonged to the gods. It is a good scene in a game that too often settles for the reference instead of the feeling. The 1986 setting, the kids-on-bikes premise, the government conspiracy — all of it is borrowed, and the game knows it.
What the Stone Costs
Crossing Souls released on 13 February 2018 for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux and PlayStation 4, then on 26 July 2018 for Nintendo Switch. It is published by Devolver Digital and developed by Fourattic, a Spanish studio. It is single player. The plot’s real subject is grief — Kevin’s death, Big Joe’s death, the ghost children — and the game is at its sharpest when the stone is a cost rather than a gadget. The puzzle design is thinner than the premise deserves, and the switching mechanic carries more weight in the pitch than in the play. Still, Fourattic commits to the ending it set up. The kids do not get everyone back.
Key facts
– Release: 13 February 2018 (Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 4); 26 July 2018 (Nintendo Switch)
– Developer: Fourattic. Publisher: Devolver Digital
– Platforms: PlayStation 4, Linux, PC (Microsoft Windows), Mac, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo Switch
– Genre: Action-adventure, RPG, indie, arcade. Single player
– Setting: Tajunga, California, 1986
– Score: 7.1/10
Crossing Souls is worth playing for the cavern and the two funerals. It is a game about a stone that lets you speak to the dead and never lets you keep them, and that is the part it gets right.
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