At about 1.5 to 2.5 hours in length, the demo is split into two parts. The first offers the game’s beginning, with progress carrying over into launch, while the second offers multiple highlights further ahead in the narrative. This includes diving into one part of a dungeon, though understandably, none of your progress in this part carries over into the game.

Nevertheless, players can familiarize themselves with the various melee and ranged weapons, with two of each available. There are also nine different types of enemies and four different bosses. While it doesn’t have many Steam user reviews, initial impressions are positive. Head here for more details.

Alabaster Dawn will enter early access later this year on PC. It’s also coming to consoles at some point.

The second is set later and offers “several highlights,” including “part of a dungeon.” Progress won’t count towards the final game, resetting back to the first part’s conclusion. Overall, demo players can expect about 1.5 to 2.5 hours of gameplay with four bosses, nine types of enemies, two melee weapons, and two ranged weapons.

Radical Fish hasn’t provided any indication as to when Alabaster Dawn will fully launch for consoles and PC (early access starts later this year). However, if CrossCode, which took seven years of development, is any indication, it may be a while. It’s planned to offer 30 to 60 hours of gameplay, though, and boasts a gorgeous new art style. Check out the latest trailer here and stay tuned for more updates.

Unfolding on the world of Tiran Sol, Alabaster Dawn stars Juno, who awakens to find that the people have vanished. She sets out to save the world and defeat the mysterious Nyx. Along the way, Juno will help rebuild settlements, interact with characters to complete their requests, and much more. There are seven unique locations in total and 30 to 60 hours of playtime planned.

However, it’s the combat which has me intrigued. While CrossCode offers a singular weapon which could take on different properties depending on the equipped element, Alabaster Dawn has eight. Each has a unique skill tree and Combat Arts, and you can further improve your power with Gems and cooking dishes.

Alabaster Dawn will enter early access later this year. Stay tuned for more updates until then.

It also confirms seven unique areas and new features like rebuilding settlements and creating trade routes. This will result in settlements developing and evolving, unlocking “new paths and opportunities.” Of course, there will be plenty of secrets to discover as well.

In the meantime, a public demo will be available in early 2025. Radial Fish revealed that a vertical slice had been in the works throughout this year, consisting of a “good bunch of” scripted cutscenes, two bosses, and a dungeon. While the first one to two hours is “almost fully playable,” the pace of development should speed up with all the systems in place. As such, the demo will be “similar” to the vertical slice, providing a rough idea of what players can expect.

The early access launch ensures “continuous feedback from a larger crowd of players, which ultimately allows us to create a better game” on top of the financial stability. While CrossCode also had an early access period before launch, Radical Fish hopes that Alabaster Dawn isn’t as lengthy.

Finally, those attending Gamescom can see the latest build at the developer’s booth. Stay tuned for more details from the trade fair when they emerge.

The story focuses on Juno, the “Outcast Chosen”, who awakens in a world in ruins. She sets out to awaken humanity and combat the mysterious Nyx seemingly responsible for the catastrophe. CrossCode fans will notice several similarities in combat, world design, and platforming – the signature four elements return, but you can now wield eight weapons.

Each element can be used in two weapons, and you can switch as necessary. Combat Arts also return, providing various techniques to unleash in combat alongside new Divine Arts. You’ll also explore the world, find new Gems and upgrade materials, and unearth recipes to cook meals for temporary boosts.

Alabaster Dawn doesn’t have a launch date, but it will be coming to consoles and PC sometime in the future. Stay tuned for more details in the meantime.

Radical Fish Games’ CrossCode received its long-awaited post-game DLC with A New Home, which provides a fitting conclusion to Lea’s story along with tons of new content. The developer has since released update 1.4.1 which is the game’s last. It adds three new quests, new Trade Offers and a “couple” of Arena Cups.

The update is exclusive to the DLC so you’ll need to own A New Home to access it. Though Radical Fish will continue to fix bugs and other issues, this will be the final content addition to the game. As for what’s next, the developer confirmed on Steam that there are currently no plans for a sequel.

Its next game is in the prototyping phase, however, with the temporary title of Project Terra. The gameplay will be an action RPG similar to CrossCode but with a new setting and storyline. Radical Fish will talk more about the project in the coming months. Stay tuned in the meantime.

It’s been a long wait for CrossCode’s post-game content but Radical Fish Games has finally announced a release date. A New Home will release for PC on February 26th. PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch players will get it this Summer.

In terms of what to expect, there’s a new area, the Azure Achipelago; a new dungeon, which is the biggest one yet; new enemies and bosses; new music tracks; and the opportunity to finally finish the raid. Rhombus Square has been extended and will have a beach. New quests also become available throughout CrossWorlds. Lea will even have the ability to run on water, because why not?

Overall, there’s about 8 to 10 hours of content to look forward to. A New Home will retail for $8.99 when it releases. Check out the trailer below to see all of its new content in action and stay tuned for more details. You can also check out our review for the base game here.

While it starts as a straightforward journey through its game-within-a-game, it soon delves into deeper understandings of its setting and beyond, all the while complementing its interesting story with clever writing and rewarding combat that works as both a love letter to the 16-bit era of gaming’s past and a worthy modern RPG that mostly achieves what it sets out to do.

CrossCode draws instant comparisons to Ready Player One by being set in an in-game MMO, called CrossWorlds, where players can synchronize their bodies into the game and effectively fully immerse themselves into its world. In CrossWorlds, players can join guilds, complete quests, and, like Ready Player One’s OASIS, look for hidden clues and lost treasures. You play as Lea, who from the outset has lost her memory and is told she is in a coma in the outside world, only staying conscious within the confines of CrossWorlds. For a good chunk of the first part of the game, your experience playing CrossCode mirrors that of someone playing CrossWorlds.

Aside from occasional hints at Lea’s true story, you follow CrossWorlds’ main quest line, meeting other players, completing the dozens of side quests, and leveling up along the way. While it can get overwhelming, the game within the game is absorbing, with its well-written side quests and diverse environments, and I sometimes felt an urge to stay in the game itself and play it like there were no larger plot.

Though you are playing an in-game MMO, you’re not actually playing with other actual people. Instead, the characters you meet are meant to mimic what interactions would look like, with people giving their own in-game motivations and explanations of their real lives. As you meet new people along the way, you can add them to your party and let them follow you around the world to collectively complete quests. Not everyone is logged in at the same time, though, and the characters are filled with personality to make them seem like actual people.

"Lea, on the other hand, is effectively mute, suffering from so-called voice synchronization issues that keep her from being able to speak within CrossWorlds."

One of the first people you meet, Emilie, is a student who keeps telling you about her school projects and unbearable group members, which, alongside her French exclamations and detailed animations, gives her some relatability and a hard connection to reality. Every character has beautiful detailed character models for their dialogue sequences that showcase their expressiveness without much movement. The clever writing leaves a lot of funny moments to go around, though it often falls into the trap of quipping about the game’s problems and refusing to actually address them, such as noting lazy quests or repetitive puzzles that you still ultimately have to complete.

Lea, on the other hand, is effectively mute, suffering from so-called voice synchronization issues that keep her from being able to speak within CrossWorlds. She communicates with a software developer who wants to help her regain her memories, but she can only speak through a handful hard-coded words, like “Hi” and “How?” Despite this, she’s still surprisingly expressive and impressively emotional. She uses her sparing words effectively, and even moments like an exclamation point or question mark convey exactly what they intend. As she comes to find out her true identity, it’s hard not to sympathize with her despite having so few words at her disposal.

By the end, CrossCode’s story predictably has taken control, with the last 3 chapters taking up nearly half of the 35-or-so hours it took me to beat it. Its pacing is back heavy in its revelations, and some of them definitely could have been interspersed throughout the early stages to give more context to Lea’s story in the first 20 hours. Despite this, though some story beats are predictable from the outset, I found it to be ultimately complex and interesting, and the late moments where everything comes together make a lot of the journey worth it and left me wanting to go back to retrace some of the clues laced around earlier moments.

"You can also tone down the difficulty in the menu with sliders to decrease damage taken or enemy attack rates, which is an appreciated option to have when a boss is really kicking your teeth in."

In playing the game within the game, you naturally become accustomed to its gameplay as a retro-style 16-bit action RPG. It mirrors many classic RPGs in its combat, as you fight its varied enemies with your own sets of melee and ranged attacks or powerful special moves. As you level up, you increase your baseline stats of HP, attack, defense, and focus, but you also equip armor and weapons that increase them even more.

Compounding this is the addition of elemental attacks that you gain throughout the course of the story, each of which has its own specialties and unique skill tree with individual upgrade points. This gives you a lot of freedom in where you want to specialize without forcing you to choose a particular style or element. Knowing that enemies have varying weaknesses, you have to balance your use of each element, but you can decide within them if you want to focus on ranged attacks, increasing your baseline stats, or improving your special moves.

I found the combat to be incredibly rewarding over time. Enemies usually don’t attack you unless you hit them first, meaning you can pick and choose your fights, but it’s imperative that you don’t just run through every area. Killing enemies predictably lets you level up faster, and it’s consistently satisfying to take down enemies, even after fighting the same ones dozens of times. Combat is intended to be difficult, as the game informs you before you even start, and it lives up to its promise.

Regular enemy encounters can become overwhelming if you’re not prepared properly or just lose track of your targets. Bosses, too, are extremely powerful, and they force you to learn their moves the hard way before being able to beat them. Most deaths come as fair culminations of being underequipped or making mistakes, though sometimes the screen can get overloaded with enemies, at which point a lock-on mechanic would be useful. It also often falls back on raising stakes within combat by following up a fight against a single enemy with a fight against two or more of the same enemy, a sequence that not only becomes frustrating when the first fight depletes your health but also defeats its own purpose because it becomes so predictable over time.

Naturally, you can buy, trade for, or find better weapons and armor around the world and in towns, which organically make you more powerful. Using new weapons for the first time is always satisfying, and even seeing the stat boosts is a great feeling when you know you’re gaining strength. Also helping you with the difficulty are the other members of your party, who are actually as powerful as other players in an MMO would be, allowing you to have a reliable second or third set of hands to take down bigger enemies. You can also tone down the difficulty in the menu with sliders to decrease damage taken or enemy attack rates, which is an appreciated option to have when a boss is really kicking your teeth in.

"CrossCode is a great example of how to create a retro-style RPG that still fits perfectly into today’s gaming landscape."

The other side of CrossCode’s gameplay is its puzzles, scattered generously around the world. These utilize your elemental and environmental knowledge to get you to hit certain out-of-the-way targets with a single bullet or cross a particularly large path with cleverly placed blocks. Most of the puzzles are fun to solve, toeing the line between obscurity and accessibility, though there are some obtuse ones that stumped me. They’re calming breaks between enemy encounters that slow the pace, and they’re usually crafty enough to subtly give you hints but still make you feel clever for figuring them out on your own.

CrossWorlds itself is an open world game, so CrossCode inhabits one, too. Environments are appropriately diverse, and they all contain both clear paths forward and more difficult paths to follow that lead to collectibles or loot. Navigating these usually consists of finding out how to get to higher areas and around obstacles, which makes environments much more vertical and efficient with their space, and they’re fun to explore, especially while listening to the infectious soundtrack and watching the fluid animations. The complexity within the map did cause me to get lost fairly often, though, and the lack of a mission marker for main quests and their absence from the quest log makes it difficult to find your next move if you’ve gone off on a tangent.

CrossCode is a great example of how to create a retro-style RPG that still fits perfectly into today’s gaming landscape. While exploring its metagame and the characters that come with it, there is a deep and complex RPG within that gives you a lot of freedom while forcing you to intimately learn its systems to progress. Despite some predictability in its story and confusion around its map, CrossCode creates a fully-realized game-within-a-game that’s interesting on its own and in the context of the world around it. It’s not only an interesting exploration of the world within a game, but it’s a great action RPG on its own merit.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

Microsoft has revealed its current slate of titles coming to Xbox Game Pass subscribers in July. Out of the Park Baseball 21 and Soulcalibur 6 are currently available on Xbox Game Pass for PC and console respectively. However, next week will see the addition of Fallout 76 and CrossCode.

Bethesda’s Fallout 76 has easily been the studio’s most controversial release but received numerous improvements through updates and patches. The Wastelanders update in April added human NPCs, reputation systems, factions and more while Season 1: The Legendary Run has begun with its own set of challenges and rewards. The online title will be available for both PC and Xbox One subscribers on July 9th.

Radical Fish Games’ CrossCode will also go live on the same day but for Xbox Game Pass for console subscribers. It takes place in a virtual game called CrossWorlds with its protagonist, Lea, trying to regain her memory. With a deep action RPG combat system, retro-art style and memorable boss fights, it’s well worth getting into (especially since the Xbox One version will have unique content).

Games that will be leaving Xbox Game Pass on July 15th are as follows:

• Blazing Chrome (Console & PC)
• Dead Rising 4 (Console & PC)
• Metal Gear Solid 5 (Console and PC)
• Timespinner (PC)
• Unavowed (PC)
• Undertale (PC)

After what seems like forever, Radical Fish Games’ critically acclaimed action RPG CrossCode finally has a release date for consoles. It will release digitally on July 8th and retail for $19.99. To showcase some of the things that players can expect, a new trailer has been released. Check it out below.

CrossCode follows the trials of Lea, who plays the virtual MMO CrossWorlds. Lea has amnesia but is also unique in having very few words that she can speak. Throughout her journey to recover her memories, she’ll encounter various other players and visit various dungeons.

With combat reminiscent of the Secret of Mana series, CrossCode carves its own niche with responsive mechanics, an appealing retro-art style and a hefty amount of side-quests and main quests. The game is currently available on Steam for PC so you can try it now via the free demo. You can also read about why it’s so great here. As for the post-game DLC, which adds new story content, it’s currently targeting a Q2 2020 release.