Update after finishing the game: Yes, it kept being good all the way through. The first 2 hours might be a bit slow, but the subsequent 94 hours more than makes up for them.

TL;DR it's a Zelda game where you shoot things, with Undertale's style of meta humor and a mix of mechanics from Smash TV, Dark Souls and The Witness. If you feel like you could do with some tricky puzzles involving pushing blocks, while fighting sloths with katanas by means of mutual bullet hell combat, while pondering on the nature of consciousness and what truly being alive is, while investigating shady business going on in a game dev company in space, look no further. Or look further if you feel like it, but you probably won't find another game like CrossCode.

Everything is super polished with love and care, the core gameplay somehow feels cohesive no matter if you're fighting a screen-sized boss or just doing some deforestation to collect materials, and the game has so much stuff to do that I reached the second real dungeon around 20 hours in. And it somehow manages to juggle five subplots at once without it getting hard to follow.

To summarize things in a spoiler-free way, CrossCode is set in a vanilla MMORPG world, where something shady is going on behind the scenes. A bunch of players that struggle with their real-world issues gradually uncover the mysteries behind how the world is managed, while tearing through most of the classic JRPG clichés like butter. The gameplay is a blend of twin-stick shooting, platform exploration, and puzzle-solving (often based around how your charge-shot bounces against walls). The systems often feed into each other, such as enemies being affected by objects you can activate in the environment making some fights into mini-puzzles, or finding the fastest path on the overworld letting you chain together enemy encounters more efficiently to keep your combo counter up (rewarding you with bonus items). The game gives you a lot of freedom with the skill tree right from the get-go (with viable options for melee, ranged, crowd-control and tanky playstyles), and unlocked branches can be swapped between different modes on the fly as long as you're not in combat, letting you try out new skills without penalty.

Since the game is set within a game, it can be really transparent with stuff like game mechanics explanation and the shallowness of the Crossworlds plot without it coming across as too heavy-handed or too fourth-wall-breaky. It's also full of silly little references to more or less every game ever: there's a blue hedgehog boss that drops a golden ring while defeated, you can equip an Assassin Garb with a Hidden Blade, there's a spell called Magic Missile that is an actual missile, and there's a painter guy that talks about happy trees. Everything is handmade with a good dose of humor, and it forms a nice contrast to the more serious elements of the story.

Update after finishing the game: Yes, it kept being good all the way through. The first 2 hours might be a bit slow, but the subsequent 94 hours more than makes up for them. TL;DR it's a Zelda game where you shoot things, with Undertale's style of meta humor and a mix of mechanics from Smash TV, Dark Souls and The Witness. If you feel like you could do with some tricky puzzles involving pushing blocks, while fighting sloths with katanas by means of mutual bullet hell combat, while pondering on the nature of consciousness and what truly being alive is, while investigating shady business going on in a game dev company [i]in space[/i], look no further. Or look further if you feel like it, but you probably won't find another game like CrossCode. Everything is super polished with love and care, the core gameplay somehow feels cohesive no matter if you're fighting a screen-sized boss or just doing some deforestation to collect materials, and the game has so much stuff to do that I reached the second real dungeon around 20 hours in. And it somehow manages to juggle five subplots at once without it getting hard to follow. To summarize things in a spoiler-free way, CrossCode is set in a vanilla MMORPG world, where something shady is going on behind the scenes. A bunch of players that struggle with their real-world issues gradually uncover the mysteries behind how the world is managed, while tearing through most of the classic JRPG clichés like butter. The gameplay is a blend of twin-stick shooting, platform exploration, and puzzle-solving (often based around how your charge-shot bounces against walls). The systems often feed into each other, such as enemies being affected by objects you can activate in the environment making some fights into mini-puzzles, or finding the fastest path on the overworld letting you chain together enemy encounters more efficiently to keep your combo counter up (rewarding you with bonus items). The game gives you a lot of freedom with the skill tree right from the get-go (with viable options for melee, ranged, crowd-control and tanky playstyles), and unlocked branches can be swapped between different modes on the fly as long as you're not in combat, letting you try out new skills without penalty. Since the game is set within a game, it can be really transparent with stuff like game mechanics explanation and the shallowness of the Crossworlds plot without it coming across as too heavy-handed or too fourth-wall-breaky. It's also full of silly little references to more or less every game ever: there's a blue hedgehog boss that drops a golden ring while defeated, you can equip an Assassin Garb with a Hidden Blade, there's a spell called Magic Missile that is an actual missile, and there's a painter guy that talks about happy trees. Everything is handmade with a good dose of humor, and it forms a nice contrast to the more serious elements of the story.