Crossing Souls review - pitch-perfect 80s nostalgia trip
Beyond simply remembering and recreating history, some games make you pine for a past that never was. Crossing Souls is just such a renegade historian, taking you back to a childhood you only glimpsed in old Steven Spielberg movies. In truth, how many people wearing hazmat suits have you actually seen in real life? And do you know a single person who's managed to evade the local law enforcement on a BMX? Reality simply isn't made up of those scintillating set-pieces. Not in the 80s, and certainly never since. And yet the nostalgia's there just the same.
More than that, though, it takes you back to that impossible time and place with a style of play that reminds you of countless treasured 16-bit titles, but in reality plays like none of them. It's far more refined than any single title of the era it apes visually. Just like a great racing game handles the way you want a car to handle rather than the way it actually might, Crossing Souls is a journey to a past you wish existed.
Set in California during the summer of 1986, it begins when a gang of five instantly likeable kids find a mysterious stone clasped within a dead man's hand, which lets them travel between the realm of the living and that of the dead. Naturally that discovery unfurls a tale of government conspiracy and supernatural warmongering, played out like A Link to the Past dip-dyed in cyan and magenta.
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