I’ve been hotly anticipating CROSSNIQ+ ever since its first trailer arrived back in April and the Twitter account started updating regularly about mechanics, characters, and music. It sought to revive the Y2K aesthetic, the style of graphic design used throughout the late 90s and early 00s prominent on the Dreamcast and used by several music personalities. Thick rounded outlines, bright metallic colors, a general hard-edged yet whimsical, high-tech view of the future. I ate it up, and being that nostalgia for decades usually crops up 20 years afterwards, it’s high time for a comeback of that design mentality since we’ve seen both the 80s and early 90s milked to death. Fortunately, I am very pleased to announce that CROSSNIQ+ leads the charge with a bang.
Based on a free browser game, CROSSNIQ+ is a fast-paced puzzle game in which you must make crosses on the playing field using colored squares; one column of a color across the field touching one row of the same color. The faster you can pull off crosses, the higher your score will be. It’s possible to select more than one square to move at once to beat the clock faster, and it’s imperative that you do this for higher grid sizes. Simple enough. There’s an endless mode where you have to keep a timer going for as long as possible, and a time attack mode where you have to make as many crosses as possible in the time of your choice: 1 minute, 3 minutes, or 5 minutes. Moreover, you have special blocks to contend with: locks cannot be shifted off the edge of the playing field, X’s prevent the row and column they’re from being moved, and stars give you bonus points when included in a cross.
In either mode, the special blocks really help give the game an extra sense of strategy and excitement. On your feet, you’ll have to figure out how to work around your obstacles: do you find a hare-brained scheme to clear out the X block in your way, or move your whole nearly-completed row over so that you can move that one color into place? Likewise, if two locks are on a column, how are you going to get that one color out of there without wasting too much time? Add in the subselector mechanic that allows for multi-block movement, and you have one tightly designed, mile-a-minute puzzle game.
And if you’re just having a bad day and you want to destress, Max Krieger was nice enough to add in a chillout mode where you can make as many crosses as you like with no timers or special blocks, on relaxing backdrop videos. It almost gives off the nostalgic feeling of playing something slower-paced like Solitaire in the earlier days of computers, just figuring out the puzzles given to you with no worries. What a very nice touch. Even nicer is the in-game context: the backdrops are art pieces in a fledgling gallery run by a dog in a cap who appreciates your company when foot traffic is low. You can even banter with him and donate your hard-earned credits to support him!
Yes, there’s currency in this game, entirely earned by playing the game and rewarded based on how well you do in a given session. You can also use this in the shop, run by a fashionable lizard who sells costumes and power-ups for the characters, and additional music. This lizard can also be talked to, and she’ll also be honest about her life and times. There’s a lot of character packed into this game, with a Puyo Puyo-styled cast to round it all up. Dialogue for this bunch is exclusive to versus mode, which works about the same as most puzzle games with a head-to-head mode: the person with the better score wins, and there’s some items to hinder the other’s progress (these can be turned off). I advise you have a friend over or use Parsec to try this out; no online multiplayer built-in, but there are leaderboards to show off your high scores.
There’s also something to be said for the effort put in to make CROSSNIQ+ as customizable as possible. Square colors are entirely customizable between 12 colors, there are three control options that can be switched pre-game AND in the pause menu, options allow for backgrounds to be altered to be still or less intense, you can change your grid size from anywhere between 6 by 6 and the absolutely brutal 16 by 16. You can play CROSSNIQ+ however you see fit.
If I had any complaints, it’d be mostly relating to the controls and the currency. The option to change control schemes in-game is great and allow a lot of flexibility, but there’s really no contest when using a controller or the keyboard compared to using the mouse; the latter is just much more precise, and I’d imagine touch control on the Switch would be the way to go for that version. If you DO use a controller, I highly recommend using one with a solid d-pad.
As for currency, it’s obviously nowhere near as exploitive as games with microtransactions, but it takes quite a few games to build up enough money to buy something or donate to the gallery. That’s fine, solid performance clearly rewards with more cash and doing it consistently can net you enough for purchases. My tiny gripe is that to check your balance you’ll have to go to the shop, which has a loading screen attached. It’s a really minor complaint as loading times aren’t bad by any means considering how video-reliant backgrounds are, but I would’ve liked to see my balance on the main menu so I knew exactly how much I had before deciding to enter the gallery or shop. Nothing game-breaking, but a small inconvenience.
To that end, the music, composed by DV-I and ViRix Dreamcore. It’s absolutely wonderful and emits the greatest moods of the Ape Escape kind, but you initially only have 3 tracks available, and the rest must be purchased individually at 150 credits each, which means you’ll have to keep at it to unlock more bangers. It’s not even a big deal either because the soundtrack will be individually released around launch, but hearing the same music after consecutive games for coins could get repetitive for some. I personally didn’t, but your mileage may vary.
Even with the incredibly minor flaws that boil down to playing sessions to unlock stuff, and in spite of the lack of online multiplayer, CROSSNIQ+ is absolutely one of the indie highlights of 2019. It oozes charm with its sleek visuals and funky music, its amusing characters, its easy-to-learn/hard-to-master gameplay, its high customization. For 8 dollars, you’re getting a puzzle game with the utmost passion put into it that would not have been out of place with the big boys such as Tetris and Puyo Puyo back in 1999, and it’s portable at that. If you’re excited for this game out of so many releases in the packed holiday 2019 season, you have every right. Consider shelling out a few more bucks from your Dragon Quest XII S savings for this!