Crossing Souls has huge Big Bang Theory energy
Listen to an audio version of this article by becoming a Patreon supporter.
I will assume you are familiar with The Big Bang Theory. Not closely - please, be good to yourself - but to a level I do not need to relitigate its comedy equation of: casual misogyny, plus racism, times pop culture reference, equals joke(?). That fruit has already decomposed and sprouted a new tree we call Young Sheldon, because white culture is nothing but the mutilated corpse of something dead.
So we’ve all agreed Big Bang Theory is bad, but what of Crossing Souls (Fourattic, 2018)? An 80s homage about connecting to the ghost realm to stop a war between the physical and spirit worlds, Crossing Souls is a conduit for our own nostalgia. The writing is bland, the lo-fi pixel art and hand-drawn cutscenes are serviceable, and the gameplay is clumsily familiar. It is the film negative of the ghost of an 80s brawler, and hardly worth all the scorn I’m directing towards it.
But what Crossing Souls does, why I am writing about it at all, is transparently bask in its uncritical nostalgia. The characters are just as you remembered, the story beats predictable with a touch of the risque. Because of course, we don’t want different; we want what we remember. Keep running on that treadmill in a dark room. Think of your childhood, all the bullshit you didn’t have to deal with, when it was enough to just be a middle-class cishet white dude who liked Ghostbusters.
I brought up The Big Bang Theory to give some sort of reference to the kind of self-indulgent cotton candy Crossing Souls is working with. You have the jock, you have the little brother. There’s the nerd that keeps crying. The one (1) black character who is described as lazy and brutish (not embellishing). The Girl.
Early on, you go to a trailer park to meet up with The Girl and are greeted with confederate flags and alcoholism. The Girl’s father, once again, drunk, forces you to fight to prove you’re man enough to protect The Girl. Then The Girl shows she can fight too and, isn’t this great, violence is gender-neutral now!
This is all within the first 30 minutes of the game and it only digs itself in more from here. There’s the stage where we visit a plantation, when we discover a body and are told we’ve all become real men (even The Girl; comedy, right?), or walk into a forest full of ghost children all dressed as cartoon indigenous peoples.
Crossing Souls is gross and incompetent, and it is a pure manifestation of nostalgia. Nostalgia for a time only a small demographic remembers fondly because they weren’t being assaulted by the CIA, fighting for basic bodily rights, having to hide their gender and sexual identity, or being labeled terrorists by the US government. The times weren’t simpler, we were just openly flouting our ignorance and privilege, perhaps winking and bemoaning how hard “other people” had it, but hey wasn’t The Goonies great?
You could sketch Crossing Souls on a napkin, and it would probably be a smarter, more inclusive game. But I won’t ask you too. I’m off to cut down Young Sheldon and burry Crossing Souls next to him where the soil is dead.
This essay was made possible through the support of Quinn K. and the rest of my wonderful Patreon supporters. If you enjoyed this post it would mean a ton if you shared it with a friend and considered becoming a supporter yourself.