So hey, CrossCode very recently got a huge post-game DLC added on, as in a DLC consisting of a post-game story. I would be inclined to describe it as a proper expansion pack, even, for the amount that's in there. Naturally I bought it, and I haven't finished it, and I don't plan on spoiling really anything about it here. But I'm
aching for somewhere to talk about this, so here we go:
Basically the entirety of CrossCode's "
zeldaesque dungeons"
consist of combat rooms and execution puzzles. Not one singular time throughout the entire game did I feel like something presented as a puzzle was anything other than "
it's really obvious what to do, I just need to act/react quickly enough to actually do it."
And now, guess what?
The DLC's new humongous mega-dungeon introduces a brand new puzzle element which hooks up with literally
every other puzzle element that's been introduced before, and links them
together in various interesting ways. Effectively it catalyzes this entire postgame dungeon to be chock full of actual, legitimate "
figure out what to do"
type puzzles.
I'm of two minds about this; obviously I'm happy to finally
see puzzles like that which require me to actually think about how to hook the mechanics and interactions together properly to achieve a desired result. But at the same time, the end result of this is that all of the "
thinking puzzles"
of the entire game are back-loaded to the
postgame. It means that even though these mechanics are interesting and the puzzles here are great, it's kind of hard to recommend the game overall to someone who's looking for good, clever puzzles, as I imagine someone on this forum might be, because there is
so much game before you can get to them, plus of course the extra price of buying that DLC.
I suppose this is just the price you pay for having a game that was sequentially developed. It gets way more interesting as it goes in ways that are harder to anticipate because the timespan the game was built over is just too long for the devs to have realistically planned everything out from the beginning. But as a result, the early-game might not give as good of an impression as the overall game experience really is.
Bringing it back around to the main subject matter of this forum, I guess DROD was kind of developed sequentially too, in a way. It's just that it's more like 5 cohesive, big chunks that were each developed over time and each released as an individual whole, rather than CrossCode's steady drip-stream of additional content over several years all being piled onto the
same whole.
Phew, okay. Rant is out of me now. I guess it's cool if anyone who's played the game before (or hasn't) wants to comment on the matter, though.
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