[Review] Crosak: Play-Dough Age (PS5)
Remember 2007?
Still on my "games with art style gimmicks" kick, here's a little indie effort from late last year, from the Spanish studio that brought us Gigantosaurus: The Game, WildSphere. Although this isn't listed on their website for some reason. It doesn't even have a MobyGames page! You'll have to trust me that it exists.
Caveman games were all the rage in the 90s, but they've petered out since. So it's nice to have this throwback. Except what it's actually throwing back to is 100% Super Mario Galaxy (despite the opening cutscene referencing Banjo-Kazooie, that doesn’t seem to really be a design influence). Anyway, in a vaguely defined "cartoon prehistoric" world, a village of Stone Age folk are kidnapped by some kind of wizard, and it's up to Crosak and his buddy Ena to rescue them across surreal floating planetoids. Ena looks kind of like Crosak, except with lipstick and big eyelashes because she's a girl. She features prominently in the key art, but only appears if you activate the drop-in co-op mode. You can't just choose to play as her, which was my first gripe with the game.
Crosak has some fun moves: he can jog, spin attack, a midair attack functions like a double jump, there's a roll to cover more distance, plus crawling and stomping. There's potential here but the moves don't chain in to each other, so it feels stiff. Combat also feels off: even basic enemies take multiple hits to defeat, and sometimes your hit just oddly misses them or you take damage simultaneously. The boss fights are especially dull and janky, but they do reward you by unlocking timed powerups in levels which can open new paths.
The game consists of six main levels, each with ten villagers to rescue, who take the place of Mario's power stars. Borrowing my least favourite convention from the 3D Mario games, getting one immediately kicks you out of the level. So I ended up covering the same ground—often a fair bit of open space included—multiple times to get villagers in the same areas or past where a previous one was. Planetoids are connected by swooping grind rails that you snap to and can't get off, and it's easy to forget which one takes you where and just go in circles. I would try to pan the camera around to get my bearings, but the game employs an aggressive eye-straining blurring effect to simulate tilt-shifting in aid of the claymation-style aesthetic.
So I have qualms with the level design. It signposts cutoffs (rails or doorways) that will take you to a minigame, but with no distinguishing features you just have to remember which ones you've done. The minigames themselves are various flavours of over-long autoscrollers, bland 2D sections, or a tedious ball-rolling one that when it got reused later I simply noped out of, since you only need about half the total villagers to get to the end of the game.
Apart from the Mario Galaxy planet gimmick (which isn't even used in a very interesting way), the main hook of Crosak is the clay-like visuals. They have a pleasing look to them, with some use of low framerate, textures that slightly shift, and visible fingerprints that give some of the intended charm. Sadly the rest of the art direction falls flat; there's just not much going on in the levels, with boring choices for world themes until the final level finally injects a bit more surrealism.
It's nice to see more 3D platformers in the indie space, but there's plenty of better ones than Crosak. I give it some points for ambition and for aping Super Mario Galaxy, although inviting that comparison will inevitably end badly for the low-budget alternative. The art style helps it stand out but it's kind of the best thing going for it, and even then it fumbles other aspects of the visual design. For better or worse it's also quite short, with my "any%" playthrough over in a few hours. It's not broken, it didn't make me angry, it just falls short in a lot of areas. Oh well.