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1[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/crossing_souls_image.jpeg]]
2''Some discoveries are too powerful to be shared...''
3
4''Crossing Souls'' is an indie [=2D=] top-down ActionAdventure, developed by Fourattic, published by Creator/DevolverDigital, and released in April 2018. It is about a group of childhood friends in a small town, who one day discover a dead body near the local lake. The deceased also carried a weird pink pyramid-like stone with him, which the nerd of the group, Matt, soon identifies as the shard of the Egyptian Duat, which has the power to cross over the worlds of the living and the dead. Matt quickly fashions it into a way to see ghosts. However, this same Duat Stone is also searched for by its previous owner, Major Oh Rus, who hopes to use it to TakeOverTheWorld...
5
6The game was funded on Website/{{Kickstarter}}. It reached its funding goal on December 13th, 2014. It was released on February 13th, 2018.
7
8!! Tropes present in Crossing Souls:
9----
10* ActionBomb: The ghost Zombies (yes, really) who rise from their graves in the cemetery blow up upon death.
11* AdvancingBossOfDoom: An example near the end, where the boss - ghostly green dragon - is actually in the background at all times, and the player is instead fleeing from the wall of green flame it is creating behind them.
12* AlienBlood: Spiders leave green or purple blood behind them. Ghosts can leave behind pinkish blood.
13* AnotherDimension: Duat, the ghostly world of the dead, which you can enter at will once Matt develops his machine.
14* ArcWords: Besides the TagLine above, there's "Together, always", which the main characters regularly say to each other. [[spoiler:These are Matt's final words, and what Charlie says after she essentially commits suicide many years later to rejoin the group in the afterlife.]]
15* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler:The group of friends do manage to stop the Major and save the world, but nearly all of them die in the process, and don't reunite in the afterlife until the final friend chooses to die in their old age.]]
16* BlandNameProduct: All the collection items are parodies of famous 80's crazes.
17* BloodlessCarnage: Played straight during the normal gameplay, where the gang do not kill any humans. Averted in the cutscenes, where there's blood whenever Major Oh Rus kills someone.
18* BondVillainStupidity: It's unclear why Major and Spielgman went to the trouble of [[spoiler:creating Cyborg Heartless and the elaborate sequence of disappearing platforms around him, when simply a room full of platforms that would have all sunk into the lava at once would have worked just fine]]. However, given the following scenes, it's possible that [[spoiler:because Spielgman wanted Matt to survive so that he could join him, he persuaded the Major to do something that would give him a chance.]] Even that looks needlessly elaborate compared to [[spoiler:the laser fence that actually gets Matt and Chris to split up and allows Spielgman to talk to Matt on his own.]]
19* CirclingBirdies: Circling stars appear over the heads of stunned enemies, be they village kids fighting you in the ring, or ghouls who miss with their leaping attacks and hit their head on the ground instead.
20* ConcealmentEqualsCover: The gang hides from the assault rifle fire of a dozen Last Regime soldiers behind a car. It is absolutely riddled with bullet holes, yet none of them get hit.
21* ConvectionSchmonvection: The battle with [[spoiler:Cyborg Heartless]] occurs over lava, and yet, it only damages the characters when they actually fall into it, while standing on the platforms right next to it is fine.
22* CreatorProvincialism: Really minor example, but it's there. Among the items in the treehouse there are a ''Manga/DashKappei'' poster and a poster of a character from ''WesternAnimation/TheFruitties''. While those ''are'' shows from the 1980s, it is extremely unlikely that kids from a small American town would know about them and be such fans of them. Developers Fourattic are from Spain, and so is ''The Fruitties'', and ''Kappei'' was quite popular in Spain between the 80s and the 90s. Additionally, there are [[SeparatedByACommonLanguage word choices]] that would not be used in America, such as "caravan park" for "trailer park".
23* CurbStompBattle: This is what is supposed to happen when Major Oh Rus' plan comes to fruition. His portal will summon enough dead, all captive to his will, that they'll overwhelm the resistance from any living who disobey him within a day - hence he and Spielgman refer to it as the One Day War.
24* CutscenePowerToTheMax: Major Oh Rus, [[spoiler:wounded after his battle with Chris, still manages to remotely snap Matt's neck with a ForceChoke equivalent]]. Why he couldn't do the same to [[spoiler:Chris, instead of jumping down to fight him]], is never explained.
25* DeaderThanDead: Possessed Entities can kill other ghosts, and even eat the souls of the living.
26* DeathOfAChild: First when [[spoiler:Chris' little brother Kevin dies]] and then when [[spoiler:Matt gets his neck snapped by Major Oh Rus.]] Then, when [[spoiler:Big Joe is hit by a bullet from Heartless' helicopter, and eventually dies from it.]] By the end, [[spoiler:Charlie is the only person out of the whole group to survive.]]
27* DefeatEqualsExplosion:
28** Happens at the end of every boss battle. While human bosses simply have the machinery they are using blow up while they themselves are merely knocked out, ghosts like Sarducci blow up themselves.
29** This also happens with the zombies (who are ghosts too, and not flesh-and-blood beings), though their explosion actually does damage, and is not just a visual effect.
30* DieChairDie:
31** You can break environmental items like wooden boxes and trash cans to search for hearts. There's even a mini-sidequest, where a neighbour asks you to break apart a few watermelons she accidentally planted on her lawn.
32** On the cemetery, you can smash piles of skulls. Sometimes, it's the only way to get through to the next area. [[spoiler:Interestingly, none of the characters comment on this, and this behavior doesn't stop the scale of souls to judge Chris' soul as being so pure as to defeat Seth.]]
33* DimensionalTraveler: Chris, Matt, and the rest turn into these once Matt develops his machine from the Duat stone.
34* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler:A rare ''hopeful'' example in the epilogue. Charlie, having grown old, tells the events of the game as a story to her grandchildren. After they leave, she activates a machine that lets her die and be reborn in the afterlife as the girl she was during the main game.]]
35* EnergyBall:
36** Zed fires long bursts of yellow ones from his machine. Later, Matt's portable gun fires green projectiles like this.
37** Ghostly Priests fire a burst of three purple balls from their clasped hands.
38** Major Oh Rus can fire a spread of three from his hand.
39* EverythingFades: Defeated enemies only take a few seconds to fade away, regardless of whether they were destroyed like machines, "killed" like ghosts, or knocked out like humans.
40* FatalFamilyPhoto: Played with: you find [[spoiler:Bronson's]] family photo right as [[spoiler:you come across his dead body on a motorized rack, killed by Major for his failures.]]
41* FirstKiss: Happens between Chris and Charlie in Major Oh Rus' base. [[spoiler:Disturbingly, it occurs right after the last words of Matt, who had his neck snapped by Major Oh Rus.]]
42* FlunkyBoss: Most bosses summon back-up during their fights. Carl the Bus Driver does nothing besides summoning back-up.
43* ForgottenFallenFriend:
44** Averted when [[spoiler:Kevin dies, and we see a montage of Chris grieving over several days spent inside his room.]]
45** The kids also remember later on when [[spoiler:Big Joe]] dies. However, [[spoiler:when Spielgman convinces Matt they do everything for the greater good, and even says Heartless' fate was due to going too far, Matt somehow forgets that Bronson was tortured to death by the same people.]]
46* FramesOfReference: Kind and nerdy Matt wears huge circular glasses with light blue frames. Mischievous Kevin wears black-rimmed square glasses. Vain Quincy Queen wears CoolShades. Wise Dr. Spielgman wears green-colored shades.
47* FriendlyFireproof:
48** The attacks of ranged enemies never hurt their allies. Even if they are explosive, with a sizeable blast radius. However, zombies' death explosions do hurt other ghosts - a good thing too, given how many of them there are.
49** You can swing your weapons and fists in front of bystanders, and it'll pass through them without ever doing damage, let alone triggering any reaction from them.
50* GameOver: The screen here literally says that, overlaid over Major Oh Rus' face.
51* GatlingGood: Heartless' helicopter has a gatling gun on it. [[spoiler:You would expect a boss fight, but instead, the kids are realistically forced to flee. Even so, Heartless' fire still gets Big Joe killed.]]
52* GhostReunionEnding: [[spoiler:After Charlie becomes the only playable character to survive the main game, she lives out a full life, travelling to Ghana with an [=NGO=] and becoming a grandmother who tells this whole story to her grandkids. After they leave, she uses a machine based on Matt's discoveries to send her soul to the afterlife as a girl she was then, not the old woman she is now.]]
53* GiantSpider: The dog-sized Red Spiders.
54* GuideDangIt: The sheer number of PermanentlyMissableContent that makes up your achievements list could leave one to constantly restart the game for a completionist run.
55* HandBlast:
56** Ghostly Priests in Carl the Bus Driver's army fire energy blasts in bursts of three.
57** During his boss battle, Major Oh Rus can fire a spread of three energy shots from his palm.
58* HeartSymbol: The health icon, as expected.
59* HyperactiveMetabolism: Characters get healed with [=SuguHeart=] candies.
60* InexplicableTreasureChests: Plain-looking wooden chests are present in plenty of secluded places. Perfect for the adventurers like you, strange for whoever placed them there in the first place.
61* ImperialStormtrooperMarksmanshipAcademy: A dozen Last Regime soldiers with assault rifles under the command of Heartless fail to hit any of the kids as they flee them at mid-range.
62* InTheHood: Ghostly Priests' face is completely obscured by their hood.
63* MeaningfulName: Heartless is the most cruel of Major Oh Rus' officers, and thinks nothing of opening fire with live rounds on kids. [[spoiler:It also becomes literal, when he's turned into a cyborg, whose heart is separate from the rest of the body, and is his weak point.]]
64* MechaMooks: Used a lot in Major Oh Rus' base.
65* NextSundayAD: [[spoiler:The epilogue has you control Charlie old enough to have grandkids, which implies some 50+ years must have passed since the events of the game in 1980. For 2030s-2040s, there's not much new at her house besides some flashy screens.]]
66* NonFatalExplosions: All explosions in the game. Granted most of these come from either children's firecrackers or from ghosts and thus have unclear physical properties.
67* OnlyAFleshWound: Averted when [[spoiler:Big Joe is hit by one of the bullets Heartless fired from his helicopter's minigun. He seems to survive it, but spends the next section plodding and visibly wounded, before ultimately collapsing and dying at the end of it.]]
68* OurGhoulsAreCreepier: Some ghostly ghouls fight for Carl the Bus Driver. They can do leap attacks at the player. However, they'll painfully bump their heads on the ground if they miss, and become an easy target while they recover.
69* PlatformBattle: The battle with [[spoiler:Cyborg Heartless]] is fought over lava, with platforms regularly appearing and disappearing, and while you are also fired at with energy projectiles and missiles from above.
70* PlayableEpilogue: The DenouementEpisode version, where [[spoiler:you control old Charlie after she's just told the events you just played through to her grandchildren. You get to walk around her house, look at the key items and see her reminisce about them, before she reaches the machine that sent her soul to the afterlife as the young girl.]]
71* PlayingWithFire: Vigo Sarducci's ghost moves.
72* PowerFloats: One of Matt's inventions lets him float a short distance off the ground.
73* PunchClockVillain: Bronson is a sympathetic link under Major Oh Rus and his second-in-commands Spielgman and Heartless. [[spoiler:It's revealed he was only doing this for his family, through a photo found next to his dead body on a rack.]]
74* RatStomp: The first battle in the game is against rats, small and large, in the burger place's basement.
75* ReferenceOverdosed: Every single collectible item is based on a piece of 80s popular culture, the plot is based on several famous movies from that period (from ''Stand By Me'' to ''E.T.''), countless posters, leaflets and graffiti with shout-outs on them... It gets to the point that several reviews stated that the endless references become distracting and overwhelming after a while.
76* {{Retraux}}: The animated cut scenes have a grainy appearance to them, sometimes have bubbles cut in it like it's being played off an old VHS tape.
77* SadlyMythtaken: Osiris and Set are referred to as "Osis" and "Seth". While "Seth" is a valid transliteration of Set's name, no culture in history ever called Osiris "Osis". (Osiris is the Greek name for the god. The hieroglyphics - which do not include vowels - transliterate to "wsjr"; suggested pronunciations include "Asar", "Wesir", or "Usir" - but ''not'' "Osis".)
78* SavePoint: Cassette tapes (though they look more like NES cartridges), as expected of its 80s setting.
79* SkeletonMotif:
80** Quincy Queen's music band/gang are named Purple Skulls, and have a logo to match.
81** Red Spiders have an exact representation of a skull on their backs. Possessed Entities are globs of slime with a skull inside them.
82* ShockwaveStomp:
83** Quincy Queen jumps up in the air holding out his staff, then creates a large shockwave of what seems like purple notes, with a huge blast radius.
84** Vigo Sarducci has a move where he jumps down and drives his sword into the ground, creating a fire shockwave around it.
85** Major Oh Rus has a similar move, though he's badass enough to just slam his fist to the ground for the same effect.
86* ShooOutTheClowns: The game is quite light-hearted at first, and even the appearance of the dead body and the introduction of ruthless Major Oh Rus do not seem to shake this too much. Sure, you are suddenly fighting dozens of ghost zombies at once, but none of the characters seem to care about it too much, so it must not matter, right. Then, [[spoiler: Kevin, Chris' younger brother who takes nothing much seriously, dies in a stupid accident due to the Duat Stone, and everyone is forced to realize the gravity of what they had been doing.]]
87* ShoutOut: Multiple shout-outs to the various 80s and 80s-set works.
88** One of the houses has the family from ''{{Film/Poltergeist|1982}}'', complete with the daughter staring into a staticy TV, and indian ghosts mad that the pool is digging into their graves.
89** A ''[[{{Series/V1983}} V]]'' symbol in the sewers has the main character hoping they don't run into Lizard Men.
90** Randall, the flunky in the Purple Skulls, shares a name and mannerisms with the class snitch of WesternAnimation/{{Recess}}.
91** The Vigo Sarducci boss is a carbon copy of [[Film/GhostbustersII Vigo the Carpathian.]] His name is probably referencing comedy character [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Guido_Sarducci Father Guido Sarducci.]]
92** Another boss is based on the librarian ghost from ''Film/Ghostbusters1984''.
93** Two agents named [[Film/PoliceAcademy Zed and Tackleberry.]]
94** Matt's parents seem to be partially based on [[WesternAnimation/TheRealGhostbusters Egon and Janine]], both in appearance and attitude.
95** AsianStoreOwner Shen Lee is clearly based on Mr. Wing from ''Film/{{Gremlins}}'', on top of that some dialogues seem to reference the parody of such characters that appeared on one ''WesternAnimation/TreehouseOfHorror'' episode of ''The Simpsons''.
96* SprintMeter: One is consumed when the characters are running, jumping, and with every attack or UnnecessaryCombatRoll. There are even platform segments where you must watch your stamina to successfully get through them.
97* StatusQuoIsGod: The epilogue implies that [[spoiler:since Charlie's grandkids don't realise their grandma was in the story, the events probably stayed secret and didn't alter the course of world history in any way. Spielgman and his scientists didn't get to do anything like what they intended, and the dozens of people who were drained by the Duat, to the point only their skeletons remain, were similarly brushed off by the rest of the world.]]
98* SuperDrowningSkills: All the characters immediately drown if they fall into the water, and respawn at its edge.
99* SuperSpit: Red Spiders spit out globs of entangling webs. An advanced version of Possessed Entities spits out delayed-explosion ghostly slime.
100* TacticalSuicideBoss:
101** Vigo Sarducci cannot be harmed as long as he stays inside his three portraits and launches fireballs from them. Every once in a while, however, he gets too proud to keep doing that, and flies out of one of them to attack the gang with his ghostly sword.
102** Major Oh Rus' second battle is a truly special example. [[spoiler: The supposed "god" is a large red beast, which charges at the player and can't be damaged normally, but whose life is dependent upon the red crystals that appear in the corners of the arena. It appears that either Oh Rus is too enraged not to repeatedly crash into the very crystals keeping him alive, or his "god" form is just a beast that can no longer have such advanced thoughts.]]
103** There is absolutely ''no'' reason for Carl the Bus Driver to have the vents for his boilers ''pointing directly at him''.
104* TennisBoss: Chris' bat somehow allows him to knock EnergyBall projectiles backwards. It's useful both against Major's turrets, and when dealing with his HandBlast.
105* UnnecessaryCombatRoll: An important part of the combat system. Just don't drain the SprintMeter too much!
106* VampiricDraining: This is what the Duat Stone does, in the absence of any other energy source. [[spoiler: Kevin dies because of this, when he's startled by Quincy Queen, and takes off so quickly the gamma battery falls out of Matt's machine, and Duat Stone drains his life instead.]]
107* WaveMotionGun: The crown weapon of the machine used by Zed in his boss fight.
108* WeCanRuleTogether:
109** Quincy Queen offers Chris early on to abandon his "loser friends" and join him and the Purple Skulls, so that they would "rule" the town together. Chris obviously knocks this back.
110** It eventually turns out that [[spoiler: Major Oh Rus received a similar offer from Seth, who would let him rule the Earth in exchange for freeing him to take over everything else.]] However, [[spoiler: Seth never intended to fulfil his end of the bargain.]]
111** Lastly, [[spoiler: Spielgman offers Matt to work alongside him and the other scientists under his control, as the Duat would allow them to converse with any dead scientist from the past, and work on the problems together, while even their own death wouldn't stop them from aiding their colleagues.]] Sadly, [[spoiler: while Matt accepts, Oh Rus petulantly killed him as soon as he lost his first fight to Matt.]]
112* WeirdnessCensor: You can swing your fist, bat, skipping rope, etc. in everyone's faces, and nobody will bat an eyelid.
113* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: It's unclear just what happened to [[spoiler: Spielgman, his two dozen scientists and the remaining Last Regime soldiers. Chris simply tells Charlie to get everyone out, and then we have a TimeSkip 50+ years in the future, with none of them mentioned. There's no explanation for how she, a lone girl, managed to rescue all the people connected to the Duat, evading the soldiers in the meantime. Just as it is unclear why Spielgman and his scientists would apparently give up on all the equipment and research they have gathered.]]
114* WhyDontYouJustShootHim:
115** The final area is a particularly jarring example of this. Oh Rus has soldiers equipped with real, proper guns, but chooses to guard most of the base with knee-high MechaMooks that easily get smashed with a bat. Even if he had to limit the number of human soldiers to a dozen or two for the sake of secrecy, it's again unclear why the robots couldn't be equipped with real guns, instead of fighting in melee, launching weak explosives or firing energy balls that get deflected with a bat!
116** Let's just say '''all''' of Spielgman's scientists failed to design a robot that could shoot a gun accurately without overheating or losing its balance from recoil. Even '''that''' doesn't explain why Oh Rus sends about a dozen of MechaMooks at Chris in several waves before joining the fight himself, rather than just getting two soldiers who were next to him in the previous cutscene to empty their mags.
117* WimpFight: Just before the Quincy Queen boss battle, his flunky, Randall, attempts to take you on yourself, but the best he can manage is some pathetic slaps to Big Joe, the strongest member of the group. He gets annoyed, and chucks him headfirst into the nearby dumpster with a single move.
118* WouldHurtAChild: Both Oh Rus and Heartless don't mind offering their troops to kill the child protagonists. [[spoiler: Both of them also end up doing it personally, with Heartless' bullet wounding and killing Big Joe, while Oh Rus personally snaps Matt's neck.]]
119* YouAllLookFamiliar: There's only a couple of ghostly kid sprites for the sizeable crowd standing behind Carl The Bus Driver, so several of them are repeated.
120* YouHaveFailedMe:
121** Major Oh Rus is introduced with a scene where he kills a masked mook for failing to locate the Duat Stone.
122** Then, [[spoiler:Bronson also gets tortured to death on what looks like motorized rack at the end.]] Similarly, [[spoiler:Heartless also appears to have been turned into a horrible cyborg due to his failure to eliminate the kids from a helicopter, even if Spielgman claims it's because he had gone too far.]]
123* YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness: Major Oh Rus does this to [[spoiler:Matt]], once [[spoiler:he gets defeated by the other kids, and decides to straight-up transition to a "god".]]
124* XRaySparks: This happens to Bronson, Zed and Tackleberry during their battle; first when they just power it on, and later as you deal damage to them.

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