Cross the Moon Switch NSP Free Download Romslab

Cross the Moon Switch NSP Free Download What makes a good visual novel? If your answer is ‘there’s no such thing’, then now’s the time to back away. Cross the Moon is very much visual, very much a novel. If your answer is ‘dialogue choices and multiple paths, leading to different endings’, then Cross the Moon is also a no-go. There’s zero gameplay, zero divergence here. All you’re doing is pressing A to move to the next lot of chat, or auto-playing it like a movie. ROMSLAB.COM BEST SWITCH GAMES

Cross the Moon Switch NSP Free Download Romslab

This is a visual novel in the literal sense. It’s a novel that happens to have imagery to smooth over the reading. You could argue that Cross the Moon is better defined as a motion comic, and the themes and art feel like neighbours to some prominent comics. The work of Kieron Gillen comes to mind, particularly Phonogram and The Wicked + The Divine. Cross the Moon features attractive, young people doing stylish things in clubs, all with a cracking soundtrack and some magic-realism moments.

The most immediately noticeable

The most immediately noticeable thing about Cross The Moon is its aesthetic. The game eschews the standard approach to visual novels (i.e. artist-drawn backgrounds) to instead present players with real-world photographs that have been heavily distorted through the use of colour saturation to give them a surrealistic quality. The genius here is that you’ve never, ever played a game that quite looks like this, and the surrealistic edge has then allowed the developer to take a fairly standard noirish story, insert vampires (that can move about in the day) and cosmic horror.Heave Ho Switch NSP

Cross the Moon Switch NSP Free Download Romslab

real-world themes like class warfare and racism, and a story-within-a-story structure and somehow make it all work together. Cross The Moon shouldn’t be as cohesive as it is, and it does seem esoteric in screenshots and on the first impression, but once you give yourself an hour or so to immerse yourself into it, you realise that it’s all kinda brilliant. It’s true auteur theory stuff, to the extent that the approach here can only work in video games when the developer is a one-person studio (because the moment you introduce additional team members in game development there is the expectation that the creativity becomes a group project).

While we don’t have any big game studios

While we don’t have any big game studios “controlling the creative process” with regards to visual novels, there are certainly norms in the genre, and furthermore, there are norms with regards to broader video games, with significant pressure by the community (rather than the studios) to make games conform to those norms. Cross The Moon almost represents a double-rejection of norms here, with visual novels themselves being criticised for not being enough like games to even deserve to be called games (and Cross The Moon has absolutely no game-like elements in it, as a kinetic VN). Heaven’s Vault Switch NSP

Cross the Moon Switch NSP Free Download Romslab

Meanwhile, visual novel fans have their own set of demands on VNs, are do tend to take a dim view of western artists that subvert their expectations of what goes into a VN. Cross The Moon isn’t anything like any VN (and therefore game) you may have played before, and it’s confidently proud of that. So the New Wave spirit is very much alive in Cross The Moon, across both aesthetic and its design. However, for me, the most interesting comparison point between Cross The Moon and New Wave is the way that it tells its story, however. Again to quote Masterclass:

Just about all of this applies to Cross The Moon.

“While Old Hollywood films aimed to entertain, most French New Wave films were about expressing the directors’ thoughts or emotions, dealing with difficult, intellectual topics like existentialism and the absurdity of existence. They wanted to encourage their audiences to think both during and after viewing, so the films often featured long takes that allowed audiences’ minds to wander and bring their own experiences to the film.” Where most vampire stories in video games reduce vampires to horrible blood-sucking antagonists or anti-heroe.Hellblade Senuas Sacrifice Switch NSP

Cross the Moon Switch NSP Free Download Romslab

Cross The Moon instead uses vampires as an analogy to racism, with vampires being forced into enclosed communities, monitored as “dangerous aliens,” to polite society, given serial numbers and terrorised by an arm of the police force specifically set up to deal with the “problem.” The way that the narrative then positions the vampire’s efforts to live in such societies – how it moulds their aspirations, how it affects their relationships with non-vampires, and what it does to the family unit – occasionally dips to a point that it’s too heavy-handed for its own good, but for the most part is a nuanced, interesting, and ultimately… human… treatment of a topic that is incredibly difficult to represent in media in a way that captures the full scope of the discourse.

Add-ons (DLC): Cross the Moon Switch NSP