Picking Up Steam: CROSSNIQ+ (PC)
Tile based puzzle games can often get a good deal of mileage out of just asking the player to match colors, but when your gameplay relies on something that needs a bit of visual simplicity to suit the task, it pays off to add some visual interest elsewhere. CROSSNIQ+ is a very straightforward puzzle game concept, but you don’t need to look far to see that isn’t the main part of the game its fans praise. This is a game where most of its appeal comes from its sleek turn-of-the-century aesthetic, a look and style it pulls off pretty convincingly despite being from 2019 itself.
CROSSNIQ+ commits quite deeply to executing on its look that is both meant to be a nostalgic throwback and yet since the futurism look was how games released around the year 2000 tried to look clean and new, it also doesn’t necessarily feel out of date. The sometimes difficult to navigate menus are presented as if you are opening up some computerized navigation device to help you reach areas in a city, but while each menu option is contextualized by a map, you aren’t really traveling and only two of the spaces really have a sense of place. Electronic music with pronounced beats can keep a nice rhythm while also sounding a bit dreamy or relaxed, one of the musicians behind the soundtrack named ViRix Dreamcore with that “dreamcore” name feeling like a good fit for not just the sounds, but the backgrounds when you’re actually doing the color-matching gameplay. Behind the board of tiles will be sometimes be trippy sights with many moving colorful effects, but other times it might just be a shot of a piece of tech. It isn’t often meant to draw the eye but still the visuals playing underneath the action feel like they were picked to match a vibe, having some meaning but more an evocative one meant to make you feel more than think. The only true unfortunate part of this aesthetic is it’s hard to tell if CROSSNIQ+’s oddly long load times are meant to evoke the length of ones you’d find on a game system like the Dreamcast, the game not really having much to load and a modern computer shouldn’t need that much time to ready a truly straightforward puzzler.
CROSSNIQ+’s tile matching takes the form of a grid that will always be square-shaped but can be anywhere from 6 tiles wide by 6 tall to having 16 tiles for those dimensions. However, whatever number you pick, the maximum amount of colors will be 4 and smaller grids will have 3. This is because making a match in CROSSNIQ+ requires a good deal of pieces to execute. To score points and clear squares from the board, you must make a cross out of pieces of the same color, the player at least able to choose from a few preset colors if they want it to be easier to spot differences between them. While the cross shape is best described as a plus sign, it doesn’t necessarily need to have the proportions of one. As long as a single row and single column contain all the same colors, it won’t matter where they intersect. In essence, you need to make a vertical and horizontal match at the same time to get your points and keep playing, something that would definitely be a daunting task on the 16 by 16 board but that seems to exist more for the extreme challenge while the lower values are more manageable and can be tackled at a fairly quick speed.
CROSSNIQ+ offers a few different control options meaning you’re almost guaranteed to find a style that suits you. You can use a mouse to click on a piece and drag it vertically or horizontally, the entire row or column moving as if you were shoving the other pieces around. The board will have pieces shoved off-screen reappear on the opposite end, and there are options to drag multiple pieces at once, although with mouse controls where you need to click and hold a piece to select it, it’s often wiser to just quickly slide the colored tile where you want it. On keyboard or controller though, you’re still grabbing a tile to move it around, but it can be more vital to get a hang of the multiple selection tool, the game not even requiring them to be adjacent so you can make some impressive movements if you spot an opportunity.
As you get deeper into a session of color matching, CROSSNIQ+ starts to throw a few new complications at you. Star tiles are beneficial, the player earning extra points if they can include them in a match. The grid might not always provide enough pieces to pull off an effective cross though, so identifying that well can be important to not wasting time trying to match a star piece that can’t yet be used. Pieces with a lock on them though can’t be dragged off-screen, limiting how you can move the row or column they’re in. X pieces take this even further, as they truly lock down the lines they’re in from being moved. Importantly, while you can’t move that specific row and column, you can move nearby ones to remove or add tiles to the affected areas and hopefully clear them. Luckily there are ways to remove locked and X pieces without matching the affected squares. If you perform a match in the lines adjacent to a special piece, it will remove the special effect, although if you’re sloppy you can wipe away a Star piece’s special star with a nearby match too. This is how CROSSNIQ+ aims to get more difficult the longer a session is played, the frequency of the obstructive pieces increasing as you make deeper progress. Unfortunately, their somewhat random appearance can make accounting for them a bit difficult, a run likely to end when a rather mean X is plopped down and you can’t make a proper match in time to survive.
A timer will determine how long you can play CROSSNIQ+, a run ending should a meter on the right deplete completely. Every time you make a match though, it will refill, the player not having to worry about the timer really becoming too quick to handle. It provides you a good bit of time to locate a cross-shaped match and start building it, hence why the presence of too many X or lock pieces tends to do you in more than growing pressure from elsewhere. The timer is almost not really worth looking at, the game will alert you when it’s getting close to running out anyway and looking over is just time spent not evaluating the colors on the board. In fact, the timer feels like it doesn’t exactly add the kind of pressure that would allow CROSSNIQ+ to be a more riveting puzzle challenge. The escalation in difficulty isn’t as tangible as it would have been should the game find a way to speed up the action, but the board is static until you act upon it and the timer doesn’t feel like it is tightening its grip on you so a loss tends to sneak up on you rather than feeling like the climax of a battle to stay in the game. Suddenly you’ll have those obstructive pieces in places that lead to you not finding a match in time, but the timer feels like it just happens to be how the game determines you failed rather than being the danger itself. Even in Time Attack, a mode where you try to get as many points as possible in a specific amount of time, it can feel like the end just occurs rather than having an appropriate rise in tension, and Time Attack limits its own potential by only offering a 1 minute, 3 minute, and 5 minute challenge.
After the round is over though, you can save your score to leaderboards and you’ll earn a bit of cash to spend in the game’s other areas. The shop, a place called Culture Camo run by an anthropomorphic lizard named Vi, lets you buy new background music and also elements related to the game’s Versus mode. Two-player CROSSNIQ+ must unfortunately be done on the same computer by way of having each player utilize a different control method, something that can force a player into a less preferred albeit still effective style. Both players get to choose a character for this competitive form of CROSSNIQ+, the small cast a colorful bunch with thick outlines and smooth designs. While many are humans with a range of hair colors and fashions, some more eccentric picks exist in the form of a normal octopus in a mech named Ocho and the android girl with a monitor for a head that hosts the tutorials, Monitan. In Versus, your matches can unleash special items on the other player to interfere with their work. Flurry, Haze, and Dr. Beam impact the visibility of the other player’s playfield for a time, but others like Ocho are more straightforward by bombarding a player with a bunch of locks or X tiles. Other items are universal and some can even be bought over at Culture Camo alongside alternate outfits for the characters, players able to pick which items they work towards earning first before a match with some universal items including things like Refresh that clears all obstructive tiles, Counter Guard to block incoming items for a time, or Time Boost, something that is more crucial in Versus based on how you can lose.
The timer bar is shared in Versus but split down the middle, and when you make matches, especially high value ones, you gain more of that bar for your timer. Rather than relying mostly on direct attacks, you can actually invoke that time pressure that’s missing from the main game modes by putting the squeeze on your opponent, and since items are optional, you can end up making Versus a more intense skill-focused challenge than solo play. The final mode, funnily enough, removes all pressures. Chillout contains the other actual location you can visit, Gallery Indigo run by a cat person curator. Here you can donate some of the money you earn to have a chance of the curator Cal picking up a new background for the relaxed version of CROSSNIQ+ where there is no timer or special pieces at all. All you have is a mellow background like a beach or flowing pieces of fabric beneath the gameplay grid, the pieces even colored to be thematic like being made of sand and water for the beach or different textile patterns for the fabric. This can make some of them hard to see depending on the background, but this matching is purely for the sake of it, ambient noise accompanying matching that you can do endlessly until you’re ready to exit. It doesn’t add much with its existence, but with a game already so focused on a specific feel leaning into it fully for one mode, its presence at least seems appropriate.
THE VERDICT: The look and sound of CROSSNIQ+ is committed to fully and is so stylish you can find yourself easily swept up in the aesthetic. It suits the color matching play well enough, but it also feels like the coat of paint is doing more for the game than the substance of the cross making action. The timer doesn’t add the kind of pressure that leads to exciting battles for high scores, things more dependent on the negative pieces eventually becoming a bit too much to handle at a point that often sneaks up on you. It works well enough up until that sometimes surprise ending, and while Versus can add some intensity despite the barriers to play it, the modes don’t offer too much else of depth to make this the kind of puzzle game you can get stuck into for hours.
And so, I give CROSSNIQ+ for PC…
An OKAY rating. In a lot of matching games, what draws you back in next time is that feeling you can do something better if you just try again, be smarter about your matches, and better contend with the building pressures at play. CROSSNIQ+’s pressures though are tiles that will just eventually show up and even if you play with the easiest settings, it’s hard to really plan around something like 11 spaces on a 36 piece board potentially being damaging to your ongoing play. The cross matching style is more demanding than a match-three so it definitely needs the timer to be generous enough for the more involved task, but CROSSNIQ+’s means of making things more difficult isn’t compelling enough to drive you to attempt the game again and again. If anything, that task seems to fall on the aesthetic of the game, a player who gels with its presentation likely to find that to be the captivating element over a puzzle format that works but doesn’t feel like it has found its footing fully in terms of providing a cerebral challenge or thrilling score chase. Versus having its odd local play format limits it somewhat, although perhaps a version where you could play against AI opponents would give the game the edge it needs to be addictive. A more active element that increases the difficulty could get the cross matching out of its rut, the format feeling too content to let you play without strong resistance.
The cross matching concept is still involved enough that it works when you’re playing the game, but it doesn’t have the draw needed to make this a game worth investing much time in. The style is doing some heavy lifting in making it seem more appealing, even if that style leads to oddities like menus having the “Back” option constantly shift place between screens, but the aesthetic shouldn’t be discounted either. A lot of puzzlers are about game sense and flow and the music and visuals support that to a degree, and their dreamy quality can even be part of what makes it feel like a loss sneaks up on you since you are entering a sort of puzzle solving zen state. The added pieces as you get deeper in do add enough considerations that CROSSNIQ+ can test your skill to some degree and keep you engaged that way, but it doesn’t feel like it’s yet found the crucial variable that can make this game hold up to other color-matching puzzlers.