California, 1986, and a Stone That Opens the Wrong Door

Five kids in suburban California find a pink stone that lets them cross between the world of the living and the world of the dead. That sentence alone tells you where Crossing Souls lives—somewhere between Stranger Things, a Saturday morning cartoon, and the hazy memory of a summer that changed everything. The Spanish studio Fourattic built it in pixel art, and it looks exactly like a game about nostalgia probably should: dense with color, almost aggressively retro, a little loose in the illustration work but genuinely beautiful in the actual pixel animation.

The pop culture references arrive fast and without apology. Ghostbusters. Back to the Future. E.T. This is a game that knows exactly what it is and commits without flinching. The whole appeal of the Stranger Things-era 80s revival—and the genre it spawned—is that specific texture of American childhood: bikes, empty lots, adults who either can’t hear you or actively want to stop you, something genuinely dangerous that only the kids can handle. Crossing Souls is that feeling encoded as a playable object.

The real question with anything in this space is whether it earns those references or just borrows their warmth. The nostalgia well has been drawn from so many times that the mechanism itself has become the subject. But doing it in pixel art rather than prestige television changes the register slightly—it feels less like a product and more like something someone actually wanted to make. The game is out now on PC, for anyone who wants to find out whether the stone opens anything worth finding.