Crossing Souls

The pixel art in Crossing Souls is the first thing that hits you. It looks deceptively simple at first, almost cheap, but the detail is meticulous. Someone in a small studio in Spain spent real time on this. The animations are sharp, the environments have weight, light falls through windows with purpose. It’s the kind of art that doesn’t announce itself, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.

The game itself is about kids in California in 1986 who find a pink magic stone that lets them travel between dimensions. It’s built entirely from 80s references—Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, E.T., all the obvious touchstones—but it doesn’t feel like a checklist. It feels like someone genuinely loved that era and wanted to capture what it was like to actually exist in it, when magic and danger seemed possible.

The story is straightforward. Kids find magic object, world faces threat, you solve the puzzle. Nothing surprising there. But the game’s real strength is in the feel of it—the rhythm of dialogue, the pacing of discovery, the way characters miss what’s right in front of them or suddenly understand something together. That’s where it lives.

I played it a few years ago and haven’t thought about it much since. But something brought it back recently—probably another wave of 80s nostalgia online, or someone mentioning it in passing. I remembered why it held up: the game doesn’t perform its own importance. It just exists, completely and without apology. That’s rarer than it should be.

It’s on PlayStation and PC.