Posted October 19, 2020
Let's be clear from the start - I love weird and unique indie games. They're often rich with interesting ideas that you don't see in ultra polished AAA games. I like to support them, even if they're not fantastic, because it's often obvious I'm supporting something someone has toiled over and worked hard at making something they can be proud of.
Crossroads Inn, sadly, is an awful game, despite me wanting to love it.
I've tried the game on three different machines:
The fast one:
Windows 10
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
RTX 2080 Ti
32GB RAM
NVMe M.2 1TB SSD
The "normal" one:
Windows 10
i5-9400F
16GB RAM
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Super 6GB OC
NVMe M.2 500GB SSD
The "work machine", a 2020 iMac:
macOS
i7 3.8 Ghz
64GB RAM
Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16GB
1TB SSD
None of these machines are slow, by today's standards. All of them are well maintained, free of malware, free of bloatware, and have no issues with out of date drivers, nor do they use beta drivers.
The "fast one" is a beast, and takes whatever I throw at it without even breaking a sweat.
The normal one does well too. I only mentioned it here because I tried the game on that machine as well.
Say what you will about macs, but the iMac is also a beast. It handles whatever the "normal one" does, but does it silently on a 5K display that makes all other displays look like your eyes are full of sand.
On every single machine, the second you load the game, there are issues. The loading screens are cropped to some specific aspect ratio or resolution that I'm not running, and words are cut off on both sides of the screen. Also, unplug all but one display. The game either won't load, or looks like a tornado hit a trailer park if you have two displays. Why it breaks on multi display systems is a total mind-bender. It's not like that kind of setup is uncommon.
Also on every single machine, the first time you get to a menu, the mouse cursor you see is actually about 200 pixels offset in the Y axis of where your click actually clicks. No worries though, because as you click around trying to figure out what the hell is happening, the game crashes, and the offset is fixed when loading the game again.
As for crashes, on all three machines, Crossroads Inn crashes every single time I play it. I've never once clicked the "exit game" button. Sometimes it's within seconds of the game loading. Sometimes it's 3 hours later. Doesn't matter if it's Windows or Mac.
Assuming it hasn't crashed, and you've clicked on Campaign mode, you're eventually presented with a screen that says "Press any key to continue" - so you do. Then it tells you to do it again. So you do. After a golden coin spins in the corner for ages, then you're presented with some sort of preamble or something, where, to continue, you have to hold down your mouse button until a sci-fi looking progress ring that doesn't match any of of the game art completes a circle. Then you do it again.
While you're doing that, you're getting some sort of explainer about something story related, while grey scale illustrations slowing shift, using parallaxed layers to be fancy. In other words, a lot goes on, and you're not quite sure if it's a loading screen at first or not.
Then you're thrown into the world, where a dingy grey/green scene might show you an empty field, or an inn. I have no idea why sometimes you have one, and sometimes you don't, but when you don't have one you find yourself interviewing a dude for ages, seemingly to adjust your relationship with him?
Never mind that though, because me not paying attention isn't why I think the game is awful.
What's awful is trying to build a damn inn (arguably, a huge part of the game).
There are no pointers at all with where to begin. Fine, you can figure it out with enough poking around.
The issue I have is the awkwardness of it. When you build a structure in pretty much any other game, you build walls. You don't build squares that, depending on the intended use, magically join when placed next to each other. Don't like your room? Just reshape it, right? Good luck. You need to get really creative with deleting square shaped chunks out of the floorplan. There's no resizing or adjusting, there's just destroying and rebuilding.
This is one of the most bizarre ways I've ever seen a game have you build something. Why did they reinvent this idea? You know who solved this decades ago? The Sims. It has a pretty intuitive system for building that's been used for every game in that series, and been copied by nearly any other game that lets you build buildings with internal floor plans. You define walls, and when those walls make a loop, it considers that a room. At any time you can remove a section of wall, add a wall, resize rooms, etc. It's easy to use, and lets you build quickly. The system is copied not just because other developers/game designers are lazy, but because it works.
Moving on. Let's say you manage to build an inn with Crossroad Inn's tools without the game crashing. Now you want to add a door. You go find a door in the dedicated door menu, then when you want to place it, you don't see what that door will look like when placed, you just see a wall highlighted in green. Like, wtf?
Someone actually wrote more code to highlight the wall in green without showing the door, than if you just showed the placement of the door. Also, it's a green highlight just for stuff that "lives" on walls. Nothing else in the game gets that weird highlight. There are other highlights, but none that look like that, which means there's no consistency in UI cues. Nothing that says "ah yes, this highlight means x will happen."
In any case, now you have an inn with some doors. Let's place a staircase. Similar awkwardness as with the doors. Then you pick the spot you want, and commit. There, it's install. Actually, that's not where you want it. Too bad. That staircase cannot be moved or deleted. You're screwed. Nothing says why you can't, but nothing lets you change it either, so, deal with it or start a new game.
I could go on and on about how terrible the UI is for doing all of this, from building, to furnishing, to picking items for the menu, to hiring of people. It's all done as if the developers have never once looked at another game to see what works well and what doesn't. They just invented it in a bubble, or avoided using tried and true ideas on purpose.
Combine all this weirdness with the constant crashing, and it makes this game awful.
Crossroads Inn, sadly, is an awful game, despite me wanting to love it.
I've tried the game on three different machines:
The fast one:
Windows 10
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
RTX 2080 Ti
32GB RAM
NVMe M.2 1TB SSD
The "normal" one:
Windows 10
i5-9400F
16GB RAM
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 Super 6GB OC
NVMe M.2 500GB SSD
The "work machine", a 2020 iMac:
macOS
i7 3.8 Ghz
64GB RAM
Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16GB
1TB SSD
None of these machines are slow, by today's standards. All of them are well maintained, free of malware, free of bloatware, and have no issues with out of date drivers, nor do they use beta drivers.
The "fast one" is a beast, and takes whatever I throw at it without even breaking a sweat.
The normal one does well too. I only mentioned it here because I tried the game on that machine as well.
Say what you will about macs, but the iMac is also a beast. It handles whatever the "normal one" does, but does it silently on a 5K display that makes all other displays look like your eyes are full of sand.
On every single machine, the second you load the game, there are issues. The loading screens are cropped to some specific aspect ratio or resolution that I'm not running, and words are cut off on both sides of the screen. Also, unplug all but one display. The game either won't load, or looks like a tornado hit a trailer park if you have two displays. Why it breaks on multi display systems is a total mind-bender. It's not like that kind of setup is uncommon.
Also on every single machine, the first time you get to a menu, the mouse cursor you see is actually about 200 pixels offset in the Y axis of where your click actually clicks. No worries though, because as you click around trying to figure out what the hell is happening, the game crashes, and the offset is fixed when loading the game again.
As for crashes, on all three machines, Crossroads Inn crashes every single time I play it. I've never once clicked the "exit game" button. Sometimes it's within seconds of the game loading. Sometimes it's 3 hours later. Doesn't matter if it's Windows or Mac.
Assuming it hasn't crashed, and you've clicked on Campaign mode, you're eventually presented with a screen that says "Press any key to continue" - so you do. Then it tells you to do it again. So you do. After a golden coin spins in the corner for ages, then you're presented with some sort of preamble or something, where, to continue, you have to hold down your mouse button until a sci-fi looking progress ring that doesn't match any of of the game art completes a circle. Then you do it again.
While you're doing that, you're getting some sort of explainer about something story related, while grey scale illustrations slowing shift, using parallaxed layers to be fancy. In other words, a lot goes on, and you're not quite sure if it's a loading screen at first or not.
Then you're thrown into the world, where a dingy grey/green scene might show you an empty field, or an inn. I have no idea why sometimes you have one, and sometimes you don't, but when you don't have one you find yourself interviewing a dude for ages, seemingly to adjust your relationship with him?
Never mind that though, because me not paying attention isn't why I think the game is awful.
What's awful is trying to build a damn inn (arguably, a huge part of the game).
There are no pointers at all with where to begin. Fine, you can figure it out with enough poking around.
The issue I have is the awkwardness of it. When you build a structure in pretty much any other game, you build walls. You don't build squares that, depending on the intended use, magically join when placed next to each other. Don't like your room? Just reshape it, right? Good luck. You need to get really creative with deleting square shaped chunks out of the floorplan. There's no resizing or adjusting, there's just destroying and rebuilding.
This is one of the most bizarre ways I've ever seen a game have you build something. Why did they reinvent this idea? You know who solved this decades ago? The Sims. It has a pretty intuitive system for building that's been used for every game in that series, and been copied by nearly any other game that lets you build buildings with internal floor plans. You define walls, and when those walls make a loop, it considers that a room. At any time you can remove a section of wall, add a wall, resize rooms, etc. It's easy to use, and lets you build quickly. The system is copied not just because other developers/game designers are lazy, but because it works.
Moving on. Let's say you manage to build an inn with Crossroad Inn's tools without the game crashing. Now you want to add a door. You go find a door in the dedicated door menu, then when you want to place it, you don't see what that door will look like when placed, you just see a wall highlighted in green. Like, wtf?
Someone actually wrote more code to highlight the wall in green without showing the door, than if you just showed the placement of the door. Also, it's a green highlight just for stuff that "lives" on walls. Nothing else in the game gets that weird highlight. There are other highlights, but none that look like that, which means there's no consistency in UI cues. Nothing that says "ah yes, this highlight means x will happen."
In any case, now you have an inn with some doors. Let's place a staircase. Similar awkwardness as with the doors. Then you pick the spot you want, and commit. There, it's install. Actually, that's not where you want it. Too bad. That staircase cannot be moved or deleted. You're screwed. Nothing says why you can't, but nothing lets you change it either, so, deal with it or start a new game.
I could go on and on about how terrible the UI is for doing all of this, from building, to furnishing, to picking items for the menu, to hiring of people. It's all done as if the developers have never once looked at another game to see what works well and what doesn't. They just invented it in a bubble, or avoided using tried and true ideas on purpose.
Combine all this weirdness with the constant crashing, and it makes this game awful.