The breed of 3D platformer during the Nintendo 64 days is often held in high regard for a good reason. They led the shift from 2D side-scrolling to fully explorable 3D worlds, revolutionising video game design. With few rules in place, developers embraced unconventional level layouts that offered a thrilling sense of freedom and wonder. Early 3D platformers delivered pure adventure and discovery, letting players roam vast, whimsical environments without guidance, creating an unmatched feeling of immersion and creativity. There could have been more, but changing tastes caused them to fade away.
Once indie game development reached the point where even a guy in his garage could create a fully 3D video game, it was only a matter of time before a wave of Rareware-style 3D platformers appeared. Sometimes players got something close to the real deal, but more often than not, the similarities were only skin deep. Does Crosak break the mould? Welcome to the Play-Dough Age!
Crosak is about Crosak, a funny-looking, bumbling caveman whose peaceful life is upended when a wizard kidnaps his kin. All the villagers are whisked away to six bizarre, prehistoric worlds, and like in a classic Nintendo 64-style 3D platformer, he sets off like a Hobbit leaving the Shire to confront a terrible evil and rescue them all. It’s a simple story and perfectly fitting the simple-minded hero whose most complex thoughts are grunting “unga bunga”. While he may seem dim-witted, the quest has a bit more to it than the average 3D platformer.
The first thing that stands out about Crosak is its play-dough-inspired design, acting as a creative link to its prehistoric setting. This handcrafted style captures the raw, mouldable essence of a world just beginning to take shape. The game’s environments and characters have a stop-motion, clay-animated style that captures the raw, tactile spirit of the Stone Age. Much like early humans crafting their world from earth and clay, this world is literally sculpted by hand, giving it a distinct, organic flavour.
The worlds and level design take cues from Super Mario Galaxy, leaning on small planetoids in orbit and complex gravity physics. Crosak doesn’t have many stages, but it’s a short, compact game priced at $14.99. While that might sound a bit steep, the core package is surprisingly generous and makes great use of its premise. Crosak can walk around entire curved surfaces, flip orientations, loop over horizons, and discover hidden areas on the underside or inside layers of planetoids, creating a constant sense of wonder and discovery.
The 60 villagers are hidden well enough, and there’s enough variation to the challenges that Crosak avoids repeating itself due to the lean playtime. There are no hand-holding markers, encouraging pure exploration guided by visual cues like collectible nuts and bolts. Drop-in two-player co-op keeps the fun social without split-screen. For a low-budget indie 3D platformer, it impresses with its breadth, quality, and committed vision of a claymation world.
Playing Crosak, the low price point quickly starts to make sense. It’s not that the game plays badly, but its small-team limitations are hard to miss. When Nintendo or Rare created their 3D platformers, they had armies of testers, decades of talent on staff, and advanced technology to fine-tune the gameplay. Crosak’s controls feel less like guiding a cartoony caveman with tactile feedback in his steps as he runs and jumps, and more like the character is simply cycling through animations while players glide him over the 3D terrain. He feels a lot weightier than expected for such a small character, and there’s a slight delay when jumping. Bashing foes with the club also lacks the appropriate audio/visual feedback, making his thwacks feel limp and nonthreatening.
Thankfully, Crosak is seemingly designed around the limitations of the iffy playability and camera system. It’s never bad enough to make the game unenjoyable, but anyone who’s been playing these kinds of games for years might raise an eyebrow at first when starting it up. Another flaw in the graphics is the shadows, which fail to land properly and appear noticeably jagged and low resolution. On Nintendo Switch 2, Crosak runs smoothly at a rock-solid 60fps, with load times staying comfortably short.
