Huge RPG Collaboration Kickstarter Campaign Starts Today!

May 25, 2026 | Radical Fish Games and Little Legendary are excited to announce a new collaboration between CrossCode, Alabaster Dawn, and SHADE Protocol, revealed through a new video that just premiered today, May 25, 2026 at 6:00 PM CEST.

The collaboration brings together three fast-paced, pixel-art action RPG worlds known for stylish combat, expressive characters, and a deep love for strange, spectacular worlds. Fans can get their first look at the collaboration in the reveal video, which will debut alongside the announcement.

The reveal also arrives shortly before SHADE Protocol’s Kickstarter campaign launches on June 4, 2026, giving players a first look at one of the collaborations and surprises planned around the game’s upcoming community campaign.

Useful Links:

• SHADE Protocol Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3581730/SHADE_Protocol/
• SHADE Protocol Kickstarter Page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/littlelegendary/shade-protocol
• SHADE Protocol Website: https://www.littlelegendary.com/
• Alabaster Dawn Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3110760/Alabaster_Dawn/
• CrossCode Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/368340/CrossCode/
• CrossCode Website: https://www.cross-code.com/
• Radical Fish Games Website: https://www.radicalfishgames.com/

SHIRAKUMO Nagi, original composer from CrossCode and Alabaster Dawn, crafted the beautiful track for this Collab Teaser Trailer. He returns as the lead composer for Alabaster Dawn and we hope to bring him in for guest tracks into SHADE Protocol as part of our Kickstarter goals!

“CrossCode and Alabaster Dawn represent so much of what we love about indie games: depth, charm, mechanical creativity, and a clear artistic identity,” said Kendall Quinones, Game Director at Little Legendary. “To have SHADE Protocol connected to those worlds in any way is incredibly meaningful for us. We are huge fans of Radical Fish Games, and we cannot wait for players to see what we have been working on together.”

The reveal video will offer a first glimpse at how the collaboration connects the games, with more details to be shared following the announcement.

SHADE Protocol is an upcoming 2D cyber-fantasy Metroidvania where players take control of Zura, a shield-wielding heroine fighting through a world of music, machines, memory, and loss. The game features fast-paced action combat, a system of instrument-based weapons, and reality-bending abilities that let players cut, shift, and reshape the world around them.

CrossCode, developed by Radical Fish Games, is a critically acclaimed 2D action RPG known for its fast combat, puzzle-heavy dungeons, charming characters, and retro-inspired pixel art. Alabaster Dawn, also from Radical Fish Games, is the studio’s new action RPG currently in Early Access, set in a world recovering from ruin and featuring exploration, elemental combat, and deep progression systems.

The collaboration will be officially revealed on May 25, 2026 at 12:00 PM ET / 9:00 AM PT / 5:00 PM BST / 6:00 PM CEST, ahead of SHADE Protocol’s Kickstarter launch on June 4, 2026.

KEY FEATURES

• Dynamic Combat System – Mix precision melee combat with specialized Instruments, executing devastating combos, parries, and counters. Swap between DAWN and SHADE modes to adapt to different playstyles in real-time.
• UNISON System – Rewrite Reality – The world of SHADE Protocol exists as code. Wield it to manipulate events, relive key moments, and choose their ultimate outcome, shaping the fate of entire factions.
• Unique Defensive Mechanics – Perfectly timed parries and counters restore Echo, a vital energy source for powerful Instrument attacks and defensive maneuvers.
• Instruments – Weapons That Sing – Wield an arsenal of musical weapons, including the Twilight Spear, Sunrise Great Axe, and Midnight Chakram, each with distinct combat and exploration abilities.

The war is lost. The song is rewritten. Will you take the stage?

ABOUT SHADE PROTOCOL

SHADE Protocol is a 2D Metroidvania from Little Legendary, blending fast-paced action, precise combat, pixel art, and a story about humanity, grief, music, and machines. Players take on the role of Zura, a young heroine inheriting a broken legacy as she fights to protect what remains of humanity in a world transformed by the SHADE virus.

ABOUT LITTLE LEGENDARY

Little Legendary is an independent game studio creating genre-defying experiences for PC and next-generation consoles. Our mission is simple: craft unforgettable games. We believe indie teams should challenge convention, take bold risks, and focus on delivering moments players will remember long after the credits roll. Specializing in single-player adventures, we build rich, fantastical worlds filled with compelling characters and unpredictable stories. By pushing the boundaries of the genres we love, we aim to inspire awe and wonder—reminding players why they fell in love with games in the first place.

ABOUT RADICAL FISH GAMES

Radical Fish Games is the independent studio behind CrossCode and Alabaster Dawn. Known for expressive pixel art, deep action RPG systems, and charming worldbuilding, Radical Fish Games continues to build beloved, mechanics-rich games for players around the world.

ABOUT STUDIO CLICKBOOM

Professional animation studio that has participated in anime projects like "Fate/strange Fake", "HoyoFair", "Hyakuemu" and more, created the spectacular animation for this Collaboration Teaser Trailer. Find more about them at: https://www.instagram.com/clickboomstudios/

Article by: Susan N.

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CrossCode – Switch Review

CrossCode by developer Radical Fish Games and publisher Deck13 Interactive—Nintendo Switch review written by Richard with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

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Have you ever wondered what your MMO would feel like if it weren't actually an MMO? What if it were more 16-bit SNES retro styled? How about combining both ranged and melee in a funky hybrid of both real and virtual? Well then, I think it's time to take a look at CrossCode.

CrossCode takes place in a sort of virtual reality-esque world of Shadoon, where your main character, Lea, is experiencing some memory and speech impediment problems. With the help of some not as virtual assistance, Lea is sent off to the "playground" where virtual avatars explore and beat up monsters and discover the secrets of the "Ancients". Admittedly it can be a bit of work to figure out what is "virtual" and what is "real", but that provides a sort of charm that games like .Hack// drew a clear line for.

As you explore Shadoon, or "the croissant", as it's colloquially called, you have a number of tools at your disposal. Like, actually quite a few. You have two types of attacks, melee and ranged, with the ranged attack having a rapid fire and charged shot, as well as a dash, guard, and skills that can be used with the ranged shot, melee attack, and even dash. As you progress trough the game you will also pick up elemental chips that allow you to use that element in battle. Overusing it will cause an overload, and you need to switch off the element to "cool down". Each of these elements, and the non-elemental one, all have their own specific skill trees to progress through as well.

While that describes the combat, you will also spend a large chunk of time simply exploring. In this 2D top down style adventure, it feels like there's a heavy emphasis on "parkour", as you will be running and jumping off ledges, cliffs, into lakes etc. Areas are divided up in separate "screens", and usually have multiple height layers to them, with a bunch of platforms and ledges at different heights. Sometimes traversing screens this way lets you access a different part of another screen you can only get to from a higher area, othertimes you'll be rewarded with items.

Speaking of items, you get five equipment slots: two weapons, a chest armor, a helmet, and shoes. Each piece of equipment not only increases base stats, but they can also have skill effects attached to them, such as "melee damage up". Equipment can either be found in chests, bought at a vendor, or exchanged for with drops you collect from enemies and the local plant life. A lot of these items you will probably acquire while completing quests for various characters.

Like any good MMO or RPG, there are NPCs that will give out quests, as well as "player characters" that will give you tasks that reward more actual items instead of exp. You can take a large number of quests at any given time, so you don't need to worry too much about running out of quest space. Additionally, there's a method to keep track of your active quests by setting them as favourites, and then you can pull them up while walking around by pushing in the thumbstick.

Unfortunately there are a couple of glaring issues with CrossCode, at least on the switch. While the combat is pretty smooth all around, I had some really serious issues with the menus. Not that they are bad, or unhelpful, rather they lag like I'm trying to play CrossCode on a 30 year old toaster. While the most commonly used menus only lag a little, the most egregious offender is the botany tab. Yeah, you can access page one, but if you try and switch tabs? Crashes the game. While not strictly speaking necessary, it does keep track of a certain quest completion progress, making it rather...frustrating, to say the least.

One really nice thing I liked about CrossCode is they have these little challenges, where you will get either confronted in a PvP battle, or Emilie will challenge you to a race through a dungeon. You can either win or lose these which is a nice little added feature, although I suggest playing how you have fun first and foremost. Speaking of Emilie and her dungeon races, dungeons are pretty standard fare for what you'd expect out of something like a Zelda title. Don't underestimate them though, because even the first dungeon had some points i stood there thinking "how the hell am I supposed to do this????". I managed to beat Emilie, so it couldn't have been that bad, but I'm pretty sure it was scary close.

Let's talk a bit about the soundtrack and art style. The soundtrack is really fitting for CrossCode's style. It essentially combines old school type tracks, those that you would expect from the more 16-bit like graphics such as Dragon Quest, and combines those for what you might hear in a similar themed MMO or similar style game. The soundtrack is really well put together, and does a really good job of matching the ritual, locale, and feeling of the game. As I've mentioned a few times, CrossCode is more retro styled in nature, but far from detracting from the experience, I found it added to it. It's got that "MMO style original Trials of Mana" sort of feeling to it, only with constant HP healing out of battle, a more fast paced combat system, and some dungeon puzzles that make you want to flip a few tables.

While there's a lot I really love about CrossCode: its wide array of functions like the party combat directives, interactive maps, some rather well thought out boss fights, and neat challenges built-in to the game, there are definitely a few drawbacks. The super aging menus are a big issue for me, especially since the one constantly causes a crash. Not going to lie, this freaked me out a little since I hadn't saved in a while, but thankfully the game autosaves every screen transition, otherwise I would have been livid instead of just slightly peeved.

Item-ing is also a bit of a nuisance. While you can collect most of the stuff required to trade for gear, you can also exchange for items to exchange for items that you can use to trade for equipment. Yes, that sentence is correct. The character banter that you can hear from party members is pretty cool as well, and doesn't repeat forever looping the same dialog every two minutes, but is usually limited in what you can get. Another point of contention for me is that enemy levels can vary wildly, and some aspects of the game aren't particularly noted very well. For instance, there are these snowmen in the second area that will probably be well above your level first time you see them. For the lack of explanation, I had this in the first dungeon.

Basically, the game tells you that guard breaking is a ting, but neglects to inform you that some enemies can only be guard broken under certain circumstances or from a specific direction. Add to that that the "columns" you need to move in dungeon puzzles can activate certain square shaped floor panels, but you aren't told which ones, or that it's even a thing. Yeah you can figure it out, but it took me ten minutes because I put the columns on the wrong two floor panels, and didn't bother with the third until I started getting fed up. Some of the switches are also a pain to hit, and if you use the rapid shot instead of the charge, you run the risk of "double tapping" the switch, essentially deactivating it when you want it on purely by accident.

I've always been a huge fan of .Hack because it let me play an MMO in my solo single player style, offline, and, on my own time. CrossCode I feel has taken this a good notch higher and between the dialog, the dungeons, the exploration, the customizations, the puzzles and the visuals? It knocks it all out of the park for a hell of an experience that shows that the developers truly used their seven years to create something incredible.

Pierre-Yves 2018 CrossCode Review

Overall, despite a few drawbacks and the infernal botanics menu, CrossCode is a really solid title that made me habitually forget I was playing it by myself. The characters are all pretty interesting and unique, the dungeons and puzzles are challenging but not impossible, and the combat is smooth. While there is a lot of menu lag and some of the quests can get a little frustrating, ultimately the latter is something you have to deal with in any RPG, and the former can be generally ignored by staying out of certain menu features. CrossCode is definitely worth checking out, and now that it's on the Switch, you can bring it with you too. If you're any fan of .Hack// or Trials of Mana, take a look into CrossCode, you'll probably be pleasantly surprised.

Score: 8 / 10

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CrossCode - PC Review

CrossCode may be my biggest surprise of the year. Following along with Lea, an amnesiac currently living inside of a fully immersive MMO, you'll follow along her adventures through a amazingly 16-bit inspired wonder filled world that feels as alive as Ara Fell did.

Having fully released on September 20th after a good seven years of development, in which half of it was spent in early access, I've had a good deal of time with it both before and after its release. The gameplay is absolutely solid and even now I'm hard pressed to say anything negative about it. Because there isn't anything negative to say.

Radical Fish Games have not only designed a retro looking world that would look amazing on a Super Nintendo, but they've created an experience that is solid by today's standards. Load times are almost non-existent, combat is extremely smooth, there are different sets of menu options for how little you need to do or how much customization needs to be done. They've even gone as far as to allow the switching of a controller's visuals from that of an Xbox's to that of a PlayStation's for it to feel more natural depending on your controller.

After what is essentially a super brief tutorial, the game starts in earnest in which you are slowly showed the ropes to the world that you'll be interacting with. CrossCode, like .Hack or Sword Art Online, simulate an MMO while still being at their core a single player and offline experience. Also, like the two mentioned, you are given a class instead of being allowed to choose your own path as you are playing a specific character and not a being of your own design. And you know what? I couldn't have been happier about this choice because of how it was done.

Being an RPG, you run around, follow story lines, complete quests, complete side quests and level up. As you level up, your base stats not only increase, but you are given points to use on a grid in order to customize Lea as you see fit. Do you want to be stronger? Tougher? More accurate as there's a blend of elements in the mix. Not only do you get to run around with a variety of melee attacks, you also have access to a system for ranged ones that aren't just tacked on, but are there as an actual combative option. You don't even need to hit anything in melee if you don't want to as the ranged system is just as powerful and often required to make your life easier.

Instead of simply using a twin-stick style to move and aim, aiming properly takes a few seconds to "calibrate". Once calibrated a powerful shot can be unleashed and this shot not only has knockback properties, but when an enemy is glowing red, it has the chance to "break" them allowing you to cause more damage. Once the elemental systems come into play more versatility is added as weaknesses can truly start to be exploited and your enemies set aflame for much more damage than you standard non-elemental weapons would do.

This is honestly just the tip of the iceberg. These systems play a role in the overall but the true performance goes into how the world is put together. Each "region" is seperated up into areas that are somewhat linear but often have pathways both in and out in which if you see something that you cannot get to? It's because you need to keep going and then find your way back. The world isn't flat either. Lea will be working with various elevations on her adventure hopping up and down hills and cliffs in order to get where she's going.

While exploring this is where you'll see enemies to fight, flora to smack in order to farm for materials and quests to pick up for a bit more experience and money. During these explorations though, Lea can hop from one surface over to another in order to make it further. This is done automatically but takes into account how fast she's moving. Move to fast? You may overshoot and lose HP to the fall whether it be an abyss or just a pond as she is teleported back onto the last solid surface. It can take some time in order to properly gauge how fast you should move but once you do, the world becomes a lot easier to navigate!

These ideas carry through into dungeons that will make any fan of the Legend of Zelda feel right at home with puzzles to solve, keys to find and doors to unlock. Using both of Lea's melee and ranged abilities is a must and often you may have to stop and think about something because it feels like it should be easy, but looks really hard, and turns out that it really was easy, but because of the design, you'll be overthinking it and over complicating it. Battles are thrown into the mix to spice things up a bit before often stellar giant boss battles that are always a lot of fun.

In regards to moving around the world though, CrossCode has a teleportations system that slowly unlocked as you move through and find points to teleport to. Basically your typical quick travel system to points of interest but the thing is that it's fast. By the time that the short animation is over, you're already in the next zone ready to move.


Throughout all of this though, and in the neat little details, is not only how fast that this is done, but that at the same time with monsters in the field, and petals or leaves floating around, other avatars are running around in parties or sitting around making the world feel alive. It makes it feel more than simply a bunch of landscapes to zoom through and in certain cases? Following these others could lead to figuring out how to get to a platform either to unlock a new area or to unlock one of these teleporters to make your future life easier.

Probably what I loved the most about CrossCode wasn't that Lea is an amnesiac and that she's exploring this virtual world brand newly, and for the "first time", but it's that her speech module is busted. So not only is she "damaged" because of some trauma, she also has other obstacles to get over and it's through the people that she meets on this journey that allow her to grow and open up even with a limited vocabulary that is slowly expanded by being hard coded into her digital avatar. Because of this, the dialog is very well written and the 2D avatars are extremely expressive carrying over the character's emotions whether they be sad, happy or reminiscing about the past through side dialog in the corner of the screen as you explore. It ties everything together, and it does it well without ever sacrificing another element to do so.

The last thing that I want to highlight are the nods to, everything. Avatar the Last Airbender and Sonic are two that I'll mention in particular to not super spoil anything but there are hedgehog enemies that made me think Sonic. Then eventually if you explore enough you'll encounter a blue one, that's a boss with a giant HP bar and once defeated? You get a chili cheese dog. Hell yes! So on top of a stellar unique world, there's also plenty of nods and pokes at other things to make the geek inside happy.

I've always been a huge fan of .Hack because it let me play an MMO in my solo single player style, offline, and, on my own time. CrossCode I feel has taken this a good notch higher and between the dialog, the dungeons, the exploration, the customizations, the puzzles and the visuals? It knocks it all out of the park for a hell of an experience that shows that the developers truly used their seven years to create something incredible.

Game Information

Platform:
PC
Developer(s):
Radical Fish Games
Publisher(s):
Deck13
WhisperGames
DANGEN Entertainment
Mayflower Entertainment   
Genre(s):
Action
Adventure
RPG
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
Sony PlayStation 4

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Pierre-Yves

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