Blackwood Crossing

Heart wrenchingly beautiful and emotionally exhausting, Blackwood Crossing is a game that will be on your mind for days.

Blackwater Crossing is a story-driven adventure game, developed by Paper Seven Studios. You play as Scarlet and you lost your brother Finn. Will you be able to find him in this beautiful and weird dream-like world?

I sit here at my desk with the second draft of this review because I’m unable to put the words down that will accurately describe my experience with Blackwood Crossing. I can’t quantify the worth of this game by deciding if it matches its monetary value. I can say that Blackwood Crossing is a shining example of using a video game to tell an emotionally deep story. I was expecting horror, but what I got could barely be considered unnerving or ominous. Instead of horror, I got a short, fulfilling story about the unwavering love of family.

If you’re looking for an unconventional but beautifully-told story, then Blackwood Crossing deserves to be on your radar. It’s not perfect, but the amount of love that pours out of the game – both in terms of the visual and technical quality from the team of developers and in the palpable relationship between the characters – far outweighs any minor nitpicks you could have. You just might want to make sure you’ve got a tissue ready for when your eyes inexplicably start leaking.

Blackwood Crossing is a playful, yet meaningful exploration of fear, love and grief.

Ultimately, if you are a console player, Blackwood Crossing is a nice little game with a decent set of controls. For PC players, while I dearly love the game (and I DO), I would recommend waiting for a patch that will hopefully address some of the woefully bad controls. Once that’s done, it’s a game you won’t want to miss.

Blackwood Crossing might be short but sweet, yet it's clearly an experience that's been made as a labour of love, and as such, it has a magical, almost ethereal quality that's impossible to forget.

Blackwood Crossing is about the relationship between a brother and sister. You play as Scarlett, an adolescent girl slowly drifting away from her younger brother, Finn. The game starts on a train, which serves as its thematic hub, and then works its way out to various other locations – some literal, some symbolic.

Despite some of the technical shortcomings of the title, Blackwood Crossing ultimately is a tale that becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Though it's a brief experience that will only last a few hours, Blackwood Crossing is another title that showcases the power of storytelling in gaming as a medium, while still offering a story that you're going to remember long after finishing it. Much like the fairy tales and fantastical worlds it borrows from and references, Scarlett and Finn's tale is filled with visuals, color, and life that goes beyond our sense of reality, but Blackwood Crossing...

First-person games where you walk around slowly and not do much else are a growing trend. In strolls Blackwood Crossing, an emotional tale involving siblings and their journey to find peace. However, is it a tale worth telling?

Blackwood Crossing does a great job with telling a story, but it’s lacking in lustre as a game. The surreal setting, the believable characters, and the plot are all highlights of Blackwood Crossing, and if that is what you’re looking for to wile away a couple of hours, then I recommend it. If you’re focus is purely more on the gameplay side of things, it may be worth waiting for updates to roll out to address issues like movement and fiddly interaction. PaperSeven’s first release shows a studio that has promise in storytelling, but it just needs to fine tune the gaming side a little bit more.