I don't get excited about early access games very often. Most of the time I will play them if they look interesting, and then never get the full release because I got bored with it the first time around. It has now been about a year since I first played CrossCode, and I haven't played it since then because I've been waiting for the full release.
Before I played CrossCode, there was a similar game released called Secrets of Grindea. It is an RPG game with some nice combat mechanics, sort of like the first Zelda game. It fell short though, because the storyline isn't very interesting and the gameplay gets pretty boring after a while. CrossCode found a way around the problems that game had over a year ago when only a third of the storyline was finished. It is a single player RPG that takes place inside a fake MMO. As a result, the world it takes place in feels alive, like the NPCs in the game are real "players".
I played the game for about 10 hours, even though the storyline at that time was probably a lot shorter than that. The combat is ridiculously fun, to the point where grinding for XP doesn't really feel like a grind at all. The dialogue is humourous and the few main characters I encountered were all pretty fleshed out. Usually when you play an RPG, you need to set aside a few hours to play and it can get really time consuming/grindy. Once you get past the first part of CrossCode, you can pick it up, play through a small quest and then stop playing.
It borrows from multiple different genres and games that I loved as a kid, and puts them into one package. It is probably ok to start playing it now, the current version is 0.9.5 and it apparently has up to 50 hours of gameplay depending on how closely you stick to the main storyline. Just look at the fucking artwork.
Reminds me of .Hack, a video game and anime series that took place inside an MMORPG, but the game itself was single-player, so your party members were other "players" who were also around you could party with. They had their own classes and levels, and various personalities and all that. One small touch that I liked was that you often had to "log off" the game to get e-mails from other players in order to advance the main story. Another was that upon returning to town, your party members would immediately run off to the shops, saying something about "selling loot" or "stocking up".
And that artwork really does look top notch.