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.
That sounds kind of like Uplink, though Uplink didn't really have any visual stuff or characters in it.
I like that breaking the fourth wall is becoming more common in games now, it never used to be the case. The first time I recall running into it was playing MGS: Twin Snakes on Gamecube. In the Psycho Mantis boss fight, the only way to beat him is to unplug your controller and put it in the second port so he can't predict your attacks. There was another part where you had to call someone on the codec to advance the storyline. The number was not given to you, you were just told it was "on the box". It took me 2 weeks of looking through items in my inventory and searching through different areas before I realised the number was literally on the back of the game case.