Ghost Song

[Cyhwuhx]

Just a few more minutes and Ghost Song will finally be released!

 

This one's been in development from before Hollow Knight was even a game jam entry, so yeah, the wait has been long! Gonna dive into this over the weekend.

 

Anyone else keeping an eye on this metroidvania?

[bumgut]

Yes. Reviewing well, but the shooting looks a bit puny

 

 

[BadgerFarmer]

I really like the look of it. Hopefully get some time to play it towards the end of the year.

[Don Wiskerando]

2 hours ago, bumgut said:

Yes. Reviewing well, but the shooting looks a bit puny

 

 

Shots do more damage, the closer you are to the target.   Risk/reward innit.

[Hitcher]

Game Pass wins again.

[Uncle Nasty]

2 hours ago, Don Wiskerando said:

Shots do more damage, the closer you are to the target.   Risk/reward innit.

 

It's a bit more than that - as your weapon overheats, your melee gets more powerful. Interesting mechanic.

 

Seems  okay so far but nothing WOW, yet.

[Uncle Nasty]

Yeah, done with this. Feels like it's wasting too much of my time with backtracking, repeating sections and leading me down dead ends. It doesn't give you enough back to be worth the slog. Controls are rough, your character doesn't feel great to control, the exploration is predicable, graphics are unimpressive. This genre is so overdone now.

[shirubagan]

This looks really boring from the trailers tbh. There’s something about the animation which feels awfully stiff and unnatural too.

[Uncle Nasty]

17 minutes ago, shirubagan said:

This looks really boring from the trailers tbh. There’s something about the animation which feels awfully stiff and unnatural too.

 

Flash game.

[jonamok]

Gave it an hour or so. Not great to control, not very pretty, some poorly laid out levels, really shite map. Got dead-ended in every direction very quickly. No idea what exit I’ve missed or maybe need to unlock a higher jump? Either way, not arsed. It’s a pretty mediocre affair. Thanks GP.

[Cyhwuhx]

I found it quite refreshing to play something which doesn’t hold your hand at all. Still, it’s not too complex in figuring out the next step as most solutions are a bit obvious. 
 

Main issue is that this is as front-loaded as Kid Icarus, and until you get a few levels in (Souls style), combat can be brutal. The rhythm between ranged and melee is pretty interesting.

 

It’s obvious this has been in the oven too long though. Every design tweak from the last decade of metroidvania game is in here. From Mercurysteam’s stick controls for Samus, to Souls like leveling and death, to Hollow Knight’s boosted vertical transitions. 
 

The thing is, it really feels like a mixed nuts approach instead of a smooth singular experience. 
 

I’m enjoying it, but more from a “ooh how will the game solve/not solve this conundrum” angle than squarely liking the game in front of me. 

[Larsen B]

Yeah, it's a little rough and a mish-mash of a lot of ideas without doing anything to an exemplary degree. I will say that the writing is very nice though, when it's not including sci-fi proper nouns. Very literary, sometimes florid prose that folk might get turned off by but it's working for me and each NPC has their own style and personality. MUTT is a highlight, although it's pretty much Siegmeyer from Dark Souls.

 

Movement becomes a lot more fluid when you get the dash and run upgrades but you have to persevere a little bit to get there. The map is relatively small (which may be a blessing with the lack of movement options) but it does mean you're going through the same zones. It does make that a bit more interesting by having non-critical story beats appear in areas you've run through a few times.

 

Think I'm closing in on the end (just picked up the fifth ship piece) and there's a few threads I've still not managed to unravel. Had one experience that gave me an item I needed to go up high to use in a certain way which felt pretty organic and non-prescriptive but then the downside is that someone might miss out if they're just doing critical path stuff or not realise/remember what to do.

 

Feels like a 7 without being a 7/10.

[Cyhwuhx]

Yeah, it becomes more, let’s say convincing once you reach the “site”. (Even though the one upgrade you find afterwards softlocks you and requires a quit and restart).

 

I think the game mis-paces itself spectacularly though. Before you get to the “site”, the game throws these mini-bosses at you with minimal health, then basically dumps three estus flask-like upgrades at you in quick succession when that’s all done. 
 

I can imagine about 90% of players not reaching the “site”.  Despite all that, it certainly is an interesting one. But every time I want to declare it scifi Hollow Knight, it pulls another weird thing out of its sleeve. 

[Cyhwuhx]

This is slowly becoming a mess.

 

A hot, sweaty, sexy mess. 🥵

 

I mean, yeah it contains just about everything: MercurySteam-Metroid contols, Souls leveling, Hollow Knight graphics & ability loadouts, TimeSpinners ally-focused story line, Axiom Verge amounts of weaponry, FOG DOORS, not one stamina bar...

 

 

Nothing is finely attuned, but it does barely work. And once you are properly set loose its flow becomes a bit more Souls-like.

Delve into an area; meet weirdos; die cheaply; come back with the spoils; repeat. And suddenly I couldn't put it down and this unappetizing bowl of slop started to taste like MOAR.

 

TL;DR. If you loved Metroid Dread, this will be horrid. If you thought Dread lacked a fair share of mystery and could do with less hand-holding: try this at the very least.

[metallicfrodo]

It is a curious bird this. As pointed out above so many system borrowed from other games. It's got its claws into me but I think my play time is equally split between enjoyment and frustration. I think my main issue is there are just too many long sections with nothing in them that just seem to have been added to make the map bigger. Also while some areas look nice, some are really drab (although I appreciate this a personal take).

 

The save points also seem to be just randomly spread about the map with some quite close together and then big sections with none. I'm also not a fan of only being able to upgrade, and therefore use your nano gel at very specific points as opposed to every save point (a la Elden Ring).

 

[Cyhwuhx]

I now realize I didn't softlock the game. You can "shut yourself down" and replace modules by long-pressing down on the d-pad. 🤦

[metallicfrodo]

 

32 minutes ago, Cyhwuhx said:

I now realize I didn't softlock the game. You can "shut yourself down" and replace modules by long-pressing down on the d-pad. 🤦

Have you only been doing that at save points then? To be honest it took me a while to understand what it meant when I saw that press down on the D-pad in game when I was looking at the module inventory section.

[Cyhwuhx]

34 minutes ago, metallicfrodo said:

 

Have you only been doing that at save points then? To be honest it took me a while to understand what it meant when I saw that press down on the D-pad in game when I was looking at the module inventory section.

Yup, just like in Hollow Knight. 🙃 Got lulled into thinking so by the familiarity of the module system. 

[Larsen B]

Finished with just under 10 hours on the clock. Got all the achievements except for not dying and the 3 hours speed run so I've given it a good go. And fortunately did it just before they patched the Skab Device!

 

It has its charms but I will likely have forgotten it in a couple of months, which is a shame as it was developed for so long by seemingly 2 people for the majority.

 

Not egregiously bad but never particularly remarkable. Some of the background art is fetching and I think they could have doubled down on that to make some more interesting biomes (do we still call them that?) instead of everywhere being Brinstar+.

 

Also found it weirdly inconsistent with damage. Sometimes enemies would die really quickly and sometimes they wouldn't, even with a red hot tip and standing right next to them. The levelling up elements probably makes this more of a secret numbers game than it appears.

[matt0]

Started this last night but don't think I'll be going back to it.

 

It feels terrible to play. Traversal, combat - feels like they just got all the player actions working in the game and then didn't do any fine tuning. Jumping is somehow stiff and floaty at the same time. There's a sprint, which is only marginally faster than the run, but there's also a sort of semi-sprint effect you get after dashing which is a slightly different speed again...? Just feels wooly. They constantly place platforms directly above each other so even simple series of ascending jumps become a pain in the arse and then the bits that are supposed to be actual platforming challenges are like in old Amiga games where you'd have to make a series of jumps between loads of 1 block wide platforms, or make jumps that are all the exact distance of your full jump length. Exacting and difficult, but incredibly boring - so you get no sense of challenge or satisfaction.

 

The melee attack is bizarre - like old NES games where the attacks are all really short range because they didn't have enough sprites for an extra 16 horizontal pixels in the swing effect. So you have a game which wants you to be constantly switching between shooting and melee, where the shooting feels bad, and the the melee feels bad, and the dash you have to close the distance feels bad.

 

It's a real shame because the graphics are nice, it's got it's own unique atmosphere, somewhere between Hollow Knight, Exile and Tsutomu Nihei's comics. Some of the enemy design is interesting. But there's just no refinement or attention to game feel.

[metallicfrodo]

3 hours ago, matt0 said:

They constantly place platforms directly above each other so even simple series of ascending jumps become a pain in the arse

 

Yeah, that is the most fucking annoying and pointless thing in the game.

 

As with most metroidvanias the start can be a bit frustrating as you are restricted movement wise, I think once you have a few of the upgrades (and I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that you will get a dash and double jump) it's much more fun to move around.

 

On the melee

 

Spoiler

You can get different melee weapons as you make your way through the game which can change up how that feels

 

It's a game with some weird difficulty spikes as well.

 

Spoiler

In general the bosses either aren't that tough, or being bonus you don't have to worry about them. Where it is very very strange are the fights with Henrietta. The first one almost made me quit, but I persevered and finally got through it. What's strange is that you have to beat her for the 'first' ship part or least the one they tell you to get first. This made me think that I was going to come up against harder and harder bosses for each part. But no, that was the only one with a boss fight, all the others were really simple, until the one I've gone for last (the red one), and it's Henrietta again and I can't get her down beyond half health despite being pretty well levelled and with 5 'estus flasks' with two upgrades to make them fill up more energy (although it still hardly fills half the bar). It would help if it didn't take a good 30-50 seconds to get back to the fight each time you die. What's also annoying is that you then lose a chunk of your health each time you die, so you can only really do a set number before having to wander of again to one of the robots to repair, which is just a shit mechanic.

 

[Qazimod]

I remember hearing about this in a podcast discussion about gestating Kickstarter projects. The Kickstarter update history dates back to 2013. 

 

Did anyone here back it? Have you received any rewards?

[Cyhwuhx]

I know the project from before that year actually. Back in 2009 was the first I heard of it? I think the Kickstarter boom made the project seem like a perfect fit.

 

Completed it BTW. Very nice, but also maybe not as accessible due to the harsh introduction. One for the genre fans, and if you can handle it, you should definitely play this. The atmosphere and presentation is rather nice. It really ends just when you think it really starts to hit its stride though. Can't really imagine why some reviews have this down as having a 'giant map'. 😕