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Ghost Song: Long spoilery review: A Functionally Monotone Game That is Padded and Needs a Structural Redesign To Be Good
I just finished Ghost Song. And I have 25/42 achievements on Steam, so I did a fair bit of exploring. There is a lot I want to say about this game and that already implies that I will get into spoiler territory for the game.
TLDR and final thoughts if you don’t read: What exists of the game currently would still need a couple of months to rebalance, tweak and polish the entire experience. But even that won’t make the game good or exceptional. There is a functional game here or rather assets of one that need a proper redesign from scratch in order to be good.
With that out of the way:
I do think that the game is not that well designed . It suffers from the common western trope of - just putting a lot of things together that might not even be cohesive.
For example - why does the sprint mechanic exist? It serves no purpose in combat or in platforming. It feels like they slowed the player character down just to add the sprint ability and pad out the game since it also consumes stamina. If the base speed of the protagonist was that of the sprint mechanic OR if the sprinting did not consume any stamina, the game feel would remain unchanged. In fact, either of those would be a QoL upgrade.
And this is a microcosm of the entire game. It feels bloated for the sake of dragging playtime.
A Padded Main Quest:
The main quest is essentially a fetch quest that is MASSIVELY padded.
You have to get ship parts from 5 extremities of the map which is the main quest and the game basically forces you to make your way back to the hub area from the extremities of the map. Since you can’t carry two ship parts at the same time and can’t fast travel while carrying the ship parts (game logic), it feels padded. It doesn’t feel thought out honestly.
In one case, there were two ship parts that were very close to each other, but I had to go through 60% of the route at least 4 times because of the design.
Without the padding, the game length would barely be 4 hours.
Since we are talking about the map, another problem is the empty rooms. There are wayyyyyyy too many rooms that exist for no reason. For example, while fighting the first quest boss (the spear lady in my case), you have 2-3 completely empty rooms between the last save room and the boss. It almost feels like I have to go through antire walking segment to get to her. And this is the case with a lot of bosses where the save room is placed between 3 rooms of either emptiness or fodder enemies and the boss.
And I am NOT saying that empty rooms are bad. A lot of games do this to build atmosphere, but with Ghost Song doing it for every boss, it becomes a pattern and hence loses impactful. Even outside of the bosses, there are many empty rooms or rooms that are too big for no reason.
Compounding upon this, players will notice that the game hasn’t been cartographed properly. 90% of the rooms on the map don’t show details within the rooms, but for some reason, there are some parts of the map that show roughly how the platforms are placed. Makes me feel like they released the game before it was completelyu finished.
A lack of polish:
When I say polish, I am talking about the minor things like I did above with the map.
There was this one point in the game where a platform was visibly too high to reach with a single jump. My initial visual response was that I could not reach it. But due to instinct, I tried anyway before realizing there was a platform below it that was hidden behind the environment asset which I could use to climb on top. This is present right at the start of the game and is a thankfully a one-off thing, but there are many little things like these that could have really been avoided with more time in development.
Pacing Issues:
I find it quite poetic that the animations of the game essentially represent the game’s design philosophy.
Keep in mind, I do not have issues with the animations. They look fine for a puppet animated game, but they don’t feel impactful because there isn’t enough of a feeling of acceleration or deceleration (if that makes sense).
The entire game feels like it's on one note. There are no highs and no lows. There is no sense of pacing - building tension, middle, and then climax. This extends to the story, combat, boss designs, and everything else.
You could find important items just laying around that are just there in the environment with no indication beforehand.
With the story, I never had a sense of escalation either. I just had to go to these places, find the parts and would find side characters muttering about in the environment. There was no change in the world. It doesn’t help that the music for the most part is flat or just ambient. There are a couple of cool tracks, but I can’t think of one that’s stuck in my head or that made me go "WHOAAA!"
Also, the story simply ends with a…. “Huh that’s it moment?”. Maybe I did not get an alternate ending (?), but from what I have read, the endings don’t have that much of a difference.
I don’t really see it having any redeeming points if I am being honest. A lot of the things besides the art feel average or not thought out.
Some other points that I feel need to be addressed.

This could very much have been programmed for a mouse and keyboard rather than just being a keyboard-only game.
The weapon that allows you to shoot baby insects is OP as hell and can clear bosses and hordes of enemies very easily while you sit out of range.
The blue LEDs that temporarily are there in the room during vertical transitions feel cheap
Dialogues have no skip/fastening when not in comic panel mode, so you need to listen to them as you wait for the dialogue to finish. Basically, voice-acted dialogues can’t be skipped, but text-based dialogues can be skipped
The boss that gives you double jump is weirdly designed. You can also shoot the boss from outside the combat arena where it can't attack you and basically cheese it hard.
Key upgrades like core upgrades that better your healing amount are just randomly placed
Hitboxes were wonky and the amount of stamina dashes consume de-incentivizes close-quarter/melee combat
Another aspect that de-incentivizes close-quarter/melee combat is the lack of proper telegraphing from enemies


The praise this game is getting is unjustified and there are way too many good games released this year for them to be ignored. There are many MVs in 2022 that deserve more praise if Ghost Song is getting an 88 on metacritic.

Lone fungus
Trash quest
Zapling bygone
Islets
Haiku The Robot etc

Are all far better designed games.