Ghost Song Review (Phranc)
A Rare Case Of Metroidvania Which Lacks Context Yet Still Pulls Me In.
To be honest, I wasn't into Ghost Song at first. The murky, gnarled artstyle and zero premises turned me down, let alone the rather weak state of our protagonist. You don't even have an objective until you explore a certain amount of areas. However, the game wins me over gradually. It does the exploration part of metroidvania really well. Secrets and NPCs spread across the alien landscapes. I even grow accustomed to the artstyle, and in the end fall in love with it.
Things I Like About Ghost Song:
1. Exploration
This is hands-down the major reason that keeps me interested throughout the game. Strictly speaking, it isn't something crazy new or creative. Features like breakable walls with subtle clues and ability-gating obstacles are well-tuned. Yet, Ghost Song manages to integrate a lot of things to season the established formula, adding more surprises on your journey. Bizarre, distinct design of each area jumps between alien-beautiful and eerily disturbing. It will make you frown but you will want to see more. Backtracking may be tedious, but the dev has put effort into making it less tiresome to go through. And there's NPC. NPCs are mostly stranded human survivors and Android crash-landing on this strange moon. You will encounter some of them in various areas wandering. Whether it's random or scripted, I am really surprised to find them and delightful to hear their stories .
2. Other Compliments
→Voice actors have done a great job in this game.
→Combat needs some time to get used to but ultimately it is interesting.
Thing I Like And Dislike About Ghost Song:
Backtracking
→Like: The dev recognizes the tediousness of backtracking, and designs some interesting twists and encounters to alleviate that feeling. There's one encounter which I still hold dear even after I finish the game: I killed a roaming boss, she was rooted after defeat. She said some quips and I left, thinking that was her last words. The next time I backtrack through this location, I was surprised to find out she wasn't dead and she greeted me leisurely, then proceed to talk about her way of living and other stuff. Moments like this really makes me fall in love with this game.
→Dislike: Still, unfortunately, backtracking in Ghost Song is infamously long and tedious. May be it's because the safe points are rather scarce, or the option to teleport only ties to the Big Bots, and they are often hidden places which are limited or hard to reach.
Thing I Dislike About Ghost Song:
Almost Non-existent Story
Ghost Song's story is so obscure to the point that it is irrelevant. There's only one over-arching story -you meet some survivors and you want to help them rebuild the spaceship-, and you only know it after roughly 30 minute into the game. No item description like the souls-series. The other thing that remotely relates to the story is NPC's diaogue, except the majority of dialogues often goes to personal struggle, or specific scene from the past. Individual areas, besides stylish backgrounds, might not even have NPC to tell you something at all.
中文小簡評
→一款幾乎沒啥故事的類銀河系惡魔城，儘管如此我還是很喜歡。
→這類型遊戲的特色都有齊全，而本作著重探索。
→畫風有種異域美，介於詭譎跟魔幻之間。
→可以在很多地方看得出製作人的用心，特別是回頭探索的部分，可能會遇到遊蕩的NPC，隨機出現的Boss等。
→角色配音十分到位，我很喜歡聽他們分享故事。
→戰鬥有趣，但需要時間適應。
→雖然在回頭探索上下了多功夫，依舊難逃無聊及煩躁感，其因歸咎於存檔點太少太分散，而能傳送的點都放在一些難以抵達的位置。
→跟主線故事相關的事物幾乎為零，只有幾位NPC的對話會扯到一點點關係。