Ghost Song Review (Snacob)
Absolutely outstanding game, though like with many particularly unique and nuanced works of art, it is the kind of thing that won't necessarily appeal to everyone. If you strip the premise and presentation completely, what you get is a decent and totally serviceable metroidvania that is more or less an amalgamation of Metroid, Hollow Knight, and Dark Souls, but what makes Ghost Song really standout among other metroidvania titles is its unusually immersive atmosphere and implicit story telling which sets the stage for a very lived-in world that leaves much to the imagination of the player, heavily exploring themes of existentialism, what it means to be human or sentient, and far more complex philosophical concepts than I could probably do much justice to in trying to explain them here.
The brooding alien planet setting along with the protagonist's appearance and general mechanics are probably mostly akin to Metroid, while the exploration and module ("charm") features are more a reflection of Hollow Knight, and the gradual stat-based leveling system and accompanying corpse-run mechanic is probably most similar to a soulsborne title. If all of these aspects appeal to you, then you will probably like this game. If none of them appeal to you, then you probably won't, and if you are on the fence, then I would say to just give it a chance for a unique experience that is not just the sum of the parts of its influences, but also a unique and noteworthy artistic vision of its own.
The presentation of Ghost Song is sort of a mix of the three aforementioned titles, as well as what I thought to be a bit of a Moebius inspired art style (French sci-fi artist who influenced many other works including Ridley Scott's Alien, Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and the various artists that contributed to the Heavy Metal comic series and its eponymous 1981 animated film). With influences like these, one can expect Ghost Song to have some heavily layered environmental story telling and some very implicit background information that you will have to either piece together, or simply infer yourself, to fill in the blanks of whatever isn't explicitly stated in the dialogue.
Of the few negative reviews that I've read here, I've seen complaints about the controls being clunky (which is a bit bizarre to me, as I found the combat and movement to be quite tight and smooth, albeit perhaps not quite as sleek as some other popular titles in the genre), as well as some complaints about the necessity for backtracking, especially for certain quest items that don't allow you to use fast travel, but those are few and far between (about as many as you can count on one hand) and don't take very long at all to traverse, so these all seem like rather odd complaints to me, unless you went into this expecting something other than a metroidvania with some amount of deliberate combat and backtracking. I would say that, having played more metroidvanias than I could possibly remember at this point, Ghost Song is at least certainly not what I would consider to be of the slower or more cumbersome variety of the genre as a whole.
Another complaint that I have heard, however, which I actually find more understandable (not for my tastes, but for the preferences of others), is the lack of explicit story telling. I could definitely see some people being turned off by this, especially with the overall outcome of the narrative, but if you are more like me, and like to have a bit more of a dark and mysterious plot that allows your imagination to do some wandering, then you may well end up loving this one for the same reasons that others might hate it. One aspect of the dialogue that I really loved in particular was the fact that pretty much every NPC has incredibly candid and personal things to say almost every time you talk to them, making each one seem more real and relatable than most characters in games that I've played in general, and it is here that you may also find what you need to piece the overall premise together yourself, if you happen to find yourself into it enough to do so, and if not, I think it's an enjoyable enough experience regardless.
All in all, I would say that, while the most basic and stripped down gameplay aspects of Ghost Song are essentially just a serviceable Metroid/Hollow Knight clone, the amount of passion that went into the story, art, and overall presentation of this game make it something incredible and far more than just a clone of anything. My total runtime for Ghost Song was about 25 hours in an attempt to 100% everything I could in a single, completely blind, first-time playthrough, including attempting to find every possible item and upgrade, which I was unable to accomplish by the time of this review, but if you aren't going for a totally blind completionist run while also revisiting everything that you can to uncover every line of dialogue or cut scene possible, then you could probably easily finish this game in about 1/3 of the time that I spent on it. I just happen to enjoy it, myself, enough to milk everything that I possibly could out of my first playthrough, and I may still spend more time on it later if I don't first end up just going all in on the recently announced upcoming title, The Silver Sun, from the same developer, which is apparently supposed to be set in the same universe that I fell in love with in Ghost Song...