So since the conception of Rants & Raves; we have always had one or the other. However as I was playing and even after I completed 'Ghost Song' I came to the conclusion it could not be one or the other. I liked it but there was definitely elements of it I did not, so for the first time, instead of a RANT or a RAVE we have a brand new category. So without further ado, lets talk about our first OKAY, 'Ghost Song'
Now story-time. I kind of have a strange relationship with Metroidvanias. The two games that inspired it I have not really played at all. I have never played a Metroid game, not even one. It began because I picked Sega consoles as my main console growing up so I've never owned any Nintendo consoles. Heck, I still don't own any Nintendo consoles to this day. So there is a whole bunch of games I never played which were exclusive to Nintendo consoles which includes the Zelda's, the Starfox's, the Smash Bro's and the Metroid's. However, being a gamer I still know of Metroid's influences on gaming in general and I know how most Metroid games work, especially the older ones.
The other game; I can be honest I've played and it kind of got lost in the shuffle of other games I was playing and I've never gotten back to playing it, that being the seminal Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I believe I did not mind it tho it didn't enthrall me like it did so many others. Half of me wants to go back and play it again and the other half is okay letting it languish in my PS4 backlog. So it is funny that I've kind of played Metroid-vanias but I've never actually 'played' Metroid or Castlevania, the inspirations for the genre.
On top of that, one of the most popular and lauded as one of the best Metroidvanias is 'Hollow Knight' and again I've played it but it did not connect with me either and after a couple nights playing it and streaming it, I found other games to play. So it is weird that the only real Metroid-vanias I've played and really enjoyed was 'Blasphemous' and I can honestly say, I LOVE 'Blasphemous'. If I was doing RANTS & RAVES back when I was playing 'Blasphemous' it would have got a long, detailed and gushing RAVE (much like my Risk of Rain 2 one) and of course I am eagerly awaiting it's upcoming sequel. The other Metroidvania I can say I whole hearted fell in love with was Xbox Live indie game called 'Shadow Complex' and I can honestly recommend both of these games in a heart-beat. So whilst I enjoy some games of the genre, I do not always gravitate towards the genre.
So back to 'Ghost Song', it is strange that out of all the metroidvanias I have gravitated towards, this is the first one I've played, completed and even did some achievement hunting in. However as mentioned previously, I do have to say, that whilst I like 'Ghost Song' I can't actually say I loved it. I enjoyed 'Ghost Song' but I honestly seeing myself deleting it off my hard-drive soon so I can have more space instead of holding onto to it like games I really like. It is a good game but due to some faults with it, I can't give it a RAVE but I still think OKAY fits it.
One of the best elements and one of the main reasons I kept playing 'Ghost Song' was its story so let's start there. You play 'Deadsuit' a mysterious amnesiac girl in a powerful exosuit. She finds herself lost at the beginning after finding herself crash landed on a mysterious planet called 'Lorian' Along the way you meet a host of people and make friends especially with another group of crash survivors. These survivors need you to find parts for their sentient spaceship so they can escape the planet and you being the only person outfitted to survive the planet take it upon yourself to help them. 'Deadsuit' and a big portion of the NPCs are also voiced which is surprising for a small indie title and they really give their all. The voice acting is very commendable and again it made the story that much more compelling. Also a very nice touch is the main creator mentioned he was inspired by Dark Souls and made it that each NPC had their own side quests and the more missions you complete for them the more you are rewarded and their stories continue to their logical endings. This is great for their lore and actually drives you to keep helping them. With the game's true ending, which I will not spoil, I really felt it took me on a journey and it was a memorable one. The story is definitely one of the best things about 'Ghost Song' and as I said, by the end I was invested and I wanted to see it to its conclusion.
Visually, for an indie game, it stands out. It uses colors wisely, characters are animated nicely, enemies are a mixture of frightful and also some are kind of cute. Areas are distinctive but at the same time it is able to merge areas into each other and still feel like its part of one world, much like the original Dark Souls. Deadsuit has a distinctive look clearly inspired by the Metroid games but has a charm of her own as well, be it in the way she is animated to always seem deep in thought and almost hurting inside but at the same time driven and determined to accomplish her tasks. As far as avatars go, I related to her and I wanted to help her achieve said goals. Again, I love the look of this game and as a fan of science fiction I enjoyed this more lofi aesthetic. The spaceships look grand but rusted, suits look worn and weathered and the world looks like it has moved on but remnants of a higher society remained. 'Ghost Song' has been described as a melancholic experience, one of self discovery and finding ones place in the world and the visuals nail it.
Another area where it does it so well is its subtle but haunting (pun intended) soundtrack. The composer of the album Grant Graham (funny how I now have 2 indie music producers I've enjoyed with first and last names that start with the same letter; the Chris Christodoulou blog is coming next! I promise) provide the perfect soundboard for this experience. From the opening intro to the softer introspective moments when traversing to the driving beats when you face off against a boss, each song really draws you into this dark, mysterious, tragic world filled with brief moments of light and laughter. Some of the sound effects can get a bit grating but nothing horrible with the exception of you used your 'sprint' too much sound which needs a better sound then a squeaky door. Unlike my last indie review for 'Indies' Lies', I had the soundtrack playing at full volume every playthrough and it still sticks with me to this day. Audio and visually, 'Ghost Song' is a RAVE.
Combat is also unique and in its own way a nice little micro-game. You have 3 main ways of surviving the harsh word of Lorian, you have your long distance gun, your special gun and your up close melee weapon. You can aim your gun to shoot certain parts and whilst its cool feature for precision aiming, it is anything but, it feels un-natural and a bit loose and wonky. I rarely relied on that. The game had a ton of variety of special guns too but sadly I only found myself relying on 2 to 3 gun types (out of multiple choices) because some of the extra gun add-ons felt like fluff. Also to equip multiple gun types, it'll draw away from your suit's power core which even when you are highly levelled is a limited resource and you are better investing it in the above perks I mentioned above. The melee weapons you can only have one at a time (which is a strange restriction) even tho again you were given multiple choices and those work in different ways too. Do you run with the heavy sledgehammer or the discus of death that you throw and it comes back at you like a boomerang. Do you rely on your big robot fist add-on and go all in or play it safe and jab them with a spear from a distance. This variety is also enhanced by one of 'Ghost Song' main innovations which is what I like to call 'Heat'. Using your gun causes it to heat up and your shots get slowly get less effective and drops off faster but if you switch to your melee weapon whilst your gun is overheating, your melee weapon will do much more damage because the heat has been transferred to it. This little back and forth brought some innovation to just shoot or slash, its a nice mechanic I appreciate to make the combat its own thing however sadly on the other side when it comes to getting attacked I feel the game really falls apart and it shows it flaws.
'Ghost Song' is a hard game but not in its like Dark Souls hard (which it was clearly inspired by). In Dark Souls, enemies have tells and very obvious ques when they will attack and give you adequate time to defend or to roll out of the way. If you get squashed, 90% of the time it is user error. 'Ghost Song' enemies have ques and tells too but here is the issue, you can't block in this game, there is no parry so your only really course of action is to use a 'slide' through as your dodge or jump and air dash out of the way. Both of these abilities have invulnerability but the window is so small it is barely noticeable. Early on, I found a perk for my suit that gave me more invulnerability for my slide and even then it was not enough and I felt myself still getting hit by multiple things and this cost me my power core to equip. I never un-equipped this perk because I could not see myself playing and enjoying myself with the provided slide.
This slide that never did want it was supposed to do lead to many cheap deaths and respawns at far away respawn places especially when it came to bosses (whom some are the cheapest of the cheap). Speaking of, quick aside, spawn places that a very, very far away from the boss arena are a thing of the past and should stay the past. From Software, the innovators of super long salty runback have even recognize that and both Elden Ring and Sekiro (their most recent games) now have you spawn almost directly outside the boss arena and that is the way it should be. When it takes up to of 4-5 mins to get back to a boss whom can kill you in 5-10 seconds, that is not fun game design. This was all compounded when I hit my first wall in this game, of the first most important parts was being guarded by a very aggressive boss who attacks constantly pegged me whilst I sliding through their attacks and sometimes one or two shoot me and then caused me to spend 5 + minutes to get back to do it all over again. This boss and another boss whom I'll go more into detail later are half of the reason why 'Ghost Song' gets an OKAY because fighting them was not fun at all. Normally a highlight in games are boss encounters, another thing Dark Souls has mastered but 'Ghost Song' every boss felt like they were over-tuned and most importantly made out of adamantium.
One particular boss, his name is etched in my memory was 'Elsom the Ogre' this particularly badly design 'boss' had you fighting in sludge which restricted your movement. spawned unlimited minions who all do big damage or slow you down if you touch them, they also put you a very small room and he used a weapon with a hit box the size of Texas. To top it all off the bullet sponge nature of this boss caused him to absorb hits that would have killed multiple enemies and he could kill you with 2-3 hits even with a maxed out life bar. He was a exercise in frustration and I ended up beating him by just face-tanking all his damage and going with a super OP weapon that was permanently overheated. No strategy, no well timed oh and ahs dodges/ slides and when I killed him I was not even that elated. I was just happy I never had to do that again. However this bosses ability to absorb obscene amount of damage is passed onto every enemy honestly. Every enemy felt they took 2 or 3 more hits to kill then it was supposed to and this was even after I had sufficiently over-levelled 'Deadsuit'. This confusing game design of making you as fragile as snowflake and all your enemies icebergs in the Antarctic is why I can't wholly recommend 'Ghost Song' to most people because I like dying in video games, its part of my slogan but even I was a bit over it after awhile. I see from a lot of other reviews from fellow gamers say that the bullet sponge enemies really are a problem with this game.
The bad game design unfortunately continues post lack luster boss battles too. Once you defeated bosses you normally get one of the parts you need to fix the getaway spaceship however the game decide that once you have one of these 5 parts, it will artificially inflate the game time for you by disabling the fast travel option so you need to make your way all the way back to the crash site camp and sometimes the part was found 20-30 mins away from your final destination. Along the way it'll purposely throw some of the most annoying regular enemies at you too and they come in droves. Die on the way back and most of the time you will because you exhausted all your healing items on overpowered bosses and well you better hope you were close to one of the rather sparse save spots. Doing this runback/ drop off once or twice might have been a change in your game plan and made you go, this is a challenge but making you do it 5 times was just un-necessary and a slight against the player and disrespect of their time. It truly felt like a way to make the game longer and it has been used before in other indie games, Mortal Shell comes to mind but in Mortal Shell, the runback was shorter, you had to do less of them (3 to be exact) and the challenge wasn't as hard because unlike 'Ghost Song' you could actually dodge things and not die. Yes, in hindsight, this oversight and design choice and some of the other things I will mention really took 'Ghost Song' from a RAVE to just OKAY.
More contributing factors were certain side quests did not have decent pay-offs for the time invested in them (going back to Elsom, killing him did not even give you an important part but just a perk for your suit WTF), some of the achievements seem half-baked and un-inspired and 'Deadsuit's overall clunk-ness when you were traversing really drags the game down. In Metroidvanias you need to nimble and be able to make and time perfect jumps and cross ledges and 'Deadsuit' would sometimes be aiming and jumping in the wrong direction and certain jumping challenges were very frustrating when that happened. The first 2 are kind of nit-picky I won't lie but the last one is very important to the feel of the game and it just made you feel clunky and took away from your enjoyment.
AV
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