Ghost 1.0

Playing this, I asked myself "why am I putting up with this?" on several occasions.

Having now finished the game, I still don't have an answer.

First off, no, this is not a metroidvania. The point of a metroidvania is to explore a vast environment and find and acquire new abilities, most often traversal abilities, that allow you to access new areas, where you'll find more new abilities, and so on and so forth. Here, the only thing preventing you from walking straight to the final boss right from the start is not having the key. A key is not a new ability. The only thing this game has in common with metroidvanias is the (somewhat) big interconnected map. Otherwise, you have almost all your full kit right from the start, and the only additional traversal abilities you can get are fully optional, acquired with skill points instead of being discovered, and never needed for exploration - the double jump helps with tricky platforming but is never outright required and the other two (air dash and glide) I never used.

Second, like Unepic before it, this game mostly offers annoyances and calls it gameplay. You lose all your stuff upon dying, and while you can reclaim items by returning to your corpse (or never lose them in the first place by saving in classic mode), your energy cubes (i.e money) are gone. And with how expensive everything is, this is a pain. Another good example is the shortcuts : at times you can enter maintenance areas that allow you to move quickly to a previous location. These areas are full of pipes. And guess what, if they're hit by a stray shot, steam starts pouring out - which hurts you. Problem : a bunch of your upgrades are about having autonomous drones accompany you. So you have a choice then : go into the menu and disable everything (and also watch your own regular shots!) then re-enable everything twenty seconds later when you're through the area, or just hit those pipes and then wait for the steam to sloooowly recede. Either way, you're screwed.

Combat is mostly fine, but on more than one occasion the game just throws barrages of unavoidable projectiles at you - you have to either tank it, or burn through tons of regen items to go through it. As for bosses, except for the first one, they're essentially all DPS checks.

But the worst of the worst is the "souls". In nearly every room, you can make some shining motes appear throughout the room, then collect them all for a reward, ranging from just some more cubes to permanent upgrades. The thing is, the conditions for making these motes appear vary from reasonnable (walk into an out of the way corner, clear an optional alarm) to absolutely impossible to reasonnably guess (crouch for 5 full seconds without moving, go back and forth on that elevator three times, wiggle in place like an idiot, kill the enemies in a particular order, use an item but from the menu not from your shortcuts, SAVE AND QUIT THEN RELOAD, open and close the menu, disable a powerup,...). Not only are some of those conditions completely unreasonnable things to do during normal gameplay, there are just so many of them that even if you were aware of them, trying all those things in every single room in the game just to see what will make the damn things appear is just plain stupid. I do not understand how you're supposed to get them without a guide. And before you ask, no, there are no hints anywhere.
You might be tempted to ignore them. But those upgrades add up, and if you get all of the souls of a particular area, you get a very powerful upgrade on top of it. So you really want to do them.

The only interesting mechanic the game has is the ability to exit your mech as a ghost, fly around, and possess other robots. It's a very neat idea, but in practice your main bot is strictly better than absolutely everything you can possess, so you only do it when you need to solve some basic puzzle, or to soften a group from afar. Oh and your main body remains vulnerable during this, so you can't use it during combat.

Structure wise, it's very simple. You arrive to an area, where you need to get the 5 pieces of the key to the next one. Doing this will take you through the entire area ; there are maybe two or three rooms in the game that are truly optional, and you never need to backtrack, except at the very beginning in the central zone (since it's the one with the locked doors to the other areas). On the way you'll accomplish another story objective. Rinse and repeat, and then you're at the end. Like I said - it's not a metroidvania. There's no exploration. It's more of a slightly open action platformer.

Then, story wise... eh. I guessed the "twist" something like 30 minutes in? It's pretty standard, you can see it coming from a mile away the moment the first element of "foreshadowing" drops. And other than the forgettable story this is "Pop culture : The Game" - to the point where the game doesn't just make references but outright namedrops some of the stuff it talks about. All of this serviced by amateur voice acting that varies between "fine, I guess" to "ugh shut up" in quality.

Anyway, I didn't like it.

The game is a pretty fun Metroid like, the story is somewhat interesting, the characters are fun, the voice acting is a bit amateur, but was still able to work, the gun play was fun, even though I felt that most guns were too gimmicky, I enjoyed the game a lot, it didn't feel too long nor too short, and when I finished the game I started playing the new game plus, and before I knew it I was already half-way through the game again, pretty much speedrunning it, just then I noticed it was 3 in the morning, and I remembered that I don't do new game plus in any game, so stopped, I guess the game was good enough to make me forget about that, I recommend it for fans of Metroid games.

Very solid metroidvania with an attractive female protagonist.

Good story, this game was clearly made with love

Can't believe I just experienced a Kojima story in a 2d game.
The game was really fun.

For a metroidvania, it even indicates places you haven't explored yet to cut down on how much time you spend staring at the map.

Great humour great games single person. Logical approach to the game save, makes sense in story. 3d print new body very transhuman post humanity fun metrovania.

Ghost's trolling of the "employers" is priceless

Relatively solid metroidvania. Two modes offered, a more traditional mode and 'survival' mode where your progress stays but most items are lost upon death. You keep some styles of permanent upgrades and talents, but others are gone (a few can be picked up by returning to the most recent corpse).

I played Survival on Normal

I mostly enjoyed my time with it. I found a few portions unfun.
I thought the story/idea was interesting, but the writing and voice acting left me disappointed most of the time.

Enjoyed this one, fun metroidvania. The only thing I disliked was that you lose your energy cubes on death.. honestly, this added nothing to the game other than annoyance, and potentially more grind. You can avoid it potentially if you quit out fast enough before you die, but yeah.. that I would say is the worst part of the game

Everything else, all good

slow and boring.

If you liked UnEpic, you will love this one.

From the creator of Unepic, Ghost 1.0 is a very solid and entertaining action and platform game. The protagonist's controls are very precise and the soundtrack is cool. Played on Steamdeck.

This is indie where the developers had shown what they can do with basic tools of making metroidvania.

Simple puzzles, quite repetitive rooms, [ABSOLUTELY FRUSTRATING SECRETS NECESSARY TO BEAT THE BOSSES].

The writing also has a really great potential, but the outcome is simplified.

You can buy this product for dumb timekilling some evenings. Wait for the discount in this case.
Or you can support the developers in belief they will make something greater.

can't beat the first boss on easy - not for me

I was very confused by the "Roguevania" tag attached to this game, and as someone who enjoyed unepic was very pleasantly surprised with how fun it was to actually explore, and to learn what a "Roguevania" was. Very enjoyable game, characters and story are very well written, and it has that classic unepic humor.

Good times.

Unepic is much better. Why?
Unepic Vs. Ghost
Farm money, items, mana...? Works vs. doesn't
Enough skill points? Yes vs. Only in new game +
Rewards for playing longer? Yes vs. No
Comprehensive difficulty setting? Yes vs. No.
Safety net? Yes vs. No.
Forced iron man for reasonable gameplay? No vs. Yes
Getting stronger while playing? Yes vs. Not really.
Help if you die over and over and over...? Yes vs. No (alert levels do not go down in time.... you get stuck you die....)
Cheats to make gameplay enjoable? Doesn't need it vs. Need it and not have it :(
Possible notes on map? Yes vs. No
Possibility to sort inventory? Yes vs. No

Ghost 1.0 was an amazing experience for me. Different in many ways from UnEpic, the developer's previous title, but still maintaining the beautifully comedic tone that the developer is known for. I want to specifically call out how fun the character writing is, filled with cheesy and somewhat dated yet equally heartwarming comedy, and supported by the amazing voice-acting for the trio of main characters, making every dialogue just a joy to listen to. In simple words, the game is so full of heart and joy that it took me back to my earlier days, when gaming was so much simpler)

Design-wise, Ghost 1.0 is a fun mix of 2D-action with Metroidvania elements, both of which are done quite well. Unlike many metroidvanias, Ghost 1.0 doesn't throw many new abilities at you, deciding to focus more on the slow improvement of your already-existent arsenal by unraveling the secrets of the space-station that you're exploring, additionally throwing in new subweapons, many of which I did find to be quite lacking, as it is quite possible to complete the game with just a couple of bought weapons.

One of the main staples of the genre which Ghost 1.0 handles quite well is exploration and secret-hunting — the Nakamura space-station if filled to the brink with secrets, many of which are close to impossible to unravel without the help of a guide, requiring you to perform a series of improbable actions such as save & quit the game. Funny in many ways, but not a very good design choice.

There are some other game-design issues that I've found quite annoying, but overall Ghost 1.0 offers an enjoyable gaming experience, improving on many elements of UnEpic, while moving in a slightly different direction. Still, the game's writing is one of its core strengths, as it's been a while since I've smiled so much during my playthrough.

I got a bit stuck sadly and stopped playing.

Which is just too bad, because what I played and saw was good..
A bit frustrating boss battles and difficulty here and there but.. hey.
At least its not super easy and boring either.

I don't know if I will come back to it and finish it but..

I can't hate on the game though.

For its genre and scope 8.5/10

Good game albeit a bit difficult for me to actually finish it apparently.

Just not smart or gud enough sadly. :)

Ghost 1.0 is exactly what a good game should be: fun! It is a light, fun, fast metroidvania that is more concerned with the player enjoyment than be "hardcore", "super hard" or "super complex" — everything in the game works for this, the fun, sometimes comical story with a nice pay-off, the awesome music and its adorable hand draw graphics.

Surely a game that you will not regret buying.