Ghost Song (part 1)
"Actually, it, uh... It bothers me that you assumed I'm the captain."
"Sorry?"
"No, it's not your fault. It's just, we say 'no hierarchies', but they develop anyway, right? They creep in. We get tired, we fall into roles. There's patterns that come of living together, of working together, and some of that's needed, of course, but we have to be careful. It can turn pernicious. It can stifle. Certain personalities overwhelm, certain ideas become givens. Suddenly we're living underneath things we never actually decided on."
"..."
"What I mean is, if you call me Captain, that makes me afraid we're failing. The crash, maybe? We can't let tragedy push us into roles that shouldn't even exist."
In 2013, a small team of aspiring indie game developers had the idea to combine the resurgently popular "metroidvania" formula with the new hotness that was From Software's "soulsborne" genre. They ran a successful kickstarter. They got a lot of hype and hope from all around the indie gaming sphere. Unfortunately, the game's development was troubled, with multiple setbacks that included a complete do-over when they had to switch engines. Years ticked by. Statements stopped getting coverage.
Then, in 2017, Hollow Knight came out and everyone forgot about that other indie metroidvania/soulsborne hybrid that had started development just a few months before it.
It wasn't until the year 2022 that Ghost Song by Old Moon studios finally hit the virtual shelves.
It's painfully hilarious that a Hollow Knight sequel called Silk Song had been announced by then. So much for that SEO. :(
I'd been wanting to play this game since its announcement, and was fortunate enough to have some friends who are active in the game dev sphere who kept me posted. I did so shortly after it came out on Steam last year, and have been trying to make time to review it ever since. Ghost Song just now released its first DLC pack, and it so happens that I'm ahead of my commission queue, so the stars seem to have aligned.
The reason *why* I've been wanting to do a pro bono review of this game for so long is because, to put it simply, Ghost Song might have the best writing of any video game I have ever played. Very importantly, it's also a story that wouldn't have worked nearly as well in any medium besides video games. The tale hinges on active immersion, active discovery, and an amazing soundtrack that goes harder the longer it loops. If you were reading it as a book or watching it as a movie, you would miss so much of the impact that comes from BEING the entity that inhabits the Deadsuit.
I'll go into the gameplay a little bit, but only a little. As a run-and-gun platformer about shooting monsters and collecting upgrades, Ghost Song is...competent. There are some cool new gameplay ideas in here that I'd like to see developed further in future games, but there are also aspects of the game that leave significant room for improvement. Some parts of the level design in particular are just plain bad; not all of it, but some parts. Mostly it's just "fine." The art and story are improved by the gameplay's presence, but they also far outshine it.
It should probably go without saying at this point, but Ghost Song's is a story that benefits greatly from going in unspoiled. If you haven't played it and think you'd like to, you might want to hold off on reading this until you've done so. Because this story requires a lot of explaining, and I have even more to say about what I personally got out of it, this article will be divided into three posts. The first will focus on the premise, the second on the lore, and the third on how the two come together to make a compelling story with a poignant thesis.
1. The Tale of a Ghost
The game begins with the Deadsuit, ancient and rusted, the decorative shroud that once adorned its sleek metal frame rotted away to clinging dirt-colored ribbons, pulling itself laboriously to its feet. Waking up and prying itself out of the ground is difficult. You need to press the buttons a few times before it manages to boot itself up all the way.
You're in a graveyard, with alien trees and crashed spaceship tombstones sheltering the flower beds from the slow, weeping rain. This is playing. You whisper, in a slow, timid voice that can only be described as "haunting," for someone to come and find you. There's no one around to hear.
"Haunting" describes almost everything in Ghost Song. The music, the art, the voicework. This is all deliberate, because the game is about a haunting taking place. The deadsuit is doing exactly what its name suggests. Much like the title of the game itself.
...
Exploring this ruined, rotted world of luminous nanotech flowers and titanium tombstones, it quickly becomes apparent that you're not the only thing that's begun stirring again. Bodies of all sizes roam the misty wildgardens and churning cave passageways. They've been...twisted. Misshapen. Accompanying them are sickly-yellow insects, and infectious floating spores of the same color that hover above the scenes of ruin or erupt from within the bodies of the moaning, shambling corpses.
Take the wrong turn, and you might meet another deadsuit. This one doesn't have a person in it, though. Just powerful weapons, sickly yellow spores, and hatred.
This game pointedly does not give a shit if it kills you. Boss enemies like the infested remains of Liselle Tal can pop up almost anywhere, including some spaces that you've already been through multiple times. Some of them you can deal with fairly easily, and defeating one will usually give you a weapon or other upgrade that improves your chances against future opponents. Others, you just need to run away from. Or, if you spot them curled up on the ground in the same posture your own deadsuit itself started the game in, sneak around without waking them up. If you run into a random boss that's too tough for your early game character, well, you can run and hope you don't meet them again until you're better equipped, or you can die.
...
On a less-positive gameplay focused note: Ghost Song has two default difficulty modes, "normal" and "explorer." Among other, mostly minor, differences, normal mode has your suit suffer maximum hp loss when you die and reset at the last save station, and you need to spend nanogel harvested from defeated enemies to repair that damage. You ALSO need that same resource to level up your character, and, later on, to purchase necessary items. In other words, your punishment for death is needing to grind more enemies.
I strongly recommend playing the game on explorer mode, which does away with this frankly unfun and tacked-on Soulsbornism. It adds nothing to the game besides padding out the length with repetitive grinding, especially when you have to do it as an intermission from the more difficult bosses against which the game expects you to die repeatedly.
In explorer mode, the only penalty for death is losing some of your accumulated nanogel, which you can recover by revisiting the site of your last demise and harvesting it back from the glowing nanotech-flower-hedge that will have grown up from it. If you die again without having recovered it, then that nanogel is lost and it'll take longer for you to level up or buy the next item you need. That, in my mind, is a perfectly sufficient penalty. It worked in Hollow Knight, and it works here too.
...
After exploring this lonely, mist-shrouded world of beauty and nightmare for a while, the game does something you probably wouldn't be expecting by this point. The Deadsuit runs into a living, healthy human, who - after making sure you aren't going to attack him like all the other creatures he's been running into - invites you back to his camp. Full of other living, healthy humans.
Their spaceship, the Gambler, crashed here a month ago, and they've been rationing supplies and supplementing them with what little local flora is edible ever since then. They won't be able to hold out much longer, but they still try to share what little food and shelter they have with you unhesitatingly (it is perhaps fortunate for them that the Deadsuit doesn't need to eat, or even have the ability to do so).
Anyway. This is where what you might call the "main" story of Ghost Song kicks off. The Gambler is a pathbreaking ship, crewed by an extended family of hereditary spacers and whatever assorted hangers-on they've picked up recently. They made a quick dip into orbit of this mysterious planet covered in strange techno-organic life and dying machinery to take a scan, but quickly found out where all those wrecks dotting its surface came from. As soon as they entered low orbit, something caused the Gambler's AI to short out completely and without warning. The vessel was pulled into the gravity well and crashed, with half the clan dying in the event. In particular, those who tried to get away in the escape pods were all lost when the pods rained down across the surreal landscape and stranded their inhabitants among the barren peaks and cave systems full of monsters. The ones who couldn't get to the pods in time, ironically, faired the best; the ship's emergency retrorockets worked well enough that there was only relatively minor damage to both vessel and environment.
The Gambler's AI came back online shortly after the impact. It has no idea what happened to knock it out like that, but whatever this effect was it seems to be active only in the planet's upper atmosphere and a little ways out passed it.
The surviving crew, still mourning their dead family members, have managed to patch the hull back together. However, several critical components were damaged in the crash, and the only way to replace those is to scavenge them from older shipwrecks. These are high-energy parts, so the Gambler's sensors can locate them at a pretty long distance. Unfortunately, some of the parts they need are only present in wrecks that have thick monster infestations around them, and others have already been scavenged from the wrecks and relocated deep underground by an unknown party.
The Gambler is a civilian ship. Her crew, likewise, civilians. They don't even have proper weaponry, let alone body armor that will stand up to anything stronger than stellar radiation. Even if they had all the parts, they likely wouldn't be able to navigate free of orbit without the ship AI's participation, and they're no closer to figuring out what's causing that exotic effect today than they were a month ago. If they stay here longer than a few more weeks, their supplies will run out and they will die.
Completely unsolicited, the Deadsuit tells the Gambler clan that she will bring them the parts and try to find out what's causing the AI-shutdown field. They're all realistically surprised when this mysterious powered-armor-wearing newcomer makes such an offer with such minimal prompting, to help people who she only just met. The Deadsuit thinks it's weird too, but she still wants to do it. She's sure.
Those glowing plant-shaped nanite colonies that seem to go for the brains of dead bodies around here might have something to do with why she's sure.
Unfinished business. That's usually why it happens, in ghost stories.
"I can't let them die! I...I can't let them die!"
This is a benevolent haunting. A spirit that came back to save its living family from peril.
For most of the game's runtime, you're just running around gathering ship components, fending off monsters and maddened survivors of previous shipwrecks, and trying to figure out what this planet's deal even is. From the beginning though, you know that your efforts will all be wasted if you can't do something about that AI-killing static field. It's also made clear that time is running out for the Deadsuit as well as her living family. After every ship part she brings back to the Gambler, she collapses in exhaustion.
At the start of every in-game day, it takes her longer to boot her suit back up and pull it to its feet. The mechanical sounds when she shuts it down - either to rest, or just when the player saves their game or changes their equipment loadout - have a tone of finality to them, like an old machine giving out and breaking. The sounds it makes when she gets back up are struggling, halting, like an ancient computer that you have to spend minutes sitting there praying it'll manage to boot up whenever you turn it on. Using many of your suit's abilities causes it to spit out a painful-looking shower of sparks. As the Deadsuit slowly, bit by bit, recovers some measure of connection with her family, her grip on the technology giving her this new life is slipping away. It's only if the player finds all the clues and uncovers all the NPC's dialogues that she even gets to remember her own name, and even then only on the final in-game day.
...
Amnesia plots are extremely overdone in video games. When I first started Ghost Song, I was annoyed to see one. I was wrong to be annoyed. The deadsuit's "pilot" lacking any coherent memories of her previous life isn't just fitting for the story's arc and metaphysics. It also connects to something plot-critical. By approaching the memory loss and recovery in this way, the story is also setting up its main antagonist, as well as how to defeat it.
You don't confront that antagonist for a long time. In fact, it's only in the game's penultimate dialogue that you even find out what it is.
Remember when I said the main plot of Ghost Song starts with the wreck? Well, there's also a background story, and it's a wild one. The foreground events of Ghost Song are a Clarketech-enabled ghost story. The background events are simultaneously a great example of cosmic horror that actually gets it, and also a deep-cutting subversion of cosmic horror's usual assumptions and messages.
