izigame.me

Mild story and gameplay spoilers with finer details omitted.
I was very excited for this game when I saw development progress years ago. Beautiful art, a cool premise, and a lot of promise from its sources of inspiration. I didn't expect another Metroid, but I did expect a carefully crafted world with a nice mystery and some clean movement in service to it. Ghost Song opens up promising all three and ends up delivering on none of them, in some ways underdeveloped and in others overdesigned. It's still a gorgeous game clearly made with love and this version runs just fine, but I can't recommend it in its current state unless you have the fortitude to enjoy it for what it is.
The level design leaves a lot to be desired. There are few shortcuts even after you've unlocked the scant few upgrades that influence the gameplay meaningfully; fast travel is possible, but only at specific save points that are still several rooms away from many important locations and junctions; and the progression of the game is tied to delivering items from the far reaches of the map back to the game's 'town', where you are explicitly denied fast travel, can only carry one at a time even if multiple are available to you, and nothing changes on the way back besides an additional littering of the same two enemy types that only serve to slow you down. When I wasn't delivering a macguffin, I was deliberately avoiding interacting with save points in order to control where my last save was, gaming save+quit's property of returning you to your last save point. To rub salt in the wound, you can only level up at those fast travel points, though thankfully that doesn't set your save location...
Most areas are completely disconnected in theme outside of a specific corruptive biome that is reused multiple times (though only two are required with the third being optional). This biome is loosely explained but never sees a resolution, so any gravity from seeing it in multiple places around the map is lost without payoff.
NPC dialogue is almost completely disconnected from the gameplay at large, alternating between voiced conversations where the Deadsuit mumbles and a character exposits, and silent text that ends up meatier but with rare relevance. There are only a couple of characters that have implied relevance to the player's origins and one of them is easily missed even if you've already combed the entire map despite spelling out a major plot point that's only vaguely hinted at otherwise. Many other minor NPCs have a habit of randomly travelling across the map in ways you would never realistically encounter them in time to stay up to date on their questlines - where failing to keep up with them between macguffin deliveries means being locked out for the playthrough. They even have unique equipment! In combination with the stricture described above, any nonlinearity the game retains transforms from freedom to obligation. But even if optional missables are no issue for you, it remains that you'll be running through the same literally empty rooms over and over as you progress the plot.
The game teases you with the plot for two hours or so before dumping it all on you at the end; the climax suddenly looms near and what's left of the story scrounges itself together in a bid to - and it's over, where the grand finale never comes. Unless I missed a true final boss (which I hope is true, despite being very thorough with everything but NPCs), the game's ending resolves little of the overarching story and merely sends off the surviving characters you've had no reason to invest in.
The gameplay is very simple - shoot gun and occasionally use subweapon, cash out on your overheated gun with melee attacks, use subweapons and equipment to manipulate overheat or ignore it as you see fit. The balance is all over the place and it quickly flattens out - in actuality, the gun's terribly weak even when upgraded and your gun stat is for specific subweapons, the subweapons are rarely worth spending the time to set up or the energy they ask for if they're not the single required subweapon, and melee starts off horribly clunky and quickly becomes gamebreaking by the end. For reference, the basic melee attack locks you in place despite requiring you to be right next to enemies to hit them, many of which won't flinch or have instant untelegraphed lunges. This is also a game with universal contact damage and extremely low iframes; standing inside enemies is usually a terrible idea until you hit critical mass and can ignore the damage you're eating. You can mitigate this by finding faster or higher-reach melee weapons, but it never eliminates the problem; one melee weapon is outright invulnerable while performing its air attack but still has issues being used offensively because it can't be cancelled into your singular defensive option. I used it for a couple of bosses it was overwhelmingly fitting against, but otherwise relied on the high-reach weapons, one of which had arcs hitting above and below. The fact that melee is so broken (to your pain and benefit) is unfortunate, since it's the only other way your movement changes outside of the couple of upgrades you receive. These sorely needed a way to swap between them quickly, if not just being additions to an ever-expanding comprehensive moveset, and the game is weaker with their implementation of mutual exclusivity.
Many bosses and some normal enemies have enormous hitboxes that dissuade you from getting close at all unless you have a way to facetank them. There are three stats, and if you aren't picking Resolve and then adjusting the rest through your equipment slots, you're going to struggle with the bosses that take any build you might have concocted and flatten them out into "keep your distance and wait your turn". Many attacks are not telegraphed, have no predictive pattern, and do very high damage in a game that has limited and delayed healing; doesn't feel very great when each boss only has a couple of attacks, too. There's nothing to chance on hoping most bosses won't do that one move that will instantly catch you; you WILL frequently pay the price for doing anything interesting and it had better be worth it.
There's a sprint mechanic but you're mostly spending stamina to move at normal speed for a while; horizontal speed is glacially slow without a different upgrade that basically replaces sprinting. You cannot sprint defensively because you need to build up speed, you cannot use it offensively outside of a specific melee weapon that has a dash attack, and entering and leaving sprint is extremely clunky, requiring you to be on the ground and not performing other actions. It's almost exclusively reserved for running through rooms you're already familiar with, and even then it's so strict and muted that there's not much benefit to trying to get use out of it.
Visual feedback on player actions is generally poor. It's hard to tell when your iframes begin and end, whether you just took a single instance of damage or two that were independently tracked, and whether your gun is hot enough for the bonus melee damage to kick in. There's screen shake everywhere, too - for melee attacks, for taking damage, for firing some weapons - and there's no way to turn it off or at least subdue it. It can be very hard to tell what hit you in darker or more detailed rooms. Spike traps or enemy pits in your first blind visit to a room can be devastating because of this.
There's too little good that came to fruition and too much bad that bogs it down, but there is definitely good, and I'm hoping for Old Moon's success moving forward - just can't recommend Ghost Song right now. Some patches and a bit more content tying up the endgame would do this game huge favors.