Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Sep 21, 2022

  Paper Mario meets Psychonauts. EEES GOOD
• gamedeal user

  Sep 21, 2022

  Was expecting a Paper Mario TYD kind of game about ghosts. It's basically that. Good stuff
• gamedeal user

  Sep 22, 2022

  Do you like Paper Mario?
• gamedeal user

  Sep 22, 2022

  This game feels like it is almost there for being an absolute amazing game however I have a few complaints about it. 1. I feel the game doesn't have much content inside roaming around. The maps are pretty huge without really doing anything inside it. The only items you can get in the game are for crafting and even that feels lack luster. 2. The difficulty spike is mostly just numbers and you would have to grind to make for no real reason. 3. There are some bugs in which my character gets stuck and I can't get out. I was in an area that wouldn't let me use the map to teleport and couldn't progess. All in all it is a great game with characters, music, graphics, and gameplay could use a tad more work. For a $20 dollar price tag, it is something I would expect. My recommendation would change if there was more content such as adding items that figments can use in battle and more things to do in the maps.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 22, 2022

  I want to love this game. I should love it. But the first hour of gameplay or so has seriously turned me off. The game doesn't setup any of the narrative or mechanics effectively, there's no explanation as to how or why we are partnering with these figments, why we're in combat with things, how we got where we are. I understand the main character is supposed to have amnesia but the lack of any context before you're thrown into what feels more like a tech demo than a actual start of a game is jarring and disappointing. The combat is trivial so far but I imagine it could become more sophisticated over time, I'm just really disappointed in the inattention to detail put into the gameplay so far when it's visually so promising.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 23, 2022

  It breaks my heart to say this because this game is clearly a labor of love and passion, and I love Paper Mario and games like it (Bug Fables for example), but The Outbound Ghost just doesn't quite make it. While the premise and artstyle is lovely, it just feels a bit half-baked in many areas. I don't really mind the lack of lengthy introductions or tutorials, but I can definitely see why people feel discouraged by it. If you're an experienced GaMeR™ you'll find your way no problem, but any newcomers will quickly feel lost, and it does make the whole thing feel a bit unpolished. Another thing is how the few NPCs you meet (at least at the start) seem to just be one-liner jokes without a lot of reason to exist. They don't say anything interesting, they're not part of quests, they just sit in a random place and throw a tame joke at you and that's that. Your party members are kind of even worse in that regard. You fight using figments of your personality. They're not characters, they don't interact with you or the world or have any dialogue, they're pretty much just badge/ability mules. While it makes sense thematically and from a storytelling perspective, it'd just be nice to be fighting with the characters you've met along the way. Which brings me to the next half-baked-feeling thing: The combat system is... kind of bland. The badges you can make are really uninspired "number go up, number go down" sort of deals, the action gauges are the same for every attack, just with more erratic cursor movements, and with the lack of personality from the fighting party is just feels really uninteresting. It tries to bring something fresh to the table by taking inspiration from Octopath's resting/AP system and the Stun/Break gauge you see in modern JRPG's, while those are welcome additions it just isn't quite enough to make me feel invested. Add to that the lack of usable items and the system seemingly being replaced with a crafting system for badges that seems a bit unnecessary and it all feels like something was streamlined in the wrong direction. There's more things that make it all feel a little unpolished, but they're mostly minor. Stuff like the badge list not having any sorting ability or categories, or the in-game areas being just a bit too needlessly big with too much empty space making everything feel a little lifeless, and not in the fun ghosty way. Feels like I've seen nothing but the same 3 or 4 decorative assets strewn in random places across 5 or so maps. I want to love this game, I really do. I went in with a positive mindset and excitement but the first couple hours are really just a turn-off. It might get better later, it might not, but those first 2 hours are so so so important to make an impression on the player and really flex your creative muscles to show them what kind of ride they're in for, and The Outbound Ghost just doesn't manage to make itself seem all that interesting.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 24, 2022

  Decent game but needs some touchups: Reduce difficulty spikes/grinding. A lot of broken geometry, It's very easy to find places to boundary break. Some areas of the game feel empty and lifeless. Great battle system though. If the developer follows up and fixes some of these issues, I will change my review.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 26, 2022

  This game is cute, has fun gameplay, a fascinating world, beautiful graphics considering the paper aesthetics, and a clear and present heart that tells me that it was made with love. Which is why it is deeply upsetting how disappointed it made me. SPOILERS! This game has four chapters and a free-roam aftergame. By the end of the fourth chapter, it feels like we've reached the end of the second act, like the action is going to start getting really good and all the mysteries are finally going to get resolved... and then the credits roll. Nothing is answered, no explanations are given. The big overhanging question is answered, but it was just so unsatisfying because we didn't see any of the characters actually find out or react to it. The ending came out of nowhere and nothing was resolved. It breaks my heart to say this because what IS there is amazing, and the end of each other chapter is deeply heartfelt, but the game just ends far too soon. If I could give a neutral rating I would, but in the absence of that I think I have to say I can't recommend it. Such a shame...
• gamedeal user

  Sep 26, 2022

  As a major fan of Bug Fables, The Outbound Ghost popped up on my radar and I picked it up because it looked interesting and I wanted another experience like Bug Fables. Unfortunately the game fell short of that expectation, but even without the comparison to other games, The Outbound Ghost has too many general flaws for me to recommend it. My main gripes with the game are: - The game says it has 5 chapters, but it actually just doesn't have a chapter 3 and chapter 5 is just the post-game. (Edit: Looking back, there is a chapter 3, but it is extremely short relative to the other chapters, like 20 minutes or less) - Levels are massive with hardly anything to find besides crafting materials. - The majority of boss fights happen for no good reason with quite a few bosses being literally invisible and having odd placement in the world. - Weak characters and story. Chapter 4 in particular spends an awfully long time setting up ideas and characters only to just abruptly end in a short ending cinematic that only really answers 1 question without addressing everything else. - Quite a few bugs. Aside from getting out of bounds and weird model collisions, the big ones for me have to do with the game pausing, or lack thereof. If you pause the game in the overworld, enemies continue to move and act, but cannot start battle with you; so you just pause as an enemy comes close, then exit pause and run into them for a free first strike. Also, in battle, if you finish off the enemy with the non-last hit of a multi-hit attack, the game pulls up the victory screen but still expects you to complete your attack. Aside from these points I would say that the music is good and the battle system is fine (albeit a bit repetitive as you usually end up spamming the same 1 or 2 moves every fight). The game has also been getting a lot of updates so maybe some of my gripes will be fixed later on, but in its current state, I cannot recommend The Outbound Ghost.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 1, 2022

  The Outbound Ghost is a game with an incredibly promising exterior — wonderful art and music direction, sufficiently interesting premise, polished graphics (relative to the genre), and a solid combat system. What lies inside, however, feels unfortunately hollow, rushed, and not very well thought through. I will apologize in advance for being what will probably come across as extremely harsh; if the developer ever reads this review (and judging from activity in the other reviews, I suspect they will), I want to be clear that this comes from a place of care and constructive criticism. I will also avoid major spoilers to the best of my ability, though discussing the basic narrative structure and some thematic spoilers is unavoidable. Let's start with the high points. As mentioned in the intro, the art is truly very charming and breathes life into the project. That, I think, is this game's single greatest strength. The characters don't have Toad syndrome; they are well-differentiated and very expressive and pleasant to look at. I found the music very charming and befitting a cute ghost game, and just when I would get tired of hearing a battle theme, the next chapter would hit and give me something fresh to listen to. Aesthetically, this game is great! I'd also like to take a moment to appreciate the combat system. While it's not perfect, I do think that enemies were sufficiently interesting that I didn't mind taking most fights. I also think it's an incredibly refreshing break from the norm that you restore your HP and SP after every battle — this game has no interest in being a resource management simulator, and I think that decision works extremely well with the Aspect/crafting system. Not having to worry about SP preservation between battles opens the floor for the kind of indulgent strategies that are not possible in many other RPGs. Now to the not-so-fun stuff. I love bugs and stupid glitches that let me experience silly fun for no reason... but there are WAY too many bugs in this game. Here's just some of what I experienced: (Note: this game is actively being patched, so some of these may be patched out after the time of review.) - Certain sound effects do not respond to the SFX volume setting (most memorably Status Glossary in-combat, the "Memory Break" sound effect, and the Obelisk break sound effect), thus blowing my ears out every time they played - Some enemies with buff abilities would endlessly buff themselves if their buffs got stolen - Visual/sound bug where the game would sometimes think I was in a bush until I entered a new screen - Dying to status on your turn with AP remaining behaves extremely unintuitively - Occasional issues with unwanted auto-advancing text, confirmed through testing not to be a general controller issue - Several cutscenes starting with strange cuts or empty text bubbles - Many textures and objects with no collision maps at all - Several instances of accidentally falling out of the map when exiting a battle - Upon noticing the above point, the realization that about 20-40% of this game's overworld non-house screens have at least one spot where you can clip out of bounds, some of which led me to become stuck in place and need to reset the game (I'll admit, of course, that this last part is nobody's fault but mine) Look, I really do hate to be nitpicky, but the bugs were damaging to my playthrough. Especially the first sound effect bug, which made me have to play on very low volume, or just outright take my headset off when playing through certain sections where I expected these sound effects to play. Many spaces in this game feel hollow and artificial. I appreciate the attempt at filling space by pasting the same few trees, rocks, fences, and houses everywhere, but it really feels like this is a game with about 15 unique screens and a LOT of filler connecting areas. I get it, reuse assets whenever possible, but I would have rather had considerably smaller connecting areas with more unique visuals and geometry and well-scrutinized level boundaries. As it is, most of the map feels like a waste of space, which feels even worse when you consider that the map is not exactly massive in the first place. Finally, to the meat of my complaint, the writing. Again, Conrad/Conradical Games, please do not take this too harshly. Everything I'm writing is meant to be constructive and is just my opinion. I found the writing extremely confused and incongruent. I felt that at many times it didn't know what it wanted to be. Is the game silly and lighthearted or serious? It's fine if the answer is "both," but there were many, many times when a serious moment was happening, or a serious topic was being addressed, but the tone of the writing completely undermined the would-be gravity of the scene. I'm sorry if it seems I have no sense of humor, but I feel that despite the interesting and serious premise of Afterlife Murder Mystery, the game was rarely willing to confront anything of importance. I definitely believe it's possible to explore deep themes with lighthearted characters, but you have to be willing to allow the characters to actually engage with said themes. I'll give a couple of examples of specific pain points. None of these ghosts (except for Bun and Adrian) actually felt like they had Burdens, yet Ascension (which is noted several times as functionally equivalent to death) is their goal. Do something with this! It's a cool observation to have Bun make, but it gets immediately shot down anytime Bun brings it up! What about Figments? Why are there Figment cultists in the universe and why don't we get to learn anything about them? Why, in the Drylands, do we start seeing apparitions of story characters, yet it's never addressed in the dialogue in any way? Again, as with my comment on bugs, I really do hate to be nitpicky, but the entire script could use a grammar/technique pass. It was distracting at best, and I'd say the way these characters spoke actively contributed to my feeling that the game wasn't willing to take itself seriously. Everyone is comma-averse, run-on prone, and written at a very low level of complexity. It left me with the impression (which I realize was never actually stated) that every character appearing on-screen except for Frank is a child with no way to process their emotions or engage with any serious matter. The writing also constantly falls into the really basic pitfall of constantly telling instead of simply showing. There are SO many instances where a character will be witty and say something like "This long trip isn't such a big deal now that we're ghosts is it?" I understand that these characters are pretty freshly ghosts, but it still feels extremely unnatural. I haven't commented once in this review that I'm writing it because I'm a human; why do ghosts constantly need to tell each other that they're ghosts? And of course, as others have pointed out, the majority of the main story ideas are not addressed or resolved at all in the ending. Right when I was excited to finally start learning answers to my most burning questions, "The End" appeared on my screen and that was that. Believe me, I'm a sucker for ambiguous, open-to-interpretation endings, but there's a huge difference between an ambiguous ending and an unwritten one. Overall, my experience was... fine, I guess, and the game was cute, but it did not deliver on either my hopes or its own promises. I understand there's a great financial burden in developing games as an indie studio, but I really think this could have shined with more time to playtest, iron out the bugs, and both refine and expand the writing. I will keep an eye out for any of your future titles, because there were elements of the game I really did enjoy; but ultimately, I wish The Outbound Ghost was as willing to seriously explore its own ideas and themes as I was excited to entertain them.