I love ghosts, and the idea of playing a game from the perspective of a haunted mansion is pretty fun. As a seasonal scare actor myself, the type of game I imagine when I think about what I just described is something like managing one of those haunted attractions, choosing where to place your “scare actors” and watching as they jump out and terrify guests.
That’s sort of the kind of game Ghost Keeper is trying to be: a puzzle game where you frighten, or outright kill, the mortal intruders on your haunted domain using your cast of ghosts and their unique skills. If you played the older title Ghost Master, you have something of an idea of what to expect from Ghost Keeper, which feels in many ways to be a spiritual (pun intended) successor to the aforementioned game.
The gameplay loop is pretty simple; you enter into a manually selected level, each with its own unique layout and objectives, but all are built around the same basic goal. You must kill or scare off humans using the abilities provided by your team of ghosts, with each human’s health and fear bars determining which choice is more effective. Ghost abilities are traps or special effects that affect humans in their own ways, and once you’ve got a few ghosts unlocked, you can set up some pretty basic combos that can essentially remove one or more humans from the game in one go, if used correctly.
During the level, humans roam from room to room, with each action performed in a room increasing its haunt level, which can be used to increase the power of some abilities. Ghosts can use certain abilities to interact with the level for unique effects and become more and more exposed throughout the level as they use abilities, which both allows humans to see them and changes some of their own abilities. Ghost hunters will occasionally enter the level and can remove a ghost from play until the level is over if you aren’t careful when interacting with them.
It’s a strong premise, and in the game’s current Early Access state, the developers have a lot of potential to build upon. Unfortunately, that also means that the current build can most certainly leave players wanting.
One of the most noticeable issues with the current build is a host of bugs or features that don’t seem to make a lot of sense. One pretty frequent bug I had to face involved humans running away from my ghosts whenever they entered a room, despite their visibility being low or even nonexistent. Since ghosts need a second to spawn into a room before they can use abilities, this could make actually affecting the humans hard to do, as they would just scream and run out of the room before I had a chance to do anything to them.
I found the game’s tooltips and UI to be an area the game needs to improve upon, too. The game’s current interface is pretty lacking, being overly simple and not all that pleasant to look at, which gives the game a pretty dated look, though that alone won’t bother everyone who checks the game out. What’s a bigger issue are the tooltips for each ability, which feel unnecessarily wordy and hard to read. These definitely could use a pass to convey information faster and simpler, as I often found myself pausing the game just to take a minute and read through a ghost’s abilities so I knew exactly what they did.
What I found the most disappointing about the game’s current build is the lack of interactivity throughout a map. There are some objects which can be influenced by your ghost’s actions, essentially scare traps that frighten or harm the human intruders in a level. While this is undoubtedly the best part of the game, I found these special interactions to be too few and far between, with one or two per level not counting furniture that you can levitate for a somewhat unique, but repetitive animation. “Repetitive animations” are also how I would describe most of the game’s interactable areas; these supposedly special points of interest could seriously do with more flair rather than simply being an area where you spray water on someone or watch them light a fireplace.
There are definitely some spots in the game that feel way more special and spectacularly spooky, and I would like to see the developers take the time to add more of those to the game as it develops.
As it stands, there isn’t enough to do in each level of Ghost Keeper to live up to the game’s own fantasy of setting up haunts and scaring trespassers. While a few unique level interactions exist, the game mostly feels like you’re executing the same two or three ability combos over and over again, chasing humans away as fast as possible and with minimal effort. Because the game does, in my opinion, a less-than-stellar job of showing you the ropes, the early game learning curve can also involve a lot of waiting around as your ghosts refresh their visibility bars, and you figure out how to interact with humans using your abilities. Basically, when the game isn’t going too slow, it’s going too fast, and it lacks many of the exciting interactions you would want from a game like this.
Overall, Ghost Keeper fits a very unique niche, being a spiritual successor to a beloved cult-classic game that nostalgic fans should enjoy. In the current Early Access state, the game has a ton of potential to build upon, with some of the right ideas already in place. However, I think the game still needs a lot of work, and I would like to see the developers work on the points outlined in this review. Particularly, I hope to see more of the unique interactions and animations on each map expanded upon, because to me, that’s when the game is at its best.
Pros:
- A strong premise, built as a spiritual successor to Ghost Master
- Unique characters and a mechanical loop with a lot of promise
Cons:
- Confusing, hard to look at UI, and difficult to read tooltips
- Gameplay loop in the current game state goes from confusing and slow to too easy pretty fast
- Very limited unique map interactions or “scare traps,” which are the game’s best feature
- Bugs and problems to be expected in the current Early Access build
TryHardGuides was provided a Steam code for this PC Early Access Review of Ghost Keeper. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page!
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