Das Geisterschiff / The Ghost Ship

A step based science ficion dungeon crawler type game. Does a good job capturing the mood of some old Japanese Saturn/PS1 games. Recommended if you like that kind of thing, because there aren't many other games like it. (it says I have 0 hours because I played the version released on itch.io)

[b][i]Review copy provided by developer[/i][/b] A unique look is all you need to get me into a game, and Das Geisterschiff had me right from the start. I was doubly interested to then find it a turn-based dungeon crawler in the vein of classic Wizardry or Grimrock. The cyberpunk stylings were just icing on the cake, forming a trifecta I thought would be a total delight. And I was wrong, tragically wrong, because inside that cake is just a tiny bit of fluff. All the style in the world won’t save your game if nothing happens in it, and after hours of wandering empty halls searching for invisible items I’m ready to blame my boredom on exactly that. Turns out the future isn’t full of grim darkness, it’s actually so bright the surface of the Earth has been scorched clean. Everyone who didn’t get an atomic sunburn moved the party underground, where two dystopian megacorps now lord over the remaining populace. I guess they got bored down there because they’re stuck in a forever war and you’ve joined up with one of them as a mech pilot, taking on odd jobs to stick it to The Man for your own The Man. Your assignments will send you to all sorts of subterranean cities, tunnels, and ruins in search of data to steal or agents to kill, hopefully without wearing down your mech or exhausting you of ammo before that happens. In gameplay terms, you have a grid map to scoot around one turn at a time in search of your objectives. There are doors blocking your progress that you can open, shoot, or bash to get past, and less frequently you’ll find doors to new areas. Maps can be quite winding and confusing, especially with the simplified graphics and few unique features of hallways. Occasionally you’ll be accosted by an enemy, which you’ll take turns popping with your weapons and scooting towards or away from tactically. More often you’ll come across mines to avoid or disarm, or force fields you need to lower somehow. Beyond that, you’ll find wall terminals and random notes that flesh out the story of what you’re doing and how ♥♥♥♥♥♥ the world you’re doing it in is. Before you ask what the titular Geisterschiff is, I will confess that I can’t tell you because I couldn’t get past the second mission. Right from the tutorial and the first mission, the problems that eventually derailed my adventure were apparent. You might have picked up that levels are tough to navigate with few landmarks and many doors, but there’s also no proper map aside from your tiny 5×5 grid on the HUD. That makes it hard enough to find your way around, but the game is rife with fruitless dead ends often behind locked doors that you need to waste valuable ammo or hitpoints to open by bashing them with your face. You’ll need to find items like keys and upgrades but these are literally invisible, requiring you to step into every square on the map to know you’ve found everything. Combat is probably the most interesting part of the game, and because of that also the most damning because it almost never happens. When an enemy approaches, you have the option to attack while advancing, retreating, or holding your ground. You also have four different weapons with different effects on both enemy behavior and damage. Switching and reloading them takes turns, though, so you have to plan ahead a little. The mobility factor allows you to duck around corners to escape or launch ambushes, though at my early stage of the game I mostly just had to shoot until dead. The issue, as I mentioned, was that combat was incredibly rare. I faced perhaps two or three foes in the first level and less than a dozen in the second, and over the course of two hours that’s not much time spent strategizing. The rest of the time was searching for invisible keycards and quest objectives, and that got old real fast. The last big issue with Das Geisterschiff is how thin most of the game systems are. You have stats but no way to influence them except by picking up invisible upgrades off the beaten path for +2 to a stat. You can only repair yourself at workshops, and there’s no way to recover ammo, and that’s about all the purported “survival horror” elements amount to. There are no complex interactions in the game, and no puzzles more complex than “find key for barrier” or “complete quest by going to place”, which makes wandering the empty halls even more of a barren experience. There’s simply not enough to do here except explore samey levels in the hope of progressing and maybe getting to fight something. This is one of those games I really set out to love, one that sounded like a fresh and exciting experience I had been looking for. I love the style, I love the premise, and I love the mash-up of genres. And it could have been great, but all the contents feel utterly half-baked. Even the striking art direction suffers from having no actual animations for anything and a weird smattering of languages confusing the signage and level names. Das Geisterschiff is a bold foundation for a game with a cardboard cutout built atop of it, a hollow experience that only the most patient and invested players will get anything out of. But for me, there are too many games out there that give me a giant mech AND something to do with it, and I’m going to stick to those. Did you enjoy this review? I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope you'll check out more of them at https://goldplatedgames.com/ or on my [url=http://store.steampowered.com/curator/11322459/]curation page[/url]!

Laser-focused, ultra-minimalistic dungeon crawler. Think id's mid-to-late 00s mobile RPGs (Orcs & Elves, Doom RPG, Wolfenstein RPG) their slim frame further stripped down of tissue so that the mere bone of combat, resource management and exploration remains. There are no crutches here, nothing placed at one's disposal is superfluous or optional - one really must master what mechanics there are. Tutorial mustn't be skipped. The presentation is just as spartan yet equally put to just the desired use, minimal wireframe visuals supported by excellent soundtrack conveying this desolate, claustrophobic feeling. The game is, perhaps, on the short side by its genre's standards. I'd argue that the length is just right given the game's self-imposed limitations, just the lenght it can support without sliding into repetition.

Temporary Review: The game has got me craving Armored Core, King's Field, and Shin Megami Tensei all at once. Excellent atmosphere, unique aesthetic, great music, tight gameplay, and plenty of challenge makes for an impressive first project for Graverobber Foundation. Can't wait to see more from them in the future.

I've followed this games development from its early stages and have to say that this is a brilliant debut. Das Geisterschiff is a brutal tile-based dungeon crawler with no handholding and features unique wireframe visuals, outstanding ambient sound design along with a great soundtrack.

The soundtrack is good. The game, unfortunately, isn't. See those cool spartan wireframe graphics? That ethos extends to all aspects of the game's design, even to things it really shouldn't extend to, like basic interface and combat feedback. First, set your mouse aside, you won't be needing it. This is keyboard-only. I decided to write it off as "immersion or something" and sort of went with it. Second, by god, everything is so *slow.* Turning is slow. Moving is slow. Scanning objects (inspecting) is slow. Which, hey, that must be immersion, since you're in a stories-tall mech, right? Well, no. You're in a "mecha," which I guess is closer to a powered exoskeleton, unless we're supposed to believe humans are busy skittering around like ants building house-sized landmines for you to step on. In other words, you're person-sized. Taller, I guess (?) stronger, and encased in armor, but person-sized. Which, to me, begs even more questions: - If I'm person-sized, why am I so slow? An unarmored person could run around me in circles and I'd never be able to catch them. - If I'm person-sized, why's there this weird infrared wireframe display thing? It made sense to me when I imagined a stories-tall war machine that's essentially a block of steel, but if i'm just some dude, some eye slits and a flashlight would do fine, thanks. - Why is there absolutely no feedback whatsoever that I'm taking damage? If I'm person-sized, there should be the sound of bullets ringing off the armor, the concussive effect of the impact not being fully absorbed, maybe my I-guess-it's-infrared display kicking static or flickering. Something beyond a sound effect of gun shots and a number in the corner going down. - What's the processor on this thing, a Pentium 2? It. Takes. So. Long. To. Scan. Anything. Is it rocking, like, 64mb of RAM? Because the thing can't even chart a map. At some point it hit me. These "aesthetic" or "immersive" choices aren't intentional. They're just lazy. Why figure out mouse control? Screw that, it'll just be keyboard-only. Graphics? I'm no good at those, how about we make it look like a Virtual Boy? Combat feedback? The sound effect is enough. Automap? Would take too long to figure out, scrap it. Ultimately the game's presentation feels like it never made it beyond the prototype phase. Instead they claimed it as intentional for immersion and style and pushed it out the door. This isn't to discourage the use of a style like this. It's quite cool, really. But since that kind of minimalism *increases* the immersion, the lazy little things like no combat feedback or auto map or consistent sense of scale *really* stand out in a *really* bad way.

Short version: You can die in the tutorial. Hardcore! 10/10!!! Long version: This game is the long lost cousin of King’s Field, if it was a sci-fi title made for the Virtual Boy. As such, those looking for shiny graphics and twitchy gameplay should stay away: the game’s unique art style looks blocky (although in exchange it works with a toaster, if you can read this you can play it), it’s a turn-based dungeon-crawled that demands patience to be played. The sound effects are okay, nothing special in my opinion, but they do their job. The music though, it’s something else: It perfectly conveys the nightmarish, claustrophobic survival horror scenario that the author wanted to convey. Story-wise I won’t tell much to avoid spoilers: You’re the newest recruit of a corporation in a dystopic future (with all that conveys), you’re given a mook-tier mecha with limited ammo and no melee options besides ramming, then told to go out and do whatever it takes to accomplish the current mission’s objective. As such, exploration is encouraged, not only to find hidden bonuses you’ll very much need to survive, but also written notes and hints such that help you to learn more about the game world. As for the gameplay, there’s a central hub of sorts for each mission, with multiple “dungeons” you must explore to progress. An interesting note is that every zone has their own type of enemies, most of them with unique differences regarding combat. For example: There are some enemies that will attack you on sight but retreat when they’re fatally wounded, others will move twice in an attempt to overwhelm you in melee, others will self-destruct upon receiving fatal damage, a few that will summon other enemies to deal with you instead, etc. Curiously, some of them have unique reactions whenever you use specific weaponry. What means is that the regular punk will panic and consider running away when he realizes you’re aiming at him with a bazooka, which can help you to trick him step into mines and such, but a combat droid won’t have such fear. As expected, the levels have countless traps and hazards that range from mines, to blocked doors, force-fields, damaging tiles, jammers that mess with your stats and/or your visual field and way more. Thankfully, you’re given the option to ram/shoot doors that impede your advance, which can help you to bypass areas you weren’t meant to enter at that point, or find alternate routes. In fact, you can even use doors to your advantage, using them to force enemies to lose track of you or prepare ambushes! Finally, I have to point out that the game is hard. Not in the sense that like the Souls games there’s artificial difficulty (such as a twitchy camera that hasn’t been fixed in decades, or bosses that spam invisible attacks). Instead, you’re given limited resources for every mission and you’re expected to survive or die trying. That includes saving, since the game uses an interesting variation of the lately over-done ironman mode: You begin the game with 100 saving points. You can save anytime, but saving and loading cost you points, so running out of them and getting a game over that kicks you back to the start of the game is quite possible if you’re careless (luckily for you, autosaves between missions are free). However, for those observant or that have experience in similar games, they’ll find the game rather easy and short-lived. After all, the average playthrough is expected to last between 4-6 hours. That being said, the developer stated that the next released patch will included bonus content such as more levels, an expanded endgame and so on. In conclusion, the game feels like a proper old-school title, for good and bad. Those looking for a fresh experience, or that have an itch for dungeon-delving, will feel right at home. If you’re not convinced, you can always try the free demo and see how far you can go!

A very interesting approach to the classic tile-based dungeon crawler games. I like the visuals and the plot premises quickly pull you in. Recommended.

This game is more of an art project then a game. Seriously, its not that good. The mechanics are thin, and navigating is tedious. I double dog dare you to find me someone with 10 hours on this game.

Zat's gonna be a NAH for me dawg. Game really hard on old-school dungeon crawlers era but today is 2019 already, make it optional but where is map? Even some old-school ones had maps that auto-fill after your travels. Also Tutorial... biggest Jebait in gaming history: at least 3 doors with same "find exit" and same layout but different closed doors... Where is guns tutorial? Item pickup tutorial? Upgrade tutorial??? Music and intro story is nice, but game by itself is kinda meh. Good luck with next thing.