GHOSTWARE: Arena of the Dead

Super unpredictable and creative genre fusion of arena FPS, liminal space horror, Metroidvania and branching narrative adventure game. The tone is very silly most of the time, but the plot is surpisingly mysterious and intriguing. There is also some poignant commentary on nostalgia and social interaction in the gaming space (or lack thereof.) It is banking pretty hard on the 90s nostalgia, some of my favorite homages were to Counter-Strike and The Matrix. However, there are also some newer jokes for modern gamers and older references like to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. A game made by practically 2 people and help won't be perfect, but overall it's amazing how coherent this experience feels. The disjointed genres feel intentional, like The Wizard is stringing you along through whatever he pleases. Some of the voice acting is awkward but again that feels like a part of the 90s charm. Fortunately, Molly is a likeable protagonist and is well voice-acted for the most part. She has these fun interjections between dialogue lines that are barely audible and not captioned. For some reason I liked that a lot. Concrete issues I have are mostly nitpicks. There's a flashlight in the "Trespasser" minigame, but not in the main game where I would have loved to have one. Some minor visual glitches and this weird bug where the menu wouldn't respond. The Arcade mode is fun, but really does feel like an afterthought in some ways. You can't play the CTF mode, and none of the characters have as many lines as Molly does so why would you play anybody else? It is pretty cool that your viewmodel hands actually change based on who you play as, though. I have seen the dev explain why there's no multiplayer, but it still feels like an obvious component that would be included. The arcade mode would have more legs if we could host and join real matches with friends. Despite the flaws I would HIGHLY recommend this game and I think it's a shame it's not more popular. I guess it's probably because there are no achievements... The sheer creativity and passion on display is reason enough to play through the story at least once - it takes around 3 to 5 hours depending on how much extra exploring you do. It gave me this eerie feeling that couldn't have been made by a person, like this game just materialized out of digital nostalgia.

A story far too vague and confusing and gameplay far too boring for its own good.

eh its decent

I could not finish it. he beginning section were good but as the game went on the flaws became more and more apparent. personally i would advise skipping this one and checking out the developers second project as it seems that is a massive improvement over the previous one

think it dream it do it really enjoyed this going in expecting an arena shooter even though I couldn't tell you exactly what is happening in the story despite reading tons of in-game lore bits, computer screens, etc. finally a good game. my only complaint is some of the bossfights feel pretty bad and occasionally I'd be able to just cheese the mob enemies like they didn't care I was shooting at them. still worth playing imo.

this game looked cool but like this sucks. It was almost cool when the game would let you play the game, but everything that isn't shooting is just bad, and the game is mostly not shooting. isn't that crazy? a first person arena shooter that doesn't let you shoot things. instead the game focuses on the story, and the worst part is that the story also sucks.... like what were they thinking with this?

All style with no substance, even if some of the jankiness is charming, doesn't leave much of an impression after the first hour.

GHOSTWARE: Pumped Brakes. It's been a long time since a game has hit me with such...absolute confusion as Ghostware has. Every duck was in a row for this game to tickle the brain like I've had with previous indie FPS games. A 3D arena shooter "Metroidvania" that has you hopping between realities and blowing things up with a motley crew of weapons and allies. It looks cool, it sounds cool, it plays like a slick piece of coding machinery. Everything is in a row and then WHAM! Frying pan to the face of the game's ending that just sorta slides in out of nowhere, and before you can even process that ending, you're thrust straight back into the main menu to go piecing together side pot ideas from the random items you scavenged from every level. I could hear the tires in my brain screech to a halt when that happened. Ghostware: Arena of the Dead is a lot of things, as you've gleamed from the description of this game. A Unreal adjacent Metroidvania where you play as Molly, a lost soul entrapped in someone's demented arena shooter and forced to kill other lost souls for the "Wizard's" personal enjoyment. Canonically dressed like ♥♥♥♥ because of said Wizard, so that explains the tits. The system that the Wiz is using to ensnare you and other souls however begins to break down, and you're given a chance to escape with an eponymous hacker. It's a fairly normal framework of a plot that can't seem to fully get behind what it wants to be. There's a constant rubber band between some wider mythos as to why exactly you're a lost soul bound to UT99, and also the hacker plot about a corporation effectively trying to entrap lost souls to make a UT99 powered Running Man to print money on advertising and bets. They're both not the worst root ideas, but the issue comes down into the good ol' implementation. The game just sorta floats between the "digital lost soul forced to use the ASMD" and "The Running Man sponsored by Epic Games" and never really gets both to a good conclusion. It just smashes the two together at the end and calls it a day. It exudes some level of "rushed out of the door" that I cannot presume was an intentional design decision. The gameplay of Ghostware is the one saving grace, it hybridizes your standard first person arena combat with enough modern features like walljumping and slides to keep it interesting. Plus not one but TWO whole weapon sets of oddball guns to keep things fresh when you "hop between realities" as the game likes to call 1-2 chapter transitions. There's a few mediocre ones in that lineup, like the SMG or the Concussion Shotgun that I could do without, but they're all still relatively fun. The enemy AI for said arenas is a fairly decent foe if you elect to use this game as a "replacement for the Unreal that Tim Fortnite DENIES you". The campaign enemies not so much, a litany of slightly-too-spongy robots and human mercenaries that exist to have you accidentally kill yourself with the shotgun's alt fire. Interspersed with bosses of a bipolar quality, and the stink of who they're copying written on full display. The ending boss does feel like a 2nd stage Armstrong except with no punching which is extremely wack. Also I still have no idea where the Metroidvania elements ARE in this game, best guess is that it counts giving you random special abilities that you use once or twice before never touching again. I don't think that legally qualifies you to use the term "metroidvania" but I'm not the person enforcing terms on Steam. Perhaps if there had been more game, I could've found a meta... It's just a bizarrely short little shot of a game that seems to fumble one of the simplest bags in history. The plot concepts it raises are neat, but it doesn't ever seem to get them fully conceptualized before it's going "Cut!" and moving on to the next stage. The dialog is clunky and short, and the last hour of this game SCREAMS a rush job. You can see massive gaps in the narrative where more stuff was supposed to exist, and instead the game just gives you a 9g bit of whiplash going from a tech base to tribal area to a casino mission and so on. Bossfight after bossfight appearing and disappearing like nothing, giving you mechanics and then skittering out the door. I was expecting some twist with the fake out level prior to the final boss, but nope! That's it! Conglaturations, you killed the final boss! Here's your credits, it's just long enough to get you over the final hump that keeps you from refunding the game! If there had been less effort in this game, I'd call that intentional. But this game has just enough effort put in it with modeling, mechanics and so on that it wouldn't make sense for a cheap cash grab. We know what slop looks like on Steam, it's in the New Releases section. Stolen models, AI voices, Unity asset flips, all that razzle dazzle. You don't build a game like this for that marketshare, nor do you prepare it like they did. This game had a good few years of teasers, it has friends with a lot of other boomer shooters to an extent with all of the bundles. Sprinkles of lore and cutscenes trying to plug in the gaps in the wall, turned into "secrets" for you to find that are barely even hidden. This is a Singularity or a Prey moment, it's a game with ideas and concepts that's being kicked out of the door for reasons that I don't know, and until someone starts datamining Daev Team, we may never know. It's a game that stops just as soon as it starts getting some inertia, and I don't know if that's intentional, or if there's some hitherto unknown tragedy lurking behind that credits sequence that explains everything.

The description made it look worthwhile however it is anything but. Waste of time and money.