The Outbound Ghost

I wanted to fall completely in love with The Outbound Ghost. The premise alone reads like something hand-stitched for me: a ghost town, a cast of troubled spirits each wrestling with personal grief, emotions made manifest as battle companions, and a mystery threaded through a papery 2.5D world. The visual style lands exactly as promised. Characters are flat, cute, rendered with real personality in their designs, and the environments carry a quiet depth that rewards a slow walk through town. The jazz and blues soundtrack is warm and mood-perfect, especially in battle, where the upbeat tempo masks just how repetitive that loop is going to become by hour three. The combat system has a clever skeleton. You do not fight directly. Instead, you summon Figments, which are personified shards of your character's forgotten emotional past: Regret is your first companion, and the idea that you are literally battling with your own trauma is genuinely affecting as a concept. You can collect up to 34 Figments across the story and optional gravestone encounters, slotting four into your active party at once. Each has its own skill set covering standard attacks, area-of-effect moves, status ailments, healing, and resurrection, and every action is gated by an Aether Points economy where defending builds up AP for later spending. A timed cursor mechanic, where hitting the green window on a sliding bar determines damage output, keeps combat from playing out on autopilot. There is also an Aspects crafting system: materials dropped from enemies are forged into badge-like equipment that stack passive effects and stat boosts onto your Figments. On paper, this is a solid RPG architecture. In practice, the execution frays. The timed bar becomes rote quickly. Boss health pools run long, and since enemies can one-shot your Figments with surprising regularity, encounters shift into cautious heal-and-poke loops that feel more like endurance tests than strategy. Outside of combat, the world offers light torch-lighting puzzles and a lock-pick minigame that most reviewers, myself included, found more friction than fun. Exploration rarely rewards curiosity beyond crafting drops. The bigger wound, though, is the story. The amnesiac protagonist chases another amnesiac ghost named Adrian across the entire runtime, and the serial-killer mystery framing the town of Outbound gets shuffled off to the margins rather than built into a satisfying reveal. The narrative shifts protagonist perspective chapter by chapter, which is an interesting structural idea that ultimately left players feeling detached from everyone rather than connected to any one arc. There is also unavoidable context around this release. The developer, Conrad Grindheim of Conradical Games, was publicly at odds with the original publisher over the game's launch window and polish level, and some of what critics found rough around the edges likely traces back to that dispute rather than creative indifference. Steam user reviews sit at a mixed 68% positive across a modest sample, which feels honest. This is a game that clearly comes from a place of genuine love for the early Paper Mario years, and that love is legible in every character design and every note of the soundtrack. It just needed more time to resolve its own unfinished business before ascending.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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