Ebenezer and the Invisible World

I have a soft spot for games that ask a genuinely odd question and then commit to answering it. The question here: what if Ebenezer Scrooge, after his famous redemption, became a cane-swinging champion of London's working class who recruits the city's trapped spirits to fight an Industrial Revolution villain? That premise alone carried me through the slower stretches, and I suspect it will do the same for anyone who has ever wanted more from a Dickens adaptation than another Christmas Eve retread. The ghost mechanic is the heart of the game and, when it clicks, its best idea. You complete small quests for lingering spirits across Victorian London, and in return they join your roster. Movement ghosts - trapeze artists Rose and Flossie Reed, mountaineer Victoria Peak, time-bending professor Haley Hall among them - gate your traversal in classic metroidvania fashion, opening paths you walked past an hour earlier. Combat ghosts summon fireballs, harpoon throws, a ball-and-chain swing, and a falcon companion that orbits Scrooge and picks off enemies on its own. Layered on top are heirloom slots for passive buffs, multiple cane weapons including a projectile-firing Lion's Head cane, and Spirit Kids that passively assist in combat. On paper, that is a pleasingly stacked toolkit. In practice, the Ghost Select Wheel can feel fiddly under pressure, and the abilities rarely build on each other in the satisfying, compounding way the best metroidvanias manage. The hand-drawn art is the other major draw, and it earns every mention it gets. Victorian London here is dense with atmosphere: background NPCs going about foggy streets, candle-lit windows framing wrought-iron fences, and a ghost-haunted necropolis that feels genuinely unsettling in the right way. The frame-by-frame animation on the character sprites shows real craft. If you are the sort of player who stops mid-run to look at background scenery, this game will slow you down pleasantly. The soundscape, too, keeps the mood tethered to that particular Victorian-winter register without ever becoming saccharine. Where the goodwill fades is in the moment-to-moment feel. Scrooge moves at a deliberate pace that some will read as characterful and others will read as sluggish, and the gap between checkpoint stations in early areas means a bad run costs more time than it should. Hitbox reliability has been a consistent complaint across platforms since launch, with collision damage and inconsistent enemy reach making otherwise fair fights feel unfair. The map is large, fast travel points are sparse, and some quest direction is vague enough that you will wander without purpose. A launch patch addressed the worst of the soft-locks and crashes, and Steam user reviews have settled into a broadly positive range, suggesting the roughest edges have been sanded. But the structural issues - slow traversal, occasional pacing drag in the mid-game, dialogue that leans on exposition - are baked in, not bugs. The honest summary: this is a second-tier metroidvania wearing first-rate clothes, and whether that trade-off works for you depends entirely on how much the setting and ghost-quest loop speak to you. For players who love the Dickens source material, appreciate handcrafted art, and can forgive mechanical softness in service of a charming world, there is a genuine 10-plus hour adventure here with sidequests and lore profiles that flesh out the ghost cast beyond their combat utility. Genre purists expecting the precision of Hollow Knight or the momentum of Dead Cells will find the friction hard to ignore. Go in with adjusted expectations and you may find, like Scrooge himself, that the experience is better than first impressions suggest.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Ebenezer and the Invisible World.