Ghost in the pool

My first impression of Ghost in the Pool was purely visual: that stark black-and-white panel work hitting the screen like a page torn straight out of something unsettling you found at the back of a library shelf. CASCHA GAMES, a solo Chinese developer, collaborated with comic illustrator JOEY to adapt a story from the horror anthology series Guiwenzhai into an interactive format, and the handcrafted aesthetic is the clearest reason to be here. Over 200 fully hand-drawn art resources fill out the campus setting, and the monochromatic palette occasionally punctuated by red interface elements gives the whole thing a controlled, pressurized atmosphere that a color palette would probably dilute. The story centers on Yaru, a high-school swimmer grinding through academic stress and a looming competition, who decides to sneak into the natatorium late at night with a duplicate key. The pool, of course, has a rumor attached to it. The game leans into that campus-legend feeling deliberately: the threat stays vague just long enough to let unease ferment before it sharpens into something more concrete. There are binary choices throughout, free-interaction segments where you click on environmental objects (the usual inventory of dread: dead animals, smeared walls, wrong-shaped shadows), and three main endings, one of which the community has labeled "mid" in the actual UI, which is either charming or disorienting depending on your patience for localization quirks. Two to three hours gets you all endings on repeat playthroughs, and the main path alone runs just over an hour. The rough edges are real and worth knowing about before you sit down. The flowchart system, which unlocks after your first ending and should let you jump back to decision points, frequently misfires: it sometimes dumps you at the ending screen and kicks you to the title, and even when it works it tends to land you later in a scene than you expected, forcing you to re-navigate. There is no text skip, which makes replaying for the other two endings feel slower than it should. The translation is functional but uneven, with occasional untranslated lines and some inconsistency in how the school setting is described. None of this breaks the experience, but it does interrupt the atmosphere that the art is working hard to build. What it gets right, it gets right in a way that sticks. The zoom-in mechanic during object inspection builds genuine dread despite itself. The rock track that surfaces during nightmare sequences has a rawness that the more ambient OST tracks lack. And the storytelling instinct to keep Yaru's supernatural situation vague at the edges, letting the school-pressure narrative run alongside the horror rather than underneath it, shows more craft than the game's runtime might lead you to expect. If you love short horror visual novels in the vein of the Junji Ito aesthetic, or you just want something that knows exactly what it is and commits to it for ninety minutes, Ghost in the Pool is worth your time in a way the flowchart bugs might make you question mid-playthrough but won't make you regret afterward.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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