Ghost Song

I keep thinking about the Deadsuit standing still. Let her idle for a moment and she starts murmuring to herself, questioning her existence, reciting poetry, mentioning her favorite color. That one small detail tells you everything about what kind of game Ghost Song is. It is a Metroidvania built on atmosphere and interiority first, combat second, and it earns every slow minute of its roughly ten-hour runtime. The bones are familiar if you have spent time with Super Metroid or Hollow Knight. You are a combat-ready mechanical suit with amnesia, dropped into the labyrinthine caverns of Lorian V, and your job is to piece together what happened here while helping the survivors of a crashed spaceship reassemble their vessel. The five ship-part retrieval missions structure the middle act, and the clever twist is that carrying a part back to camp disables fast travel and wakes aggressive machines that hunt you down. Those runs home are some of the most genuinely tense sequences in the genre in recent memory. The moon refreshes a little after each delivery too, new NPC dialogue, updated shops, advanced quest stages, which gives the world a quiet sense of life breathing around you. Combat runs on a rhythm that feels deliberate once it clicks. Your plasma blaster overheats with sustained fire, and that heat amplifies your melee hits, so you are constantly toggling between range and close quarters to maximize damage. On top of that sits a module system with 12 blaster slots and 27 suit slots, letting you tilt your build toward gun power, vigor, or energy while mixing in oddities like a slime barrage or passive regen. Three core stats, vigor, resolve, and gun power, get upgraded with nanogel collected from enemies, and death drops your stash at the kill spot in classic souls fashion, though the Explorer difficulty mode softens the penalty significantly. Traversal gates open in classic Metroidvania style, with Phase Dash, double jump, and sprint arriving at measured intervals and unlocking new strata of the moon. Optional roaming boss enemies patrol earlier zones and drop modules if you have the patience for them. Honesty demands flagging the friction. The movement in the early hours feels heavier than players raised on Metroid Dread will expect, and PC Gamer was not wrong that the dodge can feel imprecise in tight corridors. Hitboxes on both Deadsuit and several enemy types are looser than they should be. The level geometry leans on similar underground palettes a bit too long, and some players will find the voiced NPC dialogue drops in unskippable chunks right after key deliveries. These are real complaints and not ones to wave away. But they sit inside a game where the soundtrack by Jafet Meza gives every biome its own ambient dread, where a place called Six Finger Woods exists and is exactly as unsettling as that name suggests, and where the story of who the Deadsuit actually was lands with genuine emotional weight if you let it. Ghost Song is a solo passion project nine years in the making, and that singular creative voice is present in every odd, careful corner of it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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