GhostControl Inc.

My first honest reaction after a few hours with GhostControl Inc. was something like 'this is exactly the game I wanted, just a bit less of it than I needed.' The core pitch is genuinely clever: you bootstrap a ghost-hunting company in London from a garage and a VW Beetle, take calls from panicked residents, dispatch a squad to the haunted location, then switch to isometric turn-based combat to actually clear the site. Two loops, one game. That structure alone puts it ahead of a lot of 2014 indie releases that tried only one of those things. The business side is the more satisfying half. Competing agencies are also hunting jobs, so there is a light time-pressure on call response that gives the city map some texture. Revenue funds better headquarters, larger vehicles, new hires, and equipment upgrades. The version shipped to Steam added a research lab where scientists develop improved weapons and traps, which helps the progression curve feel less flat than early reviews described. Hunter classes include a Leader type for your first employee, with stats growing through use rather than level-up menus, which is a clean design call that respects casual players. The hiring pool shuffles on demand, so you can reroll for a Bruiser or a more balanced candidate before committing your limited budget. The tactical layer is where the numbers get uncomfortable. Each hunter gets two actions per turn: move, fire, deploy a trap, or interact with the environment. Weakening a ghost before dropping a trap next to it is the core interaction, and that forces at least one team member into close range every engagement, which creates genuine tension on tougher encounters. Enemy types range from basic Screamers to Voodoo Spectres, Liches, and Halloween Spirits, and boss fights introduce mechanics like knockback puddles that preview later enemy behaviors. That is competent design. The problem is the sanity system, GhostControl's version of health. When sanity drains too far a hunter flees the map; drain it completely and they are permanently institutionalized and gone from your roster. The threshold behavior is opaque and the feedback on status effects like curses and stuns does not give you enough information to make clean decisions. Genre veterans will find that maddening. The tactical map itself is also small and non-scrollable, combat environments repeat visually across restaurants, tube stations, parks, and cemeteries, and the ghost sprite variety thins out faster than the mission variety does. For newcomers to turn-based tactics this is actually a reasonable entry point, and I say that as someone who color-codes Paradox patch notes. The tutorial walks through the city clock, the business UI, and combat in a sensible order. The two-action system is approachable. The difficulty of explaining it to a genre veteran is the inverse problem: there is not enough decision surface in late combat to hold someone who has logged serious XCOM or Fallout time. Steam's user score sits at a mixed 69 percent from around 146 reviews, which tracks. Fans of the concept tend to love it despite the rough edges; players expecting genre depth tend to bounce off within a few hours. No mod ecosystem exists to extend the content, and the game has not received updates since its 2014 Steam launch window. Mac players on Catalina or later are locked out entirely by a 32-bit compatibility wall that has never been patched. Diego, Scout Team

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