GHOSTWARE: Arena of the Dead

A story far too vague and confusing and gameplay far too boring for its own good.

Super unpredictable and creative genre fusion of arena FPS, liminal space horror, Metroidvania and branching narrative adventure game. The tone is very silly most of the time, but the plot is surpisingly mysterious and intriguing. There is also some poignant commentary on nostalgia and social interaction in the gaming space (or lack thereof.) It is banking pretty hard on the 90s nostalgia, some of my favorite homages were to Counter-Strike and The Matrix. However, there are also some newer jokes for modern gamers and older references like to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. A game made by practically 2 people and help won't be perfect, but overall it's amazing how coherent this experience feels. The disjointed genres feel intentional, like The Wizard is stringing you along through whatever he pleases. Some of the voice acting is awkward but again that feels like a part of the 90s charm. Fortunately, Molly is a likeable protagonist and is well voice-acted for the most part. She has these fun interjections between dialogue lines that are barely audible and not captioned. For some reason I liked that a lot. Concrete issues I have are mostly nitpicks. There's a flashlight in the…

This starts out fine but quickly unravels into being a very boring and shallow shooter with a plot that feels like a first draft and goes nowhere with characters so paper thin that I forgot that there was more outside of Molly and The Wizard until the final mission. The campaign will take you about 2-3 hours, maybe less, and the vain "metroidvania" elements (which is just a glorified, broken level select) pad the runtime. There's a level that, every time you go in, will play an unskippable cutscene. There's The Island level that becomes completely inaccessible after you complete it even though there's collectibles you can miss. The abilities you can get are useless: from the starting "sand throw" that requires you to be one foot from your target to the "dash" which is only available much deeper when you're 30 minutes from the conclusion, or the "super jump" that is never required to get anything and is useless. It's not fun having to wander through empty levels to pick up vague lore notes or, at the worst, dumb jokes that add nothing to the experience. Combat is rough, enemies are spongey, the bosses are easy and take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes tops to beat (the final to…

Apparently this is meant to be a love letter to arena shooters but I just don't see it as most arena shooters are playable. Skip this and try Texnoplazm unless you really want to support Loudspeakerz any way you can. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2527710/TEXNOPLAZM/

Well the game really goes deeper than being retro-fps. It is kinda mocking around nostalgia which was fun. The story seems quite finished for me [spoiler]with two possible endings[/spoiler]. I like that the game went further than being just arena shooter and you can explore the maps. Web pages were fun too. The gameplay was smooth. Except I got lost at pair of moments and had to beat the boss again to listen where to go next. Navigator didn`t show tasks and I just missed the line. Q3 and UT yeah but for me it was also like NOLF. In general we got retro-fps which almost didn`t have annoying map desings, boring endless action, tasks which only creators could understand and dialogues like "and now player walks into a bar". You can talk to your pals and even not to pals and they have like reasons connected. And you don`t have to run around them every time. It`s pleasure to see some tribute to janky retro games. Mostly those quirks do bring fun to gameplay. Imagine janky fps with no funny glitches and stuff. In the same time you don`t play the game feeling like it's a complete mess. Good game really.

I like the fact that you can bunny hop in this game. story wasnt bad.