I've been curious about this game for a while.
It's visually beautiful with a cute main character. You have to hide from big rats while on your journey.

Prepare to hide a lot and be asked to find a lot of items. The game play is very repetitive and there are a lot of guards protecting the area. After finding the guard armor you'll be able to fool the guards but you'll lose speed in contrast.
The world is quite small and you'll be stuck in one area the entire game. The good thing is that you can unlock new places by finding paths and keys. By unlock I mean doors and not new "worlds".
The story is not over the top but it frankly fits this game quite well. The dialogues aren't dreary as one would think by the style of dialogue.

It wasn't particularly great to play this game but it was worth it for the experience. Outside of the main areas you'll see that the landscapes are bare and apart that there's a few glitches.

Nice soundtrack

I loved this stealth adventure more than I initially thought. Please give me more games that allow me to play as a mouse.

I wasn't thrilled with the stealth; however, the game does give you an option to essentially remove that aspect of the gameplay. (Thank you devs!) The characters are fun to get to know. The world is much more expansive and open. I thought this was a strict linear story. Nope, you explore a ton here. There's side quests, useful costumes with purpose, tools, and skills. It was a joy to play. Only a few frustrations.

The open world was fun to explore. They did a fantastic job bringing in castles, ruins, a forest, etc to life. It's a pro, but sadly, also a con. No other way to say it; there is a ton of running back and forth in each area between exploring and completing quests. There is no fast travel. You have to use your little mouse feet to get around these LARGE areas. It could have benefited from tightening the maps. It's easy to get lost and there are areas you can walk around with nothing in them. Sometimes bigger isn't better, ya know.

The other frustrations came from worrying if I accidentally broke quests. There are a handful of quests that seem a bit buggy, touchy? Thankfully after reading posts about other players having the same issues and yet able to continue, the anxiety would go away. But it doesn't feel great when a game isn't clear as it could be and you stress you broke something.

In the end, I adored Ghost of a Tale. I hope there is a sequel so I can join the world again with Tilo.

I had not realized that I had this in my GoG library, not sure where it even came from. But I’d seen it leaving PS+ at one point, and thought the art style looked intriguing. It is somewhat like a point and click adventure game, and metroidvania, but the scale is very small and palatable. Where you will use items to solve puzzles, and do different things, but also return to different locations after finding keys to doors. The game is able to walk the fine line of being cute, but also dark. You start off in jail as a political prisoner, and essentially Mice are not unlike slaves in this world. But then you have a frog who is in a headstock, gives you items by pooping them out. Pretty good, and a small adventure.

Me parece un juego divertido, sobre todo en las primeras horas. Tiene sigilo, personajes carismáticos, un buen puñado de zonas y misiones secundarias... Ahora, hay que señalar que sonoramente deja bastante que desear y que desde la mitad hasta final del juego, vas a dar muchísimos paseos. Para ello debes conseguir la armadura de guardia, pero por algún motivo decidieron que con esta andas extremadamente lento aun a pesar de mejorarla al máximo, lo cual hace que los paseos arriba y abajo sean aun más pesados. Otra pega que se podría poner es que te suelta mucho lore a lo largo de todo el juego, pero realmente poco tiene importancia para el mismo. La mayoría plantea settings para futuras entregas más que para esta.

Puede ser un juego interesante para aquellos que busquen algo fácil y no les importa la lentitud al andar, pero la verdad es que me esperaba más.

There are some very good ideas behind Ghost of a Tale. Lionel Gallat clearly has a talent for building spaces and his use of scale is clever for a story where you play as a small mouse in a big rat's world. Other qualities, ranging from its Brian Jacques-esque story to disguise system, are also broadly well done.

But Gallat's ideas aren't always well-executed. From stealth to movement in armor, there's too much that slows the player down from start to finish. I would have also liked for disguises beyond the armor and ranger's gear to be more broadly useful, rather than necessary for only a few conversations. Additionally, I think that the location of important objects in the world doesn't match the coherence of its spaces. While good for a treasure hunt, I often didn't see the logic in item placement beyond making a player crisscross maps repeatedly. That, coupled with the tradeoff of slower movement in exchange for avoiding stealth, hurt the pace of the game.

Some interesting world-building and story beats can make up for the rough edges of a production completed mostly by a single individual. The lack of clear signposts for progression and an exhaustive amount of backtracking meant I saw a lot of the same areas over and over and over. I can only imagine what a tremendous labor this was, and a bigger team might have been able to implement some quality-of-life improvements that it desperately needed. As it stands, I'd look forward to seeing the creator's next game with a hopefully bigger team, even if I can't fully endorse this one.

This game made me re-watch Disney's 1977 film the rescuers, I haven't been able to get the Rescue Aid Society theme out of my head for like three days now. Literally the only connection is that you play as a mouse but dam if Ghost of a Tale isn't a charming little game. I simply adore the aesthetic, atmosphere and art style it has, half the time I was just smiling as I played.

You play as a little mouse minstrel called Tilo escaping as a prisoner from a falling apart rat fortress whilst trying to find your missing wife. A lot of the inspirations for this game came from films and books like the Secret of Nimh, Redwall, and the Dark Crystal and it absolutely shows in the best way. The lore to the game is genuinely very good as you meet more characters and complete quests learning why you are there and the state of the outside world and it's history. A lot of the characters are funny, weird or in some cases solemn but each of them stand out and are interesting to interact with in their own way.

It's a weird game when it comes to how it plays. It's sort of a stealth game but an RPG with quests, skills and levels but there is no combat and to be honest this comes as a bit of a negative as you have to sneak around or wear guard armor to get by. With the small location however and huge amount of backtracking this does get old fairly fast which is a pity because I love everything else about it. Tilo's stats are based purely on the different costumes he collects which you can mix and match as you please and you can throw sticks, bottles, and slime to distract or knockout guards for small amounts of time but the more fun areas are just where you explore without enemies more like an adventure game though sadly they are limited. I actually think the game would be improved either with combat or removing the need for stealth simply due to the fact you basically run around the same hub level rather than constant new levels to explore.

All that said the areas themselves as mentioned look fantastic. The decrepit fortress, dungeon, forest locations are all full of detail and charm. The graphical style is interesting in that the characters are going for a bit of realism but in a cartoon caricature way yet they look a little bit like stop animation puppets? It's hard to describe and perhaps totally inaccurate but I love how they look and the animations are excellent.

The games ending teases a sequel and though nothing official has been announced I hope that is the case as I really loved my time with this and would like more in this world that the tiny team SeithCG created. No seriously this was apparently made mostly by just one guy Lionel Gallat who used to work at Dreamworks as an animator. That explains why the animations are so good then....

Underrated gem, give it a go.

+ Great characters.
+ Interesting story and world lore.
+ Art design is superb.

- A lot of back tracking in a small area gets old.

I wanted to like this more than I did. It comes down that most of what you do in this game is not fun. Running around and dodging guards is not fun even if its in a very realized world– interconnected and gorgeously designed. The main plot wasn't very interesting even if the world-building and characters were pretty decent. Despite how cartoony some could be, they all felt like inhabitants of this world. The lore in this game is good.

There are other small things to praise, like the overall art is good but the profile graphics are very expressive and often quite cute. This game was mostly frustrating. The stealth is bad and doesn't evolve much past the first hour. This game might have my least favourite stamina system with a sprint that drains too fast and refills very slowly.

I don't know if this will ever get a sequel and I really want it to because I think a lot of the game's problems come from it being a developer's first try and a sequel would iron out the issues. It's been nearly six years, though.

This made me realise I should probably start checking out more games I haven't heard of on PS+ Extra because this game only caught my eye when it was leaving the service and the description had me intrigued. Ghost of a Tale is a pretty interesting game that is trying to do a lot with what seems like a low budget. It's refreshing to play an RPG that takes place in a small world and has very little to no combat. You'll be mostly sneaking by enemies although I wouldn't say the stealth mechanics are particularly developed. The focus is more on finding parts of costumes through exploration or quests which allow you to blend in, or cause less noise or run faster. I was quite surprised to find myself quite invested in the characters too. With the main character being a bard, I wish they did something a bit more substantial with the songs other than picking one from a list and listening to an instrumental version. The zero voice acting was an obvious problem there. It's a cool little game that I would like to see what the developers do next, especially with a bit more budget.

What's your excuse? Triple-A game developers, with too much money and too much time on their hands aren't able to make a game with half the atmospheric depth, half the world-building, half the genuine love and affection that goes into Ghost of a Tale. I'm talking about a game where I had to recomplete it three times just to get the platinum as it glitched, a game where you'll often fall through the map or guards will see you from two buildings away, a game with such technical fault that it probably shouldn't have been released like this. Everything else is that good that it simply doesn't matter, and comes off as earnest more than anything. Ghost of a Tale wears its funding on its sleeve: it truly is the little mouse trying to survive in a rat eat rat world. There is no excuse.