Ghostware: Arena of the Dead is a single-player Arena FPS created by the indie dev team “Daev Team.” The game was released into Early Access April 12, 2023, and it finally made full release on June 10th, 2024. I participated in a closed beta test earlier than that - this is a game I’ve been keeping a constant eye on since it was first revealed to the public. I’m gonna be going over each aspect of the game: the Premise, Presentation, Sound, Gameplay, Story, and my Final Thoughts. Spoilers ahead!

Premise

There is almost nothing else out there similar in concept to Ghostware. The game draws inspiration from the Arena Shooters of times past - Quake III Arena and, more prominently, Unreal Tournament, along with its predecessor Unreal. Instead of trying to clone or replicate those games, it uses these inspirations as a framing device - what if there was a single-player, story focused adventure game set in the genre? The whole ‘Arena FPS’ framing ties directly into the narrative - the game’s early antagonist wanted to revive a dead genre, and turned to necromancy to recreate his nostalgia with ‘real’ players. Older multiplayer shooters like this game’s inspirations always featured a colorful cast of diverse characters, but only the faintest framing of a narrative and personality traits buried between the pages of their manuals. Ghostware makes an effort to bring these things to the forefront. Over the course of the five-ish hour campaign you’ll talk to a variety of characters, watch scripted cutscenes, and read extra lore through scattered webpages to piece together the game’s story and world. You fight opponents with big guns, all with alternate firing modes, and unlock secondary abilities along the way to give you more options in combat.

Presentation

Ghostware’s presentation is a mix of highs and lows. The character models and environments are incredibly well done, mixing digital abstract hellscapes with detailed realistic locations depending on the level. All of the guns look and sound distinct, with some cool and nostalgic designs. There were a few guns later on in the game where I knew their function off of silhouette alone. The faux webpages you can collect capture that feeling of the early internet - a wild west of personal blogs and shady message boards.

Other elements of the presentation feel fairly undercooked. Frequent loading screens are abrupt and ungraceful. I had a few instances of the game automatically skipping the last line of dialogue. On occasion my weapon would become invisible, or friendly NPCs would walk away backwards constantly facing the player, as if they couldn’t decide whether they were hostile or not. Just a couple of glitches here and there that could’ve been ironed out with a little more time in the oven.

Sound

This is where Ghostware shines. Mothership Loudspeakerz, the game’s composer (as well as programmer and designer) is an experienced musician with several albums under their belt. The soundtrack is incredibly varied - atmospheric tracks can range from haunting, to intriguing, to straight up magical. Meanwhile combat pieces are frenetic drum-and-bass mixes that bring to mind pleasant memories of frag-filled afternoons. About halfway through I had started internally referring to Ghostware as a bitchin’ album with a free game attached.

Many of the sound effects are crunchy and satisfying, letting even some of the game’s more non-conventional weaponry like the Bubblegun sound like powerhouses. There is some audio overlap between a few of the automatic weapons (mainly the Nailgun and Ricochet) but this gets rectified by the late-game arsenal.

The only thing I didn’t like regarding audio is that there’s a ‘pop’ sound whenever enemies spawn near you that sounds like a placeholder and clashes with the rest of the sound design. It’s funny, though, because it usually results in an instant frag.

Gameplay

The movement in Ghostware is ace. It’s fast-paced, responsive, and has just enough room for tricks and player innovation. You get a fun selection of movement techniques at your disposal - bunny hopping, wall jumping, and sliding all come together to make you feel like a unit. There’s a boatload of weapons - a lot more than the first couple of levels would have you think. The first couple of levels are simulated bot matches - Deathmatch, Domination, CTF - before things start going off the rails. The arenas you start off in are replaced with sprawling levels, traditional enemy AI, platforming segments, puzzles, and occasional dips into horror. There’s a lot of variety in the game, which helps keep its relatively short runtime fresh.

Though you stop fighting faux-bots after a while, enemies still react to damage the same way - pain animations and grunts, though not much in the way of interrupting their patterns. You won’t be knocking anything off of their feet for example, or stun-locking enemies with rapid-fire weapons. In that way some of the combat can feel kind of stiff.

The boss fights are fairly enjoyable, spectacle-filled romps. They were a highlight for me personally when it came to combat.

With the change in game structure comes a change in arsenal - the relatively simple starting weapons get replaced with fancier, more complex armaments. They’re all great fun, and ammo for them is spread out fairly generously. Additional skills are unlockable as well - some allowing the use of special weapons, others providing more passive, supporting effects. They’re separated into “Primary” and “Secondary” skills, and most of them are under Secondary - I wish it was just one pool you could pull from for some semblance of build diversity. One of the Primaries is obtainable in two different locations, which made finding the second one anticlimactic - especially considering that as far as I could tell it didn’t even seem to work.

Saving’s done at dedicated terminals in certain parts of the game’s overall map. From save terminals you can switch abilities. Secrets can be found by revisiting old areas with new abilities. There are checkpoints before particularly brutal encounters, so the biggest concern is losing your weapons upon a respawn.

There’s an additional side mode called Arcade - equivalent to “Instant Action” in contemporary Arena shooters. You pick a model, a map, and how many bots you want to fight and go at it. The mode is pretty bare-bones, but it’s fun for what it is. It’s worth noting that your arsenal’s limited to the first six weapons or so no matter the map you choose, but you can use your equipped skills.

Story

Now, the story is what brought me on board from day one. Heavy spoilers ahead.

Ghostware…

The whole concept of the game, at least at first, rides on the idea of nostalgia. From the very beginning:

“You find yourself here after a fairly long search. The nostalgia for the younger years makes you enjoy retro games. However, something here looks…different.”

It resonated with me, personally. I grew up on the classics. Doom, Unreal, all three of the original Quakes - you name it. I play just about every boomer shooter that hits the virtual shelves these days as it’s a game genre that’s been bringing me joy since I could hardly walk. I’m 26 as of the time I’m writing this review, and I’m still looking for stuff like what I played as a kid, as a teen, and what I play now. I’m also someone who’s huge into characters and storytelling - thinks that most FPS games usually focus on last, if at all. Here comes Ghostware, promising to fulfill that childhood dream of Unreal Tournament with an actual plot, characters you’re supposed to care about, and traditional levels mixed with arena combat. (no, UT3 doesn’t count. UC2 was a step in the right direction, though)

While I’d rather not relate to the Wizard of all characters in Ghostware, I can’t help but find his story interesting. There’s a guy that’s completely given up on finding any joy in the present, and clings desperately to the past in an obsessive manner, to the point of getting involved in necromancy and global conflict. The “players” he brought back for this - they were all real people plucked from eternal rest to appease a manchild whose life has been steadily crumbling around him. You get introduced to the whole gang by the second chapter - an ex-war vet enjoying unlife in the new young body, a kind and helping builder, a simple but well-learned farmer, straight up Van Helsing, and a robot struggling with two streams of consciousness trapped in one body. To see how the cast interacted with one another based on their wildly different origins, and how they might deal with the egotistical Wizard either through appealing to personality or violence was something I was really excited to dive into.

Much like how the game’s back-to-back arena fights then exploration loop gets shelved for the bulk of the game, so too does the entire initial cast of characters. The bigger picture plot revolves around a greedy corporation and the ghosts’ potential for reviving bloodsport - along with players both inside and out working to see their downfall.

It’s certainly an interesting concept, and is handled with a lot of mystery and intrigue to unfurl through hidden lore and context clues. I can’t help but feel like the personal touch the game starts off with gets more or less abandoned by the mid-point as the player becomes little more than a pawn in the scheme of shadow organizations. The main secondary character you’re in contact with the whole game essentially says as much when the protagonist calls it out. It gets called back to toward the end, but by that point it feels like an unimportant footnote in a sea of other stuff going on.

By the end of it, there are still plenty of questions left unsolved…and the alternate ending doesn’t so much as address any loose threads as it does reframe them.

Final Thoughts

Ghostware certainly delivers on the premise of ‘Arena FPS with characters and a plot’ - but I still left the experience wanting. What you get is a mostly functional, engaging tribute to the past - that quickly splinters off into its own thing full of detective work and corp wars. The story ends up feeling mildly unfocused, but the fun weapons, slick movement, dives into fictional message boards and engaging exploration should be enough to keep you interested. Worth checking out for the game’s premise alone.