A passion project a decade in development turns out as yet another carbon copy of Super Metroid with great presentation and tacked-on soulslike elements that serve no real purpose.
Its gameplay is perfectly serviceable, with an interesting overheating mechanic that not only prevents you from firing your guns non-stop, but also greatly boosts damage from your melee attacks when your gun is red hot, encouraging switching between ranged and short range combat. It's definitely not Ghost Song's fault that during its troubled development the indie metroidvania scene has been so prolific that such games are by now as numerous as the stars of the sky, oversaturating an industry with an ocean of perfectly competent copycats that make if far more difficult for any single one to stand out. In a different time, Ghost Song would have been special, but the way things are, it's yet another metroidvania that does nothing different from the crowd.
Extrinsic factors aside, it has problems of its own as well: taking a page from Hollow Knight, the world is frustratingly dispersive, requiring the player to wander around for far too long looking for the one way to make progress, running into dead end after dead end, which can get infuriating. The 3D geometry that composes platforms has strange hitboxes, which can lead to the player sprite falling through them when you feel like you landed on one properly. Bosses are few, far between and not very good.
The music is quality stuff, but it rarely fits the action: Metroid did not feature many loud and bombastic tracks either, but its moody and haunting ambients conveyed a sense of danger. Here we are treated to beatiful tunes that belong more in a walking simulator than an action game. Silence would have been more tense.
The soulslike elements boil down to the usual currency retrieval mechanic after being killed, plus that irritating feature from Dark Souls 2 that chips a small percentage off your maximum health each time that happens. Only here it doesn't require some rare resource to restore: just go to one of the broken robots that serve as level up/fast travel points and repair the damage for mere pocket lint. All it does is add a minor inconvenience after every death: walk out of the respawn room, shoot one critter enemy, go back in, spend that currency to repair the damage, go back to your business. One minute wasted on what only amounts to pointless busywork.
You also have the usual dodge move tied to a stamina bar, different stats governing your attributes, and the game is smart enough to not respawn enemies immediately after leaving a room to discourage level farming. Leveling up grants energy points, which set a hard cap to limit how many of the upgrade modules found around the world you can equip at once. These range from some that will decrease your overheating rate (or increase it, for a melee build), make collecting currency easier, display enemy health bars, increase your i-frames, and so on. It's a good system, similar to what is found in The Surge, allowing for fairly deep customization, even though none of the modules is really necessary for beating the game, since it's fairly easy.
A similar principle applies to the many weapons, which use the same energy pool and therefore require you to choose which ones to equip, usually only being able to afford a couple. I found the basic Metroid-style missile attack to be the most efficient, along with a blob weapon spawning small jellies that seek out and damage enemies. It's not as dispersive as Axiom Verge, which gave you dozens of weapons, with only a few of them being useful, but you still get the feeling that most of the advanced ones are little more than a gimmick.
There is a story, and a quite verbose one at that: a number of friendly NPCs living in a stranded starshipwreck will talk your ear off about how they are sick of mushroom soup or they can't comb their hair properly. There is some interesting stuff in there, but you'll have to sift through the uninteresting drivel to get there, all the while what you really want is to go out and explore. It's bored depressed people telling you how bored and depressed they are, and that is not very conducive to urgency and engagement.
The map feature is precisely what you'd expect, with the feature from Hollow Knight to place abstract markers on it for reference. The problem is that not only do these not represent anything, forcing you to make note of what you decide each one stands for, but as of the time of writing this they are completely bugged, since they will change at random to a different one, completely defeating the purpose to have multiple types in the first place.
Imagine deciding that, say, a triangle means "I need double jump here" and a circle means "need air dash here", placing down markers accordingly, then the next time you boot up the game discovering that all your triangles have become circles and all your circles have become squares. I had to bypass the bug by setting multiple markers in the same room and associating different meanings to their number instead of shape. Sloppy.
All in all, Ghost Song is fine, it's competently made, but it's confusingly laid out, too easy and with an invasive and unengaging story that doesn't really explain anything by the end. It's a shame, but with all the similar games that populate the market these days, it really doesn't do anything to warrant too much attention.
Its gameplay is perfectly serviceable, with an interesting overheating mechanic that not only prevents you from firing your guns non-stop, but also greatly boosts damage from your melee attacks when your gun is red hot, encouraging switching between ranged and short range combat. It's definitely not Ghost Song's fault that during its troubled development the indie metroidvania scene has been so prolific that such games are by now as numerous as the stars of the sky, oversaturating an industry with an ocean of perfectly competent copycats that make if far more difficult for any single one to stand out. In a different time, Ghost Song would have been special, but the way things are, it's yet another metroidvania that does nothing different from the crowd.
Extrinsic factors aside, it has problems of its own as well: taking a page from Hollow Knight, the world is frustratingly dispersive, requiring the player to wander around for far too long looking for the one way to make progress, running into dead end after dead end, which can get infuriating. The 3D geometry that composes platforms has strange hitboxes, which can lead to the player sprite falling through them when you feel like you landed on one properly. Bosses are few, far between and not very good.
The music is quality stuff, but it rarely fits the action: Metroid did not feature many loud and bombastic tracks either, but its moody and haunting ambients conveyed a sense of danger. Here we are treated to beatiful tunes that belong more in a walking simulator than an action game. Silence would have been more tense.
The soulslike elements boil down to the usual currency retrieval mechanic after being killed, plus that irritating feature from Dark Souls 2 that chips a small percentage off your maximum health each time that happens. Only here it doesn't require some rare resource to restore: just go to one of the broken robots that serve as level up/fast travel points and repair the damage for mere pocket lint. All it does is add a minor inconvenience after every death: walk out of the respawn room, shoot one critter enemy, go back in, spend that currency to repair the damage, go back to your business. One minute wasted on what only amounts to pointless busywork.
You also have the usual dodge move tied to a stamina bar, different stats governing your attributes, and the game is smart enough to not respawn enemies immediately after leaving a room to discourage level farming. Leveling up grants energy points, which set a hard cap to limit how many of the upgrade modules found around the world you can equip at once. These range from some that will decrease your overheating rate (or increase it, for a melee build), make collecting currency easier, display enemy health bars, increase your i-frames, and so on. It's a good system, similar to what is found in The Surge, allowing for fairly deep customization, even though none of the modules is really necessary for beating the game, since it's fairly easy.
A similar principle applies to the many weapons, which use the same energy pool and therefore require you to choose which ones to equip, usually only being able to afford a couple. I found the basic Metroid-style missile attack to be the most efficient, along with a blob weapon spawning small jellies that seek out and damage enemies. It's not as dispersive as Axiom Verge, which gave you dozens of weapons, with only a few of them being useful, but you still get the feeling that most of the advanced ones are little more than a gimmick.
There is a story, and a quite verbose one at that: a number of friendly NPCs living in a stranded starshipwreck will talk your ear off about how they are sick of mushroom soup or they can't comb their hair properly. There is some interesting stuff in there, but you'll have to sift through the uninteresting drivel to get there, all the while what you really want is to go out and explore. It's bored depressed people telling you how bored and depressed they are, and that is not very conducive to urgency and engagement.
The map feature is precisely what you'd expect, with the feature from Hollow Knight to place abstract markers on it for reference. The problem is that not only do these not represent anything, forcing you to make note of what you decide each one stands for, but as of the time of writing this they are completely bugged, since they will change at random to a different one, completely defeating the purpose to have multiple types in the first place.
Imagine deciding that, say, a triangle means "I need double jump here" and a circle means "need air dash here", placing down markers accordingly, then the next time you boot up the game discovering that all your triangles have become circles and all your circles have become squares. I had to bypass the bug by setting multiple markers in the same room and associating different meanings to their number instead of shape. Sloppy.
All in all, Ghost Song is fine, it's competently made, but it's confusingly laid out, too easy and with an invasive and unengaging story that doesn't really explain anything by the end. It's a shame, but with all the similar games that populate the market these days, it really doesn't do anything to warrant too much attention.