There are many things I love about Ghost of a Tale, which makes its PS4 debut this week - the ivy bursting through its bulging masonry, the witty and affecting script (with beautifully concise, optional footnotes for those who fancy diving into the lore), or the fact that one of the quests actually has you distinguishing trees by their bark and leaf shape in order to identify the mushrooms growing beneath them. But the biggest compliment I can pay it, perhaps, is that nobody in it feels expendable. The setting may be a prison, an edifice designed to crush the soul and rob the individual of identity, but the story is broadly about reclaiming that identity and finding community in a world of brutal divides. Even the rat guards who chase you around the battlements of Dwindling Heights are people, warts and all, though it's easy to forget this when you're spotted for the umpteenth time exiting a bolthole and the somewhat lumbering pursuit music kicks in.

"They're not monsters or demons, intent on killing all the mice - sometimes they don't give a fuck," says Lionel Gallat, the French animator responsible for the majority of a project that has been in development since 2013. "They're just doing their jobs. They're living their lives. And their job is to catch the mouse who escaped from his cell, so that's what they're doing in the game. Until you find the guard armour, put it on and then you can talk to them, and you discover that, no, these are not just enemies you have to kill or avoid. You can talk to them, and you have to talk to them to learn about stuff."

Among the things you'll learn, as the aforesaid mouse runaway Tilo, is that the guards don't want to be here either. They're the dregs of the rat army, incompetents and misfits banished to a neglected fortress to babysit a sad little crowd of thieves, pirates and political agitators. In the course of this handsome 20 hour adventure your relationship with them slowly evolves, from fear through irritation to a sense of tentative camaraderie. It's one of the many splendours of a storybook realm whose personalities, society and history are as cleverly wrought as its cobwebbed undervaults and turrets. "When the game starts, all the characters you meet have led lives, they come from somewhere," Gallat continues. "It's the same with a movie - you need to have the feeling that this world has been going on for a while. The characters don't suddenly pop up because the story needs them, and you need to believe that they're going somewhere."

Read more

Developer SeithCG has released a massive new update for its delightful mouse-based RPG Ghost of a Tale, aimed at quashing the "vast majority" of its remaining technical issues.

Eurogamer liked Ghost of a Tale enough to give it the Recommended stamp of approval when it released earlier this month on PC; however, reviewer Edwin Evans-Thirlwell noted that it was "absolutely riddled with bugs".

SeithCG has been more than open in acknowledging the game's launch problems, and has already released a number of updates to address them. The developer says its latest patch, known as 6.5, "takes care of the vast majority of the remaining bugs", admitting that "it's been a very intense period, with a lot of work and very little sleep."

Read more…

Ghost of a Tale's castle feels like a prison at first but ends up feeling like home. In the course of 20 hours searching for a way out, I've slowly fallen in love with the place - its feathery falls of afternoon light over mossy stonework, its leafblown ramparts and canted mausoleums, its small, hard-bitten population of anthropomorphic rats, mice, frogs and magpies. Part of the setting's allure is that it carries the echoes of many great virtual fortresses. Indeed, this slightly muddled third-person action-RPG's greatest strength is probably how it adds to that architectural tradition, though the witty, affecting, politically resonant writing runs a close second.

There's a touch of Square Enix's winding masterpiece Vagrant Story to certain overgrown, shady courtyards, and a generous dollop of both Zelda and Moria in the shape of a magnificent underground vault, woven around a circular puzzle structure. The view from the keep's belfry recalls the view inland from ICO's fortress walls, yellow crenelations biting into blissful green distances. Above all, there's the spectre of Dark Souls - a game with which Ghost of a Tale engages in fascinating, not always successful ways. As with From Software's Lordran, Dwindling Heights Keep is a purgatory for lost people and things that is much taller than it is broad, stretching from a bone-strewn shoreline up through catacombs and sewers to a barracks, kitchen and armoury. Like Lordran, it's a persistent environment bound together by a profusion of cunning shortcuts, unlocked one by one - rope elevators that whisk you from the gardens to the signal tower, doors that open from one side only and secret passages cheekily visible through rusted grates.

Working out how the game's spaces thread into one another, letting their twists and turns sink into muscle memory, is as integral to Ghost of a Tale's appeal as its hypnotic good looks. The act of stitching those wayward, ruined chambers together also chimes with the narrative, a story about rediscovering the past and building trust across racial divides that is a lot more searching than its parade of waggling tails and frog beards might suggest.

Read more…

Five years later, the gorgeous crowdfunded mouse adventure Ghost of a Tale, made by Lorax and Despicable Me animation director Lionel Gallat, is ready. An update on the game's website yesterday revealed a startlingly imminent release date of 13th March.

That's on PC, where a small portion of the game has been in early access for a year-and-a-half (it's also currently in the Xbox One Game Preview programme). It's 15/$20 and will stay that way for the next couple of weeks, after which it will go up to $25(/ 20, perhaps).

There are console versions (Xbox One X and PlayStation 4) planned for later this year but their timing depends on rectifying any issues there may be with the PC version first. A Switch version is a much trickier proposition and would require "a complete re-tooling of the visual features and a fundamental re-authoring of most of the 3D assets", Gallat said. If Ghost of a Tale sells well and Gallat can hire a studio for a Switch conversion then it would be possible, but otherwise probably not.

Read more…