A Ghost Story

A Ghost Story is a relatively simple eight-room game where you may have to cycle around everywhere a bit before you find what's going on. It's the sort of thing Speed-IF was meant for, and I think the author chose the material and scope well.

As in The Libonotus Cup, the interface and appearance are quite attractive. Here you have white text on a black background, and when you're clued to the exits, they're orange, so hooray for Halloween colors. The directions appear nonreciprocal at first, but (Spoiler - click to show)if you map things out, they form a sort of octagon which makes sense later. There's a white tower in the middle you can't get to or pull away from, as well as an Igor (that's deliberate,) a poultrygeist, a Sphinx and a locked gate. What to feed the poultrygeist was a neat lateral thinking puzzle.

I was stuck with what to do for a while, because I was trying to coast through, and I can't say I missed a puzzle per se, but I was glad to find the next items that led to me getting to the tower. (I don't think it's a spoiler to explain that, yes, you need to get there.) Each was a small fetch quest, and (Spoiler - click to show)each room has a purpose of sorts.

A Ghost Story isn't especially deep, and you've probably seen all the elements before, but it is well done. I quite enjoyed how it corrected some misspellings I made. For four hours' work, it's quite good.

This is a Petite Morte Ectocomp 2021 game, written in 4 hours or less and featuring the custom parser system used in the author's game The Libonotus Cup.

Visually, the game looks good in terms of font and color.

The story and gameplay are that you are going to the bathroom when suddenly you appear as a ghost in front of a tower. There are 8 locations around the tower, arranged in a circle. Unfortunately, you don't have hands that can pick up anything.

So you have to visit different locations and gain different powers. One location had a riddle which was based on a pun, which could be hard for non-native English speakers.

The setting is interesting, and the descriptions are well-developed for a 4-hour game, but the whole thing is somewhat disjointed and nonsensical. It's just a fun, short puzzly game, and there's nothing wrong with that.