Ghostship Delgado

Disclaimer: I tested the Amstrad CPC version of Ghostship Delgado.

At the time I wrote this review, I hadn't previously played many Quill-created games. This is probably a symptom of cultural differences in IF traditions. My understanding is that The Quill made its strongest impacts in the UK and Europe. I'm Australian.

Ghostship Delgado is a 2024-new game produced with The Quill, initially for the Acorn Electron and BBC Micro, then ported to the Amstrad CPC, which was the version I tested and played in emulation. The game is split into two parts, with a password granted at the end of part I opening the second half.

The game's PC, George Pike, falls asleep on his rented yard and wakes on the deck of an old abandoned ship, along with his dog Ruffles. The adventure starts sparse to establish the geography and abandoned status of the ship, then gets busier below deck. There are nautical-themed puzzles, mechanical ingenuity puzzles, helpful and unhelpful animals, and backstory bits to read.

The Quill's parser is a small-vocab one, but it's reassuring knowing that USE will handle most tricky situations, the way it often does in Quest adventures. The tech is old school but the design aesthetic isn't; you can't wreck your game unknowingly and there aren't any time-limited resources. Locale descriptions are thorough and good at cueing the puzzle brain. The player should certainly be thorough in EXAMining stuff. There are a good number of items to be found behind other nouns.

For me, the island-set part II of the game is the more exciting one. It's bigger and with varied terrain, creating opportunities for more atmosphere in the writing and more spread-out puzzles. The backstory is developed further from part I, with the player involved in something of a spiritual quest.

The post-script is especially satisfying. A lot of two-word parser games just finish with THE END, but this one has a thoughtful afterword that is designed to please.

Ghostship Delgado gives a fresh performance of old-school adventuring without a lot of the hassles, and has a wraparound of more narrative than usual for such games, too. It also comes with feelies, and quality instructions and set-up docs.