Untitled Ghost Game

It’s a beautiful day in the mansion, and you are a horrible ghost. A new owner has just purchased your ancestral estate and is about to bring their awful corporeal biological presence into it. You have five hours to make the house as spooky as possible and put a stop to this!

This is a lighthearted choice-based optimization game. As you roam about the mansion you find various spooky tricks you could play on the owner; each increases the “spookiness” of the house by a certain amount, but each also costs a certain amount of time. The goal is to get the maximum spookiness in the five hours allotted.

It’s not an especially difficult optimization problem—you only have one resource to worry about, so you just need to choose all the haunts that have the best spookiness-to-time ratio—but I enjoyed the tone and the writing a lot. I played this with some of my family and they loved the ghost’s analysis of their various little tricks, and the different endings you could get with different levels of optimization. This one is definitely getting a high rating from me.

I had a lot of fun with this game. Modeled on Untitled Goose Game, your goal is to cause trouble. Specifically, you have 6 hours before the new owner of your house arrives, and you have to make the house as scary as possible before then.

It's a cost/benefit analysis thing that requires trial and error: some actions take a ton of time but provide little benefit, others are short but trivial, some are heavy hitters. It requires some replay, but fortunately the choices are really funny and the text is enjoyable to read.

This was made in 4 hours, so it doesn't have huge depth, but it felt complete as a game. According to my rubric:

+Polish: I didn't see any errors, and the human-voice sound effects were really funny.
+Descriptive: The game had fun descriptions of everything.
+Interactivity: I felt like I could strategize and that the game was both responsive and not too easy.
+Emotional impact: it was funny to me.
+Would I play again? I played through three times.

The latest from Damon L Wakes, whose personal brand of flippant, off-the-wall humour is fully on display in this Twine optimization puzzle. You're a ghost with the most, and you're here to say, humans in your home, you don't dig it - no way! You've got six hours to make your abode as uninviting as possible before the new resident shows up. Each possible action has a differing spookiness quotient, but also has a differing amount of time to prepare it. Will you spend hours creating poltergeist activity in the kitchen, only to run out of time to make the lights flicker in the porch? Lots of different endings depending on your final score out of ten, all very sharp and amusing, as you'd expect from the author of such loopy delights as Good Grub! and GUNBABY.