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Choose Your Own Ghost Adventure

  • Beregon
  • 03/15/2021 08:41 PM
  • 437 views
The Ghost Cage is a relatively simple adventure game. Your character has moved into a new house, only to discover that it's haunted by a ghost. But not an RPG Maker horror game ghost, that will chase you around and send you to the game over screen after it touches you. Think Casper, but less friendly (atleast at first). An annoyance rather than something horrifying. Not really interested in having a roommate, the ghost will try its best to annoy the MC to leave the house.

Tired of the ghost's antics, the MC decides to find a way to get rid of the annoying ghost for good... or she can try to befriend the ghost instead, it's up to you. The Ghost cage is a sort of an adventure game that takes place over several days. During the day, you can talk to NPCs look for items and interact with objects, then during the night you have a visit from the ghost, who will react to your actions and his hostility stat will either decrease or increase, which leads into multiple possible endings, based on both this stat and certain choices.

Another stat you have is the Main Character's happiness value, the only way to manipulate it seems to be during certain conversations, where you can either have her say that she's really happy or unhappy about her situation. It's completely up to the player as to what value this stat will have. There doesn't seem to be much effect coming from happiness value, but I could be wrong.

In order to gain some items and solve certain situations, you will need to gain gold. Each day, in addition to the usual, you can choose to work 1 job to gain money. There's only two jobs. You can either choose to work at the store for some gold or you can choose to work in house renovations, which pays even more than the other job and doesn't seem to have any downsides. So there doesn't seem to be any reason to work at the store, unless you are RPing that the MCs dream job is a cashier at a supermarket.

The whole job mechanic makes it seem like there was supposed to be a lot more uses for gold. But there's not really anything substantial to buy. Yes, if you want certain endings, you can buy some items to decrease the Hostility value of the ghost etc., but they are very affordable and even if you pay the maximum amount every time someone asks for gold for whatever reason, you are most likely gonna swim in gold and run out of stuff to buy pretty fast. After that, the only point of it is to increase/decrease the MC's happiness value.

The Ghost Cage is a nice simple adventure game with multiple endings and frankly really nice visuals and presentation. The only negative I could think of is that the menu doesn't have any sound effects, which seems pretty weird and distracting.

Also, the game feels like it could've been fleshed out a bit more, but it's honestly fine, especially for a game jam entry. I highly recommend everyone to play it!