Ghost House

Ghost House or Haunted Mansion (as the in game title calls it) is an entry for this years Halloween contest.

Story
There's a spirit who isn't ready to move over to the other side and it's the job of our two heroes to help him. We are drip fed letters, newspaper articles and "visions" (flashbacks) of the past and slowly form a complete picture of what happened. By the end I had some sympathy for the spirit. The two main characters were on the way to becoming developed but didn't really have enough time to become fully fleshed out at least for me.

Gameplay
Largely exploration based, I think the game would have benefited from being a little less dark; at times I was really struggling to see all the items. I don't want to go fully into the linear/non-linear discussion here but I would say that Ghost House would benefit from a bit more direction for players. Either by making it a bit more linear or maybe you could get hints from your Auntie?

The game uses the default battle system for the final battle and through out the game you collect items which let you cast your skills in battle (think of an ammo system). While an interesting idea I found it to be a bit flawed. For one some of the skills lack descriptions. Next with the ammo system if your attacker runs out of ammo she can't attack and you can't win, I realise the desire to encourage exploration and collecting all the items but couldn't we either have a small of doing a small amount of damage if we've ran out of ammo or a way to maybe gather ammo in battles but waste our turns to do so? Before the battle starts the game opens the save menu for you, thankfully I was able to win on my second attempt but I do fear some players might be trapped there, having saved over their previous save and not having enough resources. One final point which really is just me being curious; the boss can only be hurt when he is stunned, but the person who stuns him is slower than the damage dealer. I'm guessing it was intentional to encourage me to use the buffs/debuffs but given the ammo situation I didn't really like using them as the different I saw wasn't enough for me to feel they were worth it.

Et cetera
After uploading the video I did go back and find the missing pieces of the story, which greatly improved my understanding of the game. The game has a few nice features like being able to view visions at any time from the menu. I only encountered one minor bug so it is a pretty smooth ride. Have fun!

Here's my play through if you are interested: