Ghosted is an indie game created with RPG Maker MV. And ohh... Boy is this a scary one. Prepare for a creepy atmosphere and a lot of jump scares.

You wake up in a house with no light. You need to search the room your in to find a candle, a flash light, and a match. For now you can only use the candle. The candle lights up a circle around you. If you find the battery you can use the flashlight to shoot light directly in front of you. Now you need to search the house. It's quite a big area. You need to interact with items to find different kinds of keys to open different doors. And you never know when you're searching if you might get a jump scare.



This is one game where having no background music works perfectly. All you'll hear is a tapping sound at the front door. When you manage to open the door to the outside of the house this is when you let the ghosts inside. At the start these things are really creepy and I had a high motivation to stay away, but this is also where the game play falls apart.



You're told that using the light will make the ghost aware of your presence (I thought it might have been better to have a flashlight battery time limit that could keep the ghost away, at least from your front side.) So you'll turn off the light to try to keep the ghost away. And finding your way through the dark house in now very challenging. So far, so good. But.... Those ghosts move through the house so quickly and precisely that it's impossible to plan how to get somewhere. I mean going one way isn't guaranteed to be safe. You may or may not die. And when you first start out you have no idea where you're supposed to head. So you'll die a lot. And deaths the player has no control over are the worst.

I was pretty hooked on this game at the start. It was pretty spooky and the story was interesting enough to keep me going for a while. Those instant game overs that are impossible to avoid, that's what's killing this game. There has to be a better way to program those ghosts. Put them in limited sections of the house. Or give the player a mechanic to scare them away for a limited time. Because right now it's very frustrating to both figure out where you're supposed to go and to also avoid dying randomly. I give this game a 2.5 / 5.