The Haunted Hoard: Ghost Cleaner (PC)
The Peggle series of casual brick-breaking games takes the idea of Breakout’s focus on destroying objects on screen with a ball and introduces a pachinko inspiration where you launch the ball into the playfield to hit the important pegs. With one of the masters of casual gaming experiences, PopCap Games, at the helm, Peggle had a brief surge of popularity between 2007 and 2014 with multiple new titles filling that time period. However, with only ports of older games produced since then, Peggle’s game type and unique mechanics faded away, and a spiritual successor from a different developer that tried to evolve the concept certainly wouldn’t feel out of place in the year 2021. However, Ghost Cleaner isn’t such a recent game, instead being produced in 2015 when the Peggle series could hardly be said to be dormant yet, and it unfortunately seems more like a game that was meant to copy something successful at the time rather than keeping the spirit of a series alive.
Ghost Cleaner’s story is told in a comic panel format and without a lot of good exposition or even many character names, so it can be hard to both describe it or even get invested in the barebones narrative. The start of the game isn’t even quite clear, where a young lady whose name isn’t given is creating a chemical concoction for a school exam and unleashes a strange pink goop that seemingly makes ghosts appear all around town. The first thing any of these bedsheet ghosts say on appearing is “I’m so glad I’m finally visible!!” implying they were around and just not causing any trouble, and the story does start poking at the idea that there is more going on here than a simple mishap in a lab, but the game concludes with a “To be continued” message after having not really done much to explain the situation or put us any closer to resolving it. The nameless blonde student does recruit her sister and younger brother for the task of eliminating these ghosts that are now spread all around town, although for the most part the malicious characters encountered in the rare, short story scenes are demented humans like a clearly evil circus ringleader who captures them and locks them in an abandoned hospital. If anything, the story really does seem like its primary purpose is to tell you why you’ve moved from a graveyard background image to a carnival backdrop and so on, and this plot is probably better left ignored since it doesn’t do much of anything for the experience.
As such, you’ll instead be coming to Ghost Cleaner for 100 levels of gameplay clearly inspired by Peggle’s approach to block breaking action. Each level in Ghost Cleaner features a screen filled with grey, blue, and purple pegs that can come in different shapes, sizes, and arrangements. The goal of a level is to make sure you hit every single randomly assigned purple peg with a ball you launch into the playfield by way of a floating cannon whose launch arc and power you can set by moving your mouse around the screen. Planning ricochets, lining up a shot so it slides around the outline of a loop, or picking which pegs to shoot first so your later allocated shots for a level can hit obstructed targets is important to success, with blue pegs mostly there to block the ball or serve as a tool for bouncing your ball in different ways. The grey pegs are indestructible though, meaning that you will have to have a decent eye for getting around them in some of the levels where they are placed a bit more deviously.
One problem with accurately aiming your cannon immediately arises when you learn the problems with having its power assigned to your mouse’s position. While adjusting its launch angle doesn’t require having your cursor too far away from the cannon, if you want your shot to pack some oomph, you sometimes have to put your mouse cursor so far off it can even go off screen. Being off screen will stop increasing your power though, and windowed mode and variable monitor display sizes can further exacerbate this problem. A more unexpected problem emerges from the fact that the game screen doesn’t just contain the pegs you’re aiming for. A strip of the screen on the left that almost takes up a fourth of the available area displays how many purple pegs you need to hit, the idea being that ghosts are contained in these pegs and that’s how you’re cleaning them up. The visuals displaying a little ghost, a meter to indicate completion, how many shots you have left, and a selection of power-ups all occupy this space, and even if the best shot you can fire at the moment requires you to put your cursor off in this area, if you are hovering over an option like activating a power-up, you will not be able to fire your ball as desired. Having the strength of the shot tied to the cursor position does not add to the experience in a way that would make it superior to keyboard controls and it is more likely to frustrate since a shot being impossible to do display problems leads to needless barriers to completing the game’s levels.
The difficulty curve in Ghost Cleaner is all over the place as well, most of the early levels fairly easy but late game levels swinging oddly from stages where you can wrap things up almost instantly and ones where a good amount of lucky bounces are going to be necessary to slip through tight openings or pull off ricochets that would be hard to plan in advance. This difficulty discrepancy mainly comes from Ghost Cleaner’s big break away from Peggle’s game design, that being that many stages focus on a spectral web connecting multiple blocks. Usually pegs float in space untethered, disappearing after your current ball has exited play or unfortunately disappearing a bit too quickly and inconsistently to adopt into your planning if the ball has somehow lingered atop one of the blocks for about a second. However, many levels have light blue connections appear between the different colored pegs in play, and by eliminating pegs in this spiderweb of lines and dots, physics will soon enter the action and cause the pegs to swing around or move position based on how they’re still connected to other pegs. Grey blocks are often the stationary lynch pins that hold these up, but destroy the connecting blue or purple pegs and it is quite possible to cause all of the destructible pegs to fall free and disappear off screen, the blocks counting as eliminated after they’ve gone a certain distance out of view.
Eliminating the spider web is a novel idea in some ways as you can consider how to break apart the connections rather than always trying to spot how your purple pegs are placed and trying to plan a flight path for your shot. However, it can also mean some levels are simply too easy as the important pieces aren’t hard to target. It is preferable to some of the late game layouts though where breaking into an intricate, potentially maze-like arrangement of blocks is barely possible without using up all your shots or power-ups. There are some levels with little freezers that will restore your ball so long as it lands in them, but these close after one use and take a round or two to reopen, meaning these later levels still will have wasted balls unless you whip out the power-ups.
The ghosts you free or eliminate from the purple pegs based on how you interpret it are actually a form of currency as well. On the level select screen you can go and use the amount of ghosts you’ve cleaned up to buy power-ups, and if you repeat a level the game will allow you to build up more ghost currency if you so desire. However, the power-up store does not make any effort to explain what these power-ups accomplish. In some ways this can be interesting, the brief experimentation working well when the power is a straightforward visual one like the ball splitting into two when it makes contact with a block, all the blue blocks on screen briefly turning intangible so you can aim at sequestered purples, and the bomb shot hitting multiple pegs in a small area with its blast. However, not every power-up’s purpose is so easy to interpret even after multiple uses, and with only minimalist symbols that don’t quite give all the details needed, it can feel like you’re missing out on an interesting tool simply because investing ghosts in such uncertain and unclear powers isn’t nearly as good as buying the reliable and straightforward ones.
One other problem with power-ups emerges from the game’s scoring system. While each level has a points score based on things like how many pegs a single ball hit during a launch or how many pegs you destroyed total, the three star system seems to be the major focus since points only go towards individual level high scores. Beating a level by any means will award you one star unconditionally, but if you can destroy both all the blue and purple pegs in a stage, you’ll earn another star. In some stages the web-like arrangement makes this as easy as cutting the right ties, others this might not register properly if the purple pegs fall off screen first since the game will start tallying your points before the entire physics object has completely fallen off screen. More frustrating is that some levels, with their grey peg layout and intricate connections, practically make this an impossible feat to execute in the allocated amount of shots. Here is where you might think the power-ups would save the day, but to get three stars in a stage you need to completely avoid using any of these power-ups. Already having issues in regards to communicating functions and occupying a part of the screen where you might accidentally click one trying to just get the right power for your cannon, you are now told that getting the best rating for a level requires completely ignoring this part of the game, essentially making it a less interesting game to play since you are encouraged to only use raw bounce tactics to win even when the layout demands power-up usage to have any hope of reasonably hitting every colored peg. Ultimately this star system basically tells you that power-ups are there to use when you’re fed up with a level’s design and want to move on to the next one, but at least there doesn’t seem to be any reward for getting all three stars in a stage, meaning instead there’s little to prevent you from overusing cheap power-ups to lessen the difficulty of certain levels unless you do care about that extra gold star.
THE VERDICT: Ghost Cleaner does bring an intriguing twist to Peggle’s style of play, the lines that connect pegs and allow them to react to removed blocks seeming like a good way to add depth and variability to a level’s design. However, the physics are often more of a way to exploit a level’s design when they are present for easy wins, and the levels where they aren’t a key part can sometimes feature poorly conceived layouts where hoping for random purple peg placement to favor you and sacrificing stars to have a hope of penetrating the maze-like designs becomes too common. Generically the screen clearing can still provide some satisfying moments because of its clear visual progress and the thrill of pulling off a clean maneuver like a nice ricochet or smooth ball slide, but with aspects like the cannon’s power being unreliable to adjust, Ghost Cleaner kills the appeal of Peggle’s gameplay rather than reviving it in a new and engaging way.
And so, I give Ghost Cleaner for PC…
A BAD rating. Like many casual games, Ghost Cleaner can get away with some rough and weak design for a fair while because many of its early levels are so easy or can be pushed through if you start to identify aspects like how to bounce your ball properly or break apart webs to your advantage. However, when Ghost Cleaner wants to be challenging, it often does so with short-sighted peg layouts that can cause problems with how you can even launch your ball and how a three star win can even be conceivably achieved. While the physics of breaking up a web lead to a dynamically evolving playfield, the fact so many of these stages just fall back on severing the key connections that don’t shift based on the physics means that a lot of the nifty applications of moving pegs are lost because the idea isn’t implemented in varied enough ways. The story is a write-off and the game seemingly doesn’t want you to use power-ups based on the withheld information and star rating system, so Ghost Cleaner really fails to match the casual fun of the series it is clearly copying. It should also be noted that Ghost Cleaner’s use of a funeral march for background music, while cute, certainly can’t match the satisfaction of Peggle’s triumphant Ode to Joy wrapping up each level, with Ghost Cleaner’s level conclusions choosing to wrap up in an odd manner where shortly after the last purple block is hit it will start tallying points and ignore any further bouncing or peg eliminations pulled off.
Developer LookAtMyGame has a few indies under its belt like Finding Teddy and Aggelos that seem to be their own thing despite drawing inspiration from certain genres or game styles, so it’s hard to say Ghost Cleaner was simply a cheap attempt to ride on Peggle’s coattails. Perhaps they did want to make a unique variant on a game type they enjoyed, but it seems they didn’t understand some reasons why Peggle works, the level design being a key part of pulling things off. Adding power-ups or peg physics to it isn’t a flawed idea, Peggle is about bouncing a ball around and having special options does a layer of depth to your ability to interact with a level, but Ghost Cleaner’s implementation of its new ideas feels like it wasn’t thought through much, leaving us with a Peggle clone that comes out worse because of its attempts to shift away from the reliable formula of that popular casual game.