Ghost of a Tale (PC)
Deep world-building can help a fantasy world come to life, the fictional space made more vivid by the attention to even the smallest of details for the people living in it. Rich lore can be found in many stories of travel to make the world feel more interconnected as you move through it, but Ghost of a Tale manages to make its world feel huge and complex while the entire adventure takes place on one small island. While you only really explore the small stronghold of Dwindling Heights Keep and the surrounding areas, by creating a complex culture for the talking animals that inhabit it and having the details of other locations weave into the lives of those on the isolated island, Ghost of a Tale ends up feeling much larger than the story of a little mouse minstrel named Tilo.
One day the minstrel Tilo and his wife Merra were called before the Baron Osdrik to perform a song, but while Tilo recognized the need to play it for his continued safety, his wife refused to perform for the cruel baron, the two then imprisoned separately for their act of sedition. Tilo is sent to Duinlan Heights, a dingy out of the way prison that earned its Dwindling Heights nickname for the gradual erosion caused by the acidic lake it is situated in. Tilo isn’t imprisoned for long before a mysterious message with the key to his cell earns him a chance to escape, but the little minstrel still has a long way to go before he can leave the island and search for his missing wife. One of the major barriers to his journey is that Tilo is a tiny mouse, all of the animals in the game capable of speech and holding things like humans but other species still dwarf him like the rats that run the keep. Tilo already isn’t much of a fighter, but he has no hope of defeating his captors, the little mouse needing to sneak his way through Dwindling Heights, blend in where he can to gather information, and work together with other people stuck on the island to try and work towards his freedom so he can reconnect with Merra.
What makes this small slice of a grander world so enticing is the richness of the history tied to it and how it relates not only to the characters you encounter but the series of quests you pick up along your journey as Tilo. A pair of imprisoned thieves named Gusto and Fatale can come off as a bit full off themselves at first, but their bragging soon becomes part of their charming silliness while the quirky pair also help you to understand mouse culture better as Tilo has someone in the keep he can speak to about his species. Silas, a rat watchman who is less than loyal, has surprisingly intricate hidden depths that take long to extract from him, his past clearly haunting him but hard to learn as it hurts him in ways he’s not eager to share. As you explore the keep and speak with whoever you can you start to understand that characters aren’t just here to fill roles in pointing you towards your next task. Characters have deeper connections to the world and their stories and dialogue help to form a bigger picture of what life was like for someone like Tilo before imprisonment and what he would be returning to after should he escape.
One useful way the game introduces concepts is by having keywords pop up during dialogue scenes. If you see a highlighted word in something someone said you can press a button and a description of the history associated with it will appear, the player able to consult lore quickly this way without potentially asking questions about subjects people in the world would already understand. Over time you’ll come to understand the interconnected animal societies of Ghost of a Tale, their special terms, and the history of war and how someone like the corrupts barons of the Red Paw can come to power. These aren’t just part of stitching together a richer world either, as there are times where part of progressing the plot or completing a quest will be giving the right answers to people in regards to the world and its history. A renown system rewards you for picking the right choices at these junctions, and as a minstrel you are also sometimes called upon to play a song. While the music is automatic, the player will need to know what the songs in their songbook are about and understand the character who requested it or their current headspace to pick the best choices. While there is no voiced dialogue each song does have unique instrumentation and the dialogue boxes also include pictures of the speaker’s face with some incredibly expressive art that helps you empathize with the people you’ll end up interacting with so often.
The quests these characters can give you also have an interesting way of weaving into the required actions of the game. While you do have a set of clear main quests that work towards objectives like finding out about Merra’s fate and trying to find a way off the prison island yourself, side quests not only help you better learn about your situation and the cast but can have surprising relevancy later. What can seem like a series of extra tasks to sneak around and find items might soon become relevant since the reward given to you for doing it ends up solving a problem on the main quest line. A detail learned through a small interaction can become surprisingly important later on, a concept introduced in dialogue making a surprising appearance sometimes not even with any greater purpose beyond showing that this world doesn’t just include things because they are important. The game works to make the keep feel like it has a history greater than the here and now and you can never be too sure what might be incredibly relevant or a nice little touch because of how the quests and lore can weave together in such unexpected ways, but even if a quest isn’t key to progression it can still have benefits. You’ll burn through candles and lantern oil to explore dark passages, but complete the right quest and you can earn a light source without any limitations. Find some items for the quirky little thieves and they’ll teach you abilities that let you better detect nearby guards, activate a special mist to highlight hidden items, or increase your ability to carry more items or recover stamina quickly.
When the game begins you will be doing a lot of sneaking around between the rich interactions, and while quest givers will give you a good idea of what you should be doing, they won’t give away what exactly must be done nor does any in-game indicators push you towards completing it. Ghost of a Tale lets you figure out much of the required action yourself, the player needing to carefully avoid the much stronger rat guards while completing little tasks that gradually open up Duinlan Heights to greater navigation opportunities. Shortcuts cut out the need for retreading too much ground, and while the keep is the centerpiece of all the action, you’ll soon learn the island has a lot more to explore than an old stronghold. Later in the adventure you’ll start to explore the catacombs far below or head to the forest on the outskirts of the island, each new area introducing more opportunities for exploration and discovery. Ghost of a Tale’s world is beautifully rendered as well, the small details of each creature’s fur easy to see but coming together in something that looks natural. The world around you is vividly realized in a visual sense on top of its importance to the lore, lush plant life beautiful but dingy areas made grimier by the attention to even the darker parts of the area’s look. The music outside of the minstrel tunes can be particularly effective both as entertaining background music or for setting the tone, the game’s work at constructing a scene in all regards rather impressive.
You’ll come to know the island well in the same way the story gets you familiar with this fantasy world’s greater history, although that can be held back a bit by some of the game’s mechanics. Sneaking around rat guards in a new area is of course a new challenge and you are often given little tools or new considerations to keep the action fresh on that first visit, but since quests and the general flow of the game require traipsing through familiar turf fairly often, the speed with which you traverse them becomes a bit of an issue. You are given some items for distracting guards or briefly knocking them out, but some areas have a fair few guards and that option mostly seems most effective in the early parts of the game. You can take shortcuts at times if you find them, but with the main keep being so central and the guards never going on break you will sometimes either need to throw caution to the wind and just try to bolt past everyone at the risk of your life or slow things down for sneaking that isn’t doing anything new. You do eventually get disguises that let you slip past them unmolested, but the main one given to you early has a caveat attached to it. The guard armor tricks them into thinking you’re one of their own and even lets you start to understand your enemy through conversing with them, but it slows you down immensely. Tilo is usually able to run rather quickly so long as his stamina allows, the world’s size seeming to favor quickly moving about even though the rats still have a good chance of hitting you if you try and dash past. The armor that removes the need to try and sneak past the familiar guards makes you shuffle along, and while you can eventually reduce its weight it doesn’t ever truly become less of a burden. Having some limits on it for its incredible benefit makes sense, already it can’t jump in a game where a lot of extra goodies can be hidden behind a little platforming or involved puzzle solving that the armor is incompatible with, but the armor is simply too useful for avoiding trouble that it reduces the game’s pace a fair bit.
Luckily, even after the armor can trivialize the very present stealth elements early in the adventure, the growing need for figuring out environmental puzzles or using your lore knowledge to help people around the keep keeps the action engaging. Traps and creatures like spiders and leeches also allow for new dangers to replace the concern with guards, the atmosphere of new places encouraging caution even before you learn what lurks within. Riddles ask you to think more about what you’re doing, and the game not pushing you too hard towards the next objective means figuring out how to complete your work is part of the challenge. A blacksmith can give you tips if you are truly stuck, and while he does have a price for such aid the money you find hidden about is mostly used for his services. He is, oddly enough, sometimes tied to required details for progression though, so not every dialogue option with him is asking for paid tips and figuring that out is a bit less natural than other interactions in the game. Still, there are a lot of interesting moments of clever deception and meaningful interaction with characters that are little puzzles as well, Ghost of a Tale mostly achieving a good balance between how relevant its story is to success while giving you plenty of physical work and exploration tasks that keep you active and avoid bogging the game down in constant conversation.
THE VERDICT: Ghost of a Tale may have little quirks in its stealth system, but the world it constructs and the characters who inhabit it make it a particularly compelling adventure and one where your growing knowledge of its rich history both increases your investment in the narrative and aid in some interesting puzzle solving. Your work escaping Dwindling Heights Keep continues to evolve as new areas introduce new gameplay ideas while things still continue to loop back to the ever developing cast of characters and your understanding of this small slice of a greatly realized setting, forward progress inviting the player in with a growing sense of discovery of both the fictional world and what tasks your little minstrel will be asked to complete. With a gorgeous art style and a wide range of orchestral music that helps to set the stage and tone, Ghost of a Tale is a game world that is great to visit and a bit sad to leave when the credits roll.
And so, I give Ghost of a Tale for PC…
A GREAT rating. In the richly realized world of Ghost of a Tale, characters and species might never be seen but their influence is still felt, history leaves its mark on how the world works, and you never know what little bit of lore you came across will suddenly pop up either as an important part of the plot or just part of making this cohesive setting come together. Tilo’s history is developed wonderfully too, certain characters pulling out more about him as he interacts with them across the different quests they give him and collectible roses helping fill a book of his personal history. Dwindling Heights is a host to a handful of interesting characters with memorable personalities or histories to plumb and luckily many of them tie to the more interesting aspects of navigation and puzzle solving. Finding items needed by someone can involve simply collecting things as you go to make moving forward through areas a bit more interesting or it can involve needing to interact with someone correctly or solving a riddle. Navigating the world is a big part of the process and there are sneaking puzzles and ones that involve more thought than proper movement to solve, but that is one thing that holds the adventure back a bit as the naturally interconnected world also asks you to either retread areas in clunky armor or keep doing the same solutions to slink by. The expansion over time does lead to more areas with new threats and few if any guards so that sneaking doesn’t dominate the entire experience, but the keep’s constant supply of watchmen can slow down movement in the game’s central location. Luckily this doesn’t harm too much of the open-ended approach to completing quests, the blacksmith a bit of a hint system but not helpful to the point he completely solves things most of the time and the act of figuring out what must be done often an engaging little bit of play as well.
Ghost of a Tale does leave certain details hanging for a sequel and it is certainly a game more for the patient type of player who can tolerate a little slowness for the richness of what is found after shuffling around in the armor, but it is also a game that’s hard to say goodbye to as its characters become familiar companions whose tales you don’t want to end quite yet. It’s a world with a lot more story telling potential and spreading that into a sequel that continues a grander plot makes a good deal of sense, the game even starting to embrace the supernatural near the end that continues to expand the layers this setting has to offer. While its handling of stealth is a bit rough, the whole of the game is an adventure that is made more interesting by not settling into one idea for its entirety, the game’s content expanding out into new ideas rather than making itself feel artificial by building everything around a small set of mechanics. With the amount of care put into the look and lore of this little mouse’s journey, Ghost of a Tale’s less smooth play moments are worth pushing through to explore the meticulous fantasy world built here.