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• gamedeal user

  Sep 22, 2022

  Do you like Paper Mario?
• gamedeal user

  Sep 22, 2022

  This game feels like it is almost there for being an absolute amazing game however I have a few complaints about it. 1. I feel the game doesn't have much content inside roaming around. The maps are pretty huge without really doing anything inside it. The only items you can get in the game are for crafting and even that feels lack luster. 2. The difficulty spike is mostly just numbers and you would have to grind to make for no real reason. 3. There are some bugs in which my character gets stuck and I can't get out. I was in an area that wouldn't let me use the map to teleport and couldn't progess. All in all it is a great game with characters, music, graphics, and gameplay could use a tad more work. For a $20 dollar price tag, it is something I would expect. My recommendation would change if there was more content such as adding items that figments can use in battle and more things to do in the maps.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 26, 2022

  As a major fan of Bug Fables, The Outbound Ghost popped up on my radar and I picked it up because it looked interesting and I wanted another experience like Bug Fables. Unfortunately the game fell short of that expectation, but even without the comparison to other games, The Outbound Ghost has too many general flaws for me to recommend it. My main gripes with the game are: - The game says it has 5 chapters, but it actually just doesn't have a chapter 3 and chapter 5 is just the post-game. (Edit: Looking back, there is a chapter 3, but it is extremely short relative to the other chapters, like 20 minutes or less) - Levels are massive with hardly anything to find besides crafting materials. - The majority of boss fights happen for no good reason with quite a few bosses being literally invisible and having odd placement in the world. - Weak characters and story. Chapter 4 in particular spends an awfully long time setting up ideas and characters only to just abruptly end in a short ending cinematic that only really answers 1 question without addressing everything else. - Quite a few bugs. Aside from getting out of bounds and weird model collisions, the big ones for me have to do with the game pausing, or lack thereof. If you pause the game in the overworld, enemies continue to move and act, but cannot start battle with you; so you just pause as an enemy comes close, then exit pause and run into them for a free first strike. Also, in battle, if you finish off the enemy with the non-last hit of a multi-hit attack, the game pulls up the victory screen but still expects you to complete your attack. Aside from these points I would say that the music is good and the battle system is fine (albeit a bit repetitive as you usually end up spamming the same 1 or 2 moves every fight). The game has also been getting a lot of updates so maybe some of my gripes will be fixed later on, but in its current state, I cannot recommend The Outbound Ghost.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 1, 2022

  The Outbound Ghost is a game with an incredibly promising exterior — wonderful art and music direction, sufficiently interesting premise, polished graphics (relative to the genre), and a solid combat system. What lies inside, however, feels unfortunately hollow, rushed, and not very well thought through. I will apologize in advance for being what will probably come across as extremely harsh; if the developer ever reads this review (and judging from activity in the other reviews, I suspect they will), I want to be clear that this comes from a place of care and constructive criticism. I will also avoid major spoilers to the best of my ability, though discussing the basic narrative structure and some thematic spoilers is unavoidable. Let's start with the high points. As mentioned in the intro, the art is truly very charming and breathes life into the project. That, I think, is this game's single greatest strength. The characters don't have Toad syndrome; they are well-differentiated and very expressive and pleasant to look at. I found the music very charming and befitting a cute ghost game, and just when I would get tired of hearing a battle theme, the next chapter would hit and give me something fresh to listen to. Aesthetically, this game is great! I'd also like to take a moment to appreciate the combat system. While it's not perfect, I do think that enemies were sufficiently interesting that I didn't mind taking most fights. I also think it's an incredibly refreshing break from the norm that you restore your HP and SP after every battle — this game has no interest in being a resource management simulator, and I think that decision works extremely well with the Aspect/crafting system. Not having to worry about SP preservation between battles opens the floor for the kind of indulgent strategies that are not possible in many other RPGs. Now to the not-so-fun stuff. I love bugs and stupid glitches that let me experience silly fun for no reason... but there are WAY too many bugs in this game. Here's just some of what I experienced: (Note: this game is actively being patched, so some of these may be patched out after the time of review.) - Certain sound effects do not respond to the SFX volume setting (most memorably Status Glossary in-combat, the "Memory Break" sound effect, and the Obelisk break sound effect), thus blowing my ears out every time they played - Some enemies with buff abilities would endlessly buff themselves if their buffs got stolen - Visual/sound bug where the game would sometimes think I was in a bush until I entered a new screen - Dying to status on your turn with AP remaining behaves extremely unintuitively - Occasional issues with unwanted auto-advancing text, confirmed through testing not to be a general controller issue - Several cutscenes starting with strange cuts or empty text bubbles - Many textures and objects with no collision maps at all - Several instances of accidentally falling out of the map when exiting a battle - Upon noticing the above point, the realization that about 20-40% of this game's overworld non-house screens have at least one spot where you can clip out of bounds, some of which led me to become stuck in place and need to reset the game (I'll admit, of course, that this last part is nobody's fault but mine) Look, I really do hate to be nitpicky, but the bugs were damaging to my playthrough. Especially the first sound effect bug, which made me have to play on very low volume, or just outright take my headset off when playing through certain sections where I expected these sound effects to play. Many spaces in this game feel hollow and artificial. I appreciate the attempt at filling space by pasting the same few trees, rocks, fences, and houses everywhere, but it really feels like this is a game with about 15 unique screens and a LOT of filler connecting areas. I get it, reuse assets whenever possible, but I would have rather had considerably smaller connecting areas with more unique visuals and geometry and well-scrutinized level boundaries. As it is, most of the map feels like a waste of space, which feels even worse when you consider that the map is not exactly massive in the first place. Finally, to the meat of my complaint, the writing. Again, Conrad/Conradical Games, please do not take this too harshly. Everything I'm writing is meant to be constructive and is just my opinion. I found the writing extremely confused and incongruent. I felt that at many times it didn't know what it wanted to be. Is the game silly and lighthearted or serious? It's fine if the answer is "both," but there were many, many times when a serious moment was happening, or a serious topic was being addressed, but the tone of the writing completely undermined the would-be gravity of the scene. I'm sorry if it seems I have no sense of humor, but I feel that despite the interesting and serious premise of Afterlife Murder Mystery, the game was rarely willing to confront anything of importance. I definitely believe it's possible to explore deep themes with lighthearted characters, but you have to be willing to allow the characters to actually engage with said themes. I'll give a couple of examples of specific pain points. None of these ghosts (except for Bun and Adrian) actually felt like they had Burdens, yet Ascension (which is noted several times as functionally equivalent to death) is their goal. Do something with this! It's a cool observation to have Bun make, but it gets immediately shot down anytime Bun brings it up! What about Figments? Why are there Figment cultists in the universe and why don't we get to learn anything about them? Why, in the Drylands, do we start seeing apparitions of story characters, yet it's never addressed in the dialogue in any way? Again, as with my comment on bugs, I really do hate to be nitpicky, but the entire script could use a grammar/technique pass. It was distracting at best, and I'd say the way these characters spoke actively contributed to my feeling that the game wasn't willing to take itself seriously. Everyone is comma-averse, run-on prone, and written at a very low level of complexity. It left me with the impression (which I realize was never actually stated) that every character appearing on-screen except for Frank is a child with no way to process their emotions or engage with any serious matter. The writing also constantly falls into the really basic pitfall of constantly telling instead of simply showing. There are SO many instances where a character will be witty and say something like "This long trip isn't such a big deal now that we're ghosts is it?" I understand that these characters are pretty freshly ghosts, but it still feels extremely unnatural. I haven't commented once in this review that I'm writing it because I'm a human; why do ghosts constantly need to tell each other that they're ghosts? And of course, as others have pointed out, the majority of the main story ideas are not addressed or resolved at all in the ending. Right when I was excited to finally start learning answers to my most burning questions, "The End" appeared on my screen and that was that. Believe me, I'm a sucker for ambiguous, open-to-interpretation endings, but there's a huge difference between an ambiguous ending and an unwritten one. Overall, my experience was... fine, I guess, and the game was cute, but it did not deliver on either my hopes or its own promises. I understand there's a great financial burden in developing games as an indie studio, but I really think this could have shined with more time to playtest, iron out the bugs, and both refine and expand the writing. I will keep an eye out for any of your future titles, because there were elements of the game I really did enjoy; but ultimately, I wish The Outbound Ghost was as willing to seriously explore its own ideas and themes as I was excited to entertain them.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 4, 2022

  Only 5% of players have the "Finish Chapter 2" achievement at the time of this review, which is 2 weeks after release. With the Chapter 1 version not too far ahead with only 13.5% completion. If that does not speak for itself, I will be a tad bit more explicit. The charm in this game is purely in the aesthetics; otherwise, the game is extremely lackluster in every front. Exploration, combat, difficulty, but worst of all, story and writing are all mediocre at best. For a papermarioesque game, it is sad to see such rushed pacing, with little setup and payoff. Tons of people are saying it is not fair to compare this game to Bug Fables, which I severely lack the understanding of why that is not a fair comparison. Both games are trying to heavily emulate the Paper Mario formula, while deviating in certain aspects, and both games are sold at the same exact price. I would highly understand if this game was $5 or something, but this game has the same market value as Bug Fables; and unless you have already played that game, I cannot recommend Outbound Ghost over Bug Fables. Simply, it does not do anything better, and it does not do much different rather than do little else. The only pro of this game is its emphasis on moment-to-moment combat, rather than resource management. I have always been a fan of games that restore your HP and SP/MANA after every encounter; and this game does that. Had it not been for this one single mechanic, I am confident I would have not powered through Outbound Ghost. There is clear talent here, and if this the developer's first game, then I am definitely confident they can still make a great game in the future. But for now, this should be a pass for you unless it is on a massive sale.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 11, 2022

  It's so hard to leave a real review of this game and say if I'd recommend it or not. I'd recommend the first half, but not the second half. I liked the game, up until I didn't. The Game's Style: The game is gorgeous, I mean absolutely beautiful, but you can tell that's kinda where most of the production time and budget went to. It's in the same art style of the Paper Mario series, but unlike Paper Mario it never really take advantage of it. In Mario there's things hidden in 2d that you can only see if you explore in 3d, so Paper Mario TTYD pulls this off better. The Writing: I wish the writing in the game was better. Being styled after Paper Mario I thought it would incorporate more of the humor that comes with those games, but it really doesn't. There were a few parts that made me laugh, but overall I felt like it could have done MUCH more. There were very few jokes or mentions about the characters being ghosts. They really just repeat the same Ghost joke over and over instead of telling different jokes. The Music: I like some of the songs, like the underground song, the Central Outbound song, and the real boss music but the rest are pretty forgettable. The Gameplay: The game is pretty fun, you get to explore the world and battle the monsters you see on the overworld, but it starts to get pretty repetitive. There's around 15 or so different characters you can use in battle, but I really only used 4 because they were far and away the best ones. Why would I use the others if these ones can kill every enemy in 1 turn. It was pretty easy to get lost also since the map doesn't show you where you are on it, so you have to read and guess which way to go sometimes since the game never tells you where to go, the dialog does. I was reading all the dialog since I wanted to follow the story, but if I didn't play for a few days it's hard to remember what I'm supposed to do. It was never very difficult, but I didn't play with any of the nuzlocke modes that you can use, so it could theoretically get harder. The Story: It's okay. It just kinda plops you into this world with very little backstory and then thrusts some characters on you like you're supposed to know who they are. But as the story progresses into the halfway portion of the game it does get better. Then it starts to lose my interest by random important events to the plot happening off screen, but then later on in the game you get to see MOST of these things (some I guess they just forgot about and we never get to see). this part, however, is where the game really starts to lose you. *SPOILERS* You start playing the game backwards basically. You meet up with a character who you've been chasing the entire game, but then you work THEIR story backwards, episodically. You get to fill in all the blanks that you missed from earlier in the game, but you end up just playing the exact same thing Over and over again. I'd rather this part of the game just be a cut-scene than me rushing through various 15 sections of exploring places I've already been just to get story details that I've already seen the result of. By the end of the game I know what's going on, but it took TOO long to get there. I knew the "twist" ending long before it got "revealed." With that said, I still LIKED the story. I liked seeing the world unravel a little more, but it didn't pay off at all. Also some of the characters literally just disappear, they don't ascend, they just aren't on screen ever again. The Ending: *spoilers* Bruh, this has got to be one of the worst endings to a game ever. The game sets up so many different plot lines for a bunch of different character, but you don't get to see ANY of them through. The game leads up to the two main characters finally coming together and then poof games over, nothing happens. It ends with a "The End?" screen, but like no dude, the game isn't over. The whole point of the game was to help different ghosts ascend AND NONE OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS GET THEIR PAY OF. Nothing happens. Ultimately NOTHING occurs in the plot of the game. The main characters realistically accomplish nothing, the antogonist accomplishes nothing. Nothing gets done because there is no more game. The game ends and you feel like you have at least another 5-10 hours to go, but nope. Nothing. The End? So I Liked the game and then the last few hours just ruin it. So if there's DLC, it better continue the main story, and if it does I'll play it. If there is no DLC, aw well.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 18, 2022

  I'm upset with the amount I have to say about this game. It's like there were 4 teams, that were all given their own assignments. The music team? Absolutely killed it. Amazing. Weird blips when the audio loops most of the time, but probably not on them. The art team? Phenomenal. Vibes are great. No visual or story reason for the characters to be paper, other than the aesthetic homage to Paper Mario, but still well done. The story team? Submitted their first draft, took no criticism and regarded no notes. No dialogue is well-written and no character is likable. The programming team? Played Paper Mario and thought "I could do this but better" and said "what if this, but more" without realizing the gameplay reasons it was designed like that. So much of this game makes me so angry. I didn't want to be angry as I played a cute ghost game, but holy cow guys, what happened? You took the medals system from Paper Mario and were like "what if they were available to collect, constantly, dozens of them, so many you won't even be able to keep up with them. They will be sorted exclusively oldest to newest and require arbitrary crafting." You looked at the fun teammates and said "What if there were more, so many more, and they were also collectibles and negated each other constantly, but also held no story significance whatsoever, to the point that you could miss getting one and not even notice." You looked at the combat and thought "Multiple button inputs for difficulty? No just make it faster, even if it lags sometimes. Oh, and what if there are multiple status ailments you can have that act like poison, but only hurt you when you act? That way you are punished for healing yourself, and can actually die from the action of using a healing item?" The only actions that matter are attacks. All the stat boosts are moot when *regular enemies* can one-shot you, when you're a *higher level then them.* It doesn't help that there are multiple medals that have the description of doing something to "attack skills", but mean regular "attacks" and not "skills"? The programming logic doesn't even track correctly. I had one figment and gave him a percentile attack boost at cost of damaging myself with attacks, a buff that when if I attack myself it does one damage, and an additional attack buff. Therefore I do strong attacks to the enemy and only take one damage, right? No. If I did 20 damage to the enemy, I took 45 damage and killed myself. It doesn't help that the menuing feels terrible, and that *multiple* goals for the roadmap (two weeks after release) are revamping different menus and systems? I bought this game on release and I feel like I was punished for playing it when I did, instead of just waiting another year. In closing, both Bug Fables and Outbound Ghost wanted to be Paper-Mario-Likes. Bug Fables visually looks a little rougher, but feels like a well-crafted experience by people who understood the source material. Outbound Ghost visually looks better, but made me say "Man, I wish I was playing Bug Fables."
• gamedeal user

  Nov 3, 2022

  I wanted to write a review just as a caution. Sometimes things really look too good to be true. This game looked good, but unfortunately it was only in the looks. I played for only 4 hours, didn't even get past Chapter 1, and was already so bored. Combat is repetitive, everything feels empty, and there's just a general sense of a lot missing while playing this game. I probably would have refunded the game if I hadn't tried to give the game a change and played for too long
• gamedeal user

  Dec 8, 2022

  Putting this at the top so you can't miss it. TL,DR this game is not like Paper Mario or Bug Fables. Skip this one. I'm gonna be honest, I bought this game not only because it was another indie resembled paper Mario, but because I wanted to support the developers of this game because from the videos and screenshots, the game looked really promising and it was clear that they put hard work into it. And considering how much I enjoyed a similar game, Bug Fables, I was looking forward to this. I stopped playing once I got to the cave of delusions. I was pretty disappointed by this game for quite a few reasons. But let's get the obvious positives out of the way first. The game looks extremely polished and ran very well and consistently. Though my play time was short, I never ran into any bugs or glitches. The music, while mostly atmospheric, was still well composed and pleasant to listen to. Unfortunately that's about where the high points end with this game for me. The story: This game's narrative has a really cool premise. A village of people is murdered and some of the residents remain trapped in purgatory as ghosts who are unable to move on. The villagers want to find out who the killer is and ascend to the afterlife. That's pretty much what I got from the 2 hours I played and from what I read from others it doesn't really go anywhere from that. None of the characters, with maybe one or two exceptions, seems to really care that much that they're dead. They're kinda just like "Well, darn. We're dead. That kind of sucks. Wonder where the killer ran off to." The story does not spend any time on how the victims of the murder feel about the fact that they were frigging murdered and that they are stuck in purgatory. For some it doesn't even seem like much has changed for them, the only difference is that they're ghosts now. I respect the optimism guys but you're kind of been majorly screwed over and none of you are even mad or upset in anyway? Aside from that, none of the characters themselves are very interesting in general. None of them stand out from one another because they all just talk like regular people. By which I mean none of them have any character quirks. I hate to make comparisons, but in Bug Fables, our three main characters all had distinct personalities. Kabu was stern and respectful, Vi was hyperactive and childish, and Lief was dry and a little distant. None of these characters have any personality and that is especially apparent in the main character. He's silent and I really don't understand why he had to be. He isn't Mario. There's no reason why he had to be mute. The characters talk to him like they understand what he says when he emotes so why not just switch the dialogue to him? The challenge to writing a silent protagonist is that the supporting cast has to carry the narrative otherwise it doesn't work, and in a Paper Mario-like RPG, one of the best things about them is the characters and the connections that they form with each other. Since that's not here, and neither is the narrative really, it all feels very hollow. General Game Play: This game has zero sense of transition between scene to scene. The game just throws you right into it. You start out immediately in the first over-world map with no introduction to who you are or what you're doing here. Not that it matters because its' later revealed that you're an amnesiac but whatever. You wonder around for a bit, bump into your first enemy, and you start combat. You do this for about 2 hours straight with some cut scenes here and there, maybe pick up a few items and that's pretty much it. When you do get to a cut scene, like everything else in this game, it kind of just abruptly starts and in one case it abruptly ends. Seriously, when I saw it I thought I had accidentally skipped it somehow but no, that's just how the scene ends. It was very jarring to say the least. The environments leave much to be desired. I didn't find them too be to big or too small but visually they're just not interesting. A forest, a cave, a beach, and the bottom of a well. No identity or gimmick unique to this game, they are exactly as I described them and they get pretty boring to look at after a while. Combat: When you run into you're first enemy you begin the combat tutorial. Here you are introduced to your first figment who acts as you're party members, kind of. You only ever see them in combat and they have no relevance to the plot whatsoever. The first figment, regret, Explains to you how combat works and then never again. In fact, none of the figments you find here after talk or interact with anyone here after. The combat itself is basic. Like, really basic. It's pretty much time your button presses to do max damage and every attack or skill move does this. The only difference between them is the timing. Some have very straight forward, easy timing and others have it a bit more tricky. An interesting idea on paper but the problem is that it gets old fast. Even for the hard ones, they may start off a little bit annoying to time but once you get it it becomes too easy. Combine that with just giving one character attack buffs and letting them do all the work makes this combat system pretty stale. Unlike most RPGs you reset your hp and sp after every battle. One one hand I do like that I don't have to resource manage so much but on the other hand, none of the battles have any stakes because I go into them comply maxed out on everything. Another reason the battles aren't very exciting. I can never come out of a battle, having just barely won, thinking about how I almost didn't make it, because in the next battle it's like it didn't even happen. Speaking of items though, there are none. Not really anyway. All the items you pick up in the over-world can only be used to craft traits for your figments. Badges essentially. You can't use them for anything else. There are no heath items. No sp items, no status items, nothing. And if you ask me, none of the badges are really worth it. They either raise a stat, or trade one stat for another, or give you a new move that you most likely won't use because you already figured out a good combo. I barely noticed a change when I equipped them. Other nitpicks: These are just my personal nitpicks so nothing here is too big a deal but i figure I'd mention anyway. The character designs, like pretty much everything else, aren't very interesting. Everyone in this game is a pastel colored floating ghost. They're pretty much all the same shape and that's kind of lame guys. They might have different hairstyles and colors but that's it. They all blend together especially the NPC's who are all pallet swaps of the same 3 or 4 template characters. The enemy designs are better but they don't strike much harder in the visuals department. They're still pretty generic looking bad guys who are also basically all ghosts. Over all, this game is just bland. It feels like all the good ideas it had were not thought through very much. The story doesn't take advantage of itself, the characters are all forgettable, and the combat isn't anything I haven't seen before. I would recommend not wasting time on this one. Sorry, Conradical Games.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 9, 2022

  This review is no longer authorized by the player.