REVIEW : Spooky Ghosts Dot Com (PC)
How difficult is it to create a Metroidvania game? You mash some rooms together, put up some special doors and thingy-dos to open them, throw in some monsters and things, and you’re ready to go. But, no, even producing a decent Metroidvania is a difficult task. Making your map simply navigable, ensuring the powers you provide your players are gratifying and well-paced, balancing your enemies, so they don’t wear players down too quickly, and providing people with an incentive to fill out the entire map are just a few of the near-infinite considerations.
Despite its small scope, Spooky Ghosts Dot Com manages to check practically all of those boxes, putting it ahead of many independent attempts in the category.
A ghost hunter and a human with a rosy complexion. Ruby is the owner of Spooks Ghosts Dot Com, an online ghost-busting company. On Halloween night, she receives an email inviting her to a large estate where a particularly punky ghost has misinterpreted the site’s purpose. Our heroine is thrown into the estate’s ghost-filled bowels when a misunderstanding goes frightening. Ruby is now stuck in a typical haunted home, where she must blast her way past spectres and skeletons to collect candies, hug kittens, and possibly escape this lovely nightmare.
That’s pretty much the entire tale, and it’s all you need to know. By the way, the mansion is planned up; this Metroidvania does a great job of driving you along to where you need to go. There are only a few powerups to locate, and the majority of them are keys or convenience items, so once you’ve beaten a boss for a new item, you’ll know where to go next. A few side chambers and alternative objectives to complete are getting candy buckets that extend your health and kitties that open the fast travel nodes, so it’s not fully linear. But, overall, it’s a beautiful, small map that’s easy to navigate and navigate.
However, there are lots of spooks in the area, and they’re the portion that’ll trip you up the most. Most enemies are straightforward antagonists that follow the outlines of walls or throw items in predictable patterns, but a handful stands out in unusual ways. For example, you’ll have to contend with crow mages in the early garden section, who can call pillars of fire right beneath your feet, wherever you are and can kill you in a second before you receive your health upgrades.
The shield skeletons that imitate your jumps are particularly aggravating until you have the pistol upgrade that allows you to combat them. While none of the bosses is very difficult, they have health bars that are arguably a little too long, forcing you to retry a few times just through attrition.
It’s just in the early game that it becomes frustrating, albeit I’m not a fan of instant-death spikes in a Metroidvania. They’re used in moderation, and I believe that’s a good takeaway for the entire game. None of its flaws is highlighted, and the basic charms on display more than compensate. The images are simple pixel art that perfectly captures the eerie atmosphere and the music… well, it exists, but I wouldn’t expect anything more than background music to keep quiet at bay. Hunting for kittens and candy is entertaining enough, especially once you’ve acquired some improvements and a greater understanding of how enemies operate.
