Fetch Quest: The Game
Ghost of a Tale is an indie stealth adventure game with impressive visuals and a deep amount of world building. Unfortunately, playing Ghost of a Tale is not very fun. The gameplay amounts to sneaking around guards, doing dozens of fetch quests and solving rudimentary puzzles.
The game takes place in a fantasy medieval world where characters are anthropomorphic animals like mice, rats, frogs and birds. You play as a mouse named Tilo, who has been imprisoned. Tilo receives an envelope containing the key to his cell by a mysterious beneficiary, who tells Tilo to escape and meet him on the Castle rooftops. Tilo is small and scrawny and has to use his smarts to survive in this world of much larger and stronger rats.
The visuals of this indie game are on par with games of much higher production values however the gameplay feels stuck in the 90s. It is easy to get lost in the game. Quest givers will only say their quest dialogue once, so if you accidentally skip over it, it is troublesome figuring out what to do next. I am frankly curious how many players actually finished the game without going online.
Even when the main objective is clear, there is an atrocious amount of backtracking. I did not find it fun walking past the same guard, having to don the sluggish soldier armor disguise and then re-equip to much lighter gear. The game does provide a series of hidden paths and shortcuts, but it is not enough the allay my frustrations.
I was still able to power through the game because I enjoyed the narrative and its characters. However, the straw that broke the camel's back is the final act. It's a frustrating gameplay sequence that deprives Tilo most of his skills and involves slowly carrying items back and forth. It succinctly summarizes what I felt about this entire game, that even at the game's "best moment" it is simply yet another fetch quest.