Posted on: May 25, 2025
DoomFruit
Verified ownerGames: 887 Reviews: 16
Warning: Souls-like
At its heart, this game is a metroidvania. You're in a large interconnected map of passages and collect abilities which allow you to progress further (missiles, wall jump, double jump). And it's a pretty competent one. However, it's missing a tag. That of "souls-like". There's a stamina bar. I hate those things. It's got a currency which is both XP and shop money and you lose that currency on death. Your character needs to be levelled up and this can only be done at special "bonfires", with an escalating cost. In Metroid, enemies drop health pickups, allowing you to live off the land. Here, you can only heal from "estus flasks" of which you have a finite quantity (yes, there's a powerup that lets you heal from melee attacks, but you only get that at the end of the game) and which can only be refilled at "bonfires" (which respawn all the enemies). And finally, you could equip all the powerups in Metroid at once (except the first game, where the wave and ice beams were exclusive, and in the third game where the wave beam and spazer were exclusive). Here, most powerups take up a set amount of capacity, where your total capacity is equal to your level. Yes, you can in theory have enough to fit everything, but that requires an insane amount of grinding. However, Ghost Song makes one nice improvement on the Metroidvania formula: secondary weapons (such as missiles) are fed by an automatically refilling energy pool. For someone who suffers from Giant Robotic Crab syndrome, that's a huge bonus because there's no longer a concern about "wasting ammunition". But did I enjoy the game? Yes. While it has been infected with Souls-like elements, it is at least not a serious infection. They're annoying, but not enough to put me off the game entirely like Hollow Knight did. There's enough Metroid in here (gunplay is a viable strategy) that I can manage despite being a Souls hater.
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