Get ready for a truly spiritual experience
Grave.. I mean good news! The dead have risen, and they are yours to command in Ghost Master Resurrection, a remake of the classic supernatural strategy game from developer Mechano Story Studio and publisher Strategy First.
With a legion of ghouls to call upon, summon the dead to spread fear and loosen bowels among the mortal inhabitants of Gravenville. I say a legion, but you begin the game with only a select few spooks to take on your missions of terror. More ghosts become available as you solve puzzles in each haunting and release them from the chains that keep them anchored to their mortal remains.
In the center of the town stands the Ghoul Room. In this building you can see your collection of spectres and interact with them to see their powers and epitaph. Along with a humorous introduction, the epitaph shows a ghost’s details, such as its type, its experience and level and the area that it can be bound to. You can see all this during your hauntings as well, but it is particularly handy to cast your undead gaze upon these details before you go out causing mayhem, so that you can pick the right fiends for the job.
Another important feature of the Ghoul Room is the talents screen, here you can upgrade your ghost master abilities to increase the effects of your ghosts powers, reduce cooldowns and increase the number of ghosts you can take on missions. To pay for these upgrades you need to earn pumpkins, which can be obtained during hauntings or by exchanging gold plasm for pumpkins in the Ghoul Room. Six pumpkins is the standard cost for an upgrade, though the later ones do cost more.
Each building that pops up around the Ghoul Room on the town map is a haunting. You can pick any to attempt that you haven’t already completed or use the portal on the lower right to shuffle the missions. The first mission you can attempt is called Haunting 101, it is a simple haunt with only one ghost to rescue and requires you to scare away all the mortals. You can use this mission to get used to the controls and familiarise yourself with your undead minions. You only need one specific ghost to unlock the one in this haunting, it won’t matter which other ghosts you take as all are capable of scaring the living and that is all you need to do after, but some of the other missions will have specific goals to accomplish to release the ghosts trapped inside. Once you have completed a haunting you cannot return to it, so any ghosts you fail to liberate are lost to you, this makes picking the right ghosts for your team at the start of the mission all the more important. You get two minutes at the start of each haunting to look around the level and see who you might need to take with you.
Ghost Master has little in the way of a tutorial other than Haunting 101, so in subsequent missions where the goal is more complex than just to frighten people away, you are kind of thrown in the deep end and left to figure things out for yourself. In my first mission after Haunting 101, there was a ghost anchored to his corpse hidden behind a brick wall in the basement, I needed the mortals to find him but I had no idea how to do that at first. Manipulating mortals is quite satisfying when you know how, and a skill that you will put to use repeatedly throughout the game, in this case I needed a combination of two ghosts to draw attention to the corpse, and once found, I unlocked the ghost that belonged to it. Once you unlock a ghost you can immediately use them in the same mission, and their powers can be useful in unlocking the others in hauntings with multiple ghosts to rescue. Once you identify a trapped ghost by clicking on it you can look at its epitaph and powers before releasing it, you aren’t required to free them in a certain order, but if you are clever in your selections it can be much easier to do so.
You can issue your ghosts orders, allowing you to determine when and if they use their powers, you can specify a particular target for them to pick on, tell them to use their powers only when a mortal is present or to only use a specific power, you can even tell them not to use any powers.
Resource management plays a part in Ghost Master. During hauntings, powers and bindings cost plasm to perform, this is separate from the gold plasm I mentioned earlier and the amount you have available is indicated by a bar in the top left of the screen. You often have to choose which of your ghosts you want active and whether to let them cycle through the use of their powers or set them to using specific ones. You can always remove a ghost from its binding by selecting to bench it, whether to move it to another room or select a different ghost. Gold plasm on the other hand you obtain by completing hauntings with a decent rating, and aside from exchanging it for pumpkins, its main use is to unlock new powers for your spooks which opens up greater tactical options later in the game.
There are 58 ghosts for you to command over three acts in Ghost Master, they are split up into six main categories, Sprites, Vapours, Disturbances, Freighteners, Elementals and Horrors. These are further divided into sub-categories. Can you free them all?
Ghost Master Resurrection comes with the first two DLC packs, which include several new missions as well as two new game modes. In the first, you must scare all the mortals away before the sun rises. In the second everything is random, the ghosts, the locations, the mortals and unholy chaos ensues. And should you not want to rest in peace after those, there are even more DLC packs coming throughout the year. You can get your chilling hands on these packs as they release with the season pass, and continue your reign of terror.
