Ghost of a Tale

I like stealth games and good adventure - and this game ticks all the right boxes for me. There were few main selling points for me here:

Its immersive adventure in beautiful, very detailed world. The world design borrows heavily from first Dark Souls game, and as much as I love that game I dare to say here it is much more cleverly designed, with lots of hidden secret passages and details put into it.

The games is focused heavily on exploration, finding things and avoiding enemies. No minimaps, quest markers and other horrible modern stuff - the game feels old school in that manner and I loved it. This plays like a stealth/puzzle solving game, but it feels like a puzzle game in the same way that Looking Glass games felt - not in a way of point and click adventures (but there were few riddles to solve on the way).

You can save game only in "safe" spots - very cool concept and works perfectly. The experience is "casualised" a bit here and there - the game gets easier as it progresses and allows you to obtain hints and maps for money. This does not ruin the fun, but removes lot of frustration associated with being "stuck" for too long. You will get stuck once in a while anyway, do not worry. My only complaint is that I would remove some hints for secondary quests - they are optional anyway so no need to make it too easy, especially since you can figure out everything when you pay enough attention to the world and the dialogues.

The stealth system is quite original and works very well. It is totally unrealistic and a bit too easy, but it all fits perfectly with cartoonish style of the game.

Unfortunately the game is not perfect and I need to address few things:

The experience quality drops significantly in last third of the game. The attention to detail and level of polish of the first few hours of the game are not carried through the whole playthrough. (which is a case for most games actually...)

The game tries to throw too much fetch quests at player at some point (they really should have cut out some of the quests from the game) and it also tries to take more "cinematic" approach at the end which it fails to do, exposing many design limitations. There is a moment when you start getting that indie game feeling, that some obvious things are missing due to limited budget and resources.

The game also throws more and more dialogue lines at the player as story progresses and the quality of that aspect also drops a lot, the later conversations drag for too long and are quite uninspired. I would also do the ending differently, but thats a minor thing. I wasnt that much into story anyway, I liked the lore and some characters very very much, but found a whole main story a bit bland and too complex for its own sake.

Anyway the game was great and much better than I ever expected any indie title to be. If you like adventure and exploration - this is must have.