Holy Ghost Story

released on Dec 01, 2022

A visual novel about helping the ghost of a schoolgirl move on by completing her unfinished business: some maths homework.


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     'Just us, standing here.'

Some games have a dramatically intimate quality that makes them difficult to assess. Dissecting a game that dozens of people have worked on doesn't conjure up the same unpleasant feeling of voyeurism as a standalone title that mirrors a single person's emotions and life, in all its layers of complexity. Woodaba is one of the well-known figures on this site and their critical work opened up a window into their thinking. A creative work summons new perspectives, but can be more hermetic. It is therefore appropriate to preface this short review by pointing out that my position does not allow me, unlike other reviewers, to feel intimate empathy for the two characters; I have real sympathy for them – and for all those who have had to go through the ordeal that school represents – but I was lucky enough and had the requisite social conditions not to experience, in the flesh, the anguish of education and to excel to the point where I have fond memories of it.

The player is an unremarkable adult who finds themselves in a Catholic school, with alcohol dulling their senses. They meet a ghostly-looking girl who tells them to help her finish a maths assignment so that she can find peace and finally move on. The title is a retrospective of the high school years and their anxieties for many teenagers. The spectre of guilt is always present, be it towards the educational institution, family or friends, but the figure of Jesus Christ, martyr for humanity, forms the essence of the discomfort. Is he, who suffered for the sins of mankind, not disappointed to see those who were made in his image stumble over simple mathematical problems?

To emphasise this persistence of Catholic thought, the game is interspersed with white text on a black background panels, framing the action of Holy Ghost Story. The opening words are taken from Canto I of Dante's Purgatorio (1316), while the ending concludes with the final lines of Canto XXXIII, echoing Beatrice's admonitions and Dante's trials to purify himself in order to reach Paradise. It is unclear how much of the intertextuality is deliberate. If Siobhan is similar to Beatrice in her faith, and the figure of the giant – mentioned in Canto XXXII – haunts Holy Ghost Story, the cruel irreverence of the protagonist seems out of place and rather clumsy, given the brevity of the title, which leaves little room for character development. On the other hand, the title manages to make the protagonist a rather unpleasant character, despite their more or less affable appearances, and it seems to me that Woodaba's gambit is successful here. Erato_Heti mentioned the weakness of the final choice: I would argue that it makes sense in the characterisation of the protagonist, but that its weight is clearly not emphasised enough in the subsequent dialogues. In any case, the references to Dante seem like preliminary invocation – paradoxically quite similar to the way the author invokes the Muses during his ascent, but from a classicist perspective, supported by the presence of the ancient authors – but feel ill-assigned, as the other elements do not really support this intertextuality.

The visual and audio presentation is fluctuating. Erato_Heti mentioned the effectiveness of the opening and closing scenes: I concur. They present a poetic abstraction that plays well with traditional visual novel codes, to showcase their motif, without over-emphasising it. The ending scene, full of unspoken words, works with a quality that the game has struggled to achieve before. In fact, there seems to be too strong a dichotomy between the dialogue and the musical atmosphere, breaking the naturalness of the discussion. Kevin MacLeod's original tracks were well chosen, with the piano oscillating between dissonant and pleasant arpegios, thus underlining the reassuring discomfort of this Catholic school. However, the classical music choices seem more faulty and off-key. While Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 (1888) is still adequate, Pachelbel's Canon in D (ca. 1680) completely extinguishes the dialogue by creating an happy atmosphere contrary to that of the text. Is this a deliberate choice of contrast? I find it difficult to understand the logic, if so.

Woodaba pointed out that the writing was completed well before the design on Ren'Py and that the choice of graphic assets and music was done in a rather artificial way, to suit the text as best as possible instead of binding them elegantly. This can be strongly felt in the school setting, which draws on a certain idea of Japanese school life, not very appropriate for the game's discourse, set in Ireland with the Catholic setting. Similarly, it is quite odd that the writing style changes throughout the game. The prologue indulges in concrete, albeit classic, poetic flourishes that tend to disappear completely until the epilogue. Admittedly, these gaps in homogeneity are typical of the genre and they don't pose a major problem in the game experience; but there always seems to be something missing – stylistically, thematically or symbolically –, especially with the Dante quotations. They never manage to follow through with their idea, beyond the simple idea of Purgatory.

Holy Ghost Story provides few answers, as do our daily introspections. Nevertheless, it is certain that society is shackled by systems that have little regard for the well-being of individuals and neglect them, with varying degrees of disdain. The title never embarks on great lyrical and idealistic discourses: it retains a prosaic edge that is quite touching, with its characters ultimately unable to learn from this strange night. But how can one blame them? They found, at least, some closure. The production of the game seems to follow this same direction. There's an excessively humble aspect to the title's design, from the graphic choices to the way the story is told – and written, I agree with Erato_Heti's remark about the spelling mistakes, excessively prevalent at the beginning of the game – but also in the references, be it to The Divine Comedy or the Neon Genesis Evangelion-esque titlecards. This gives the impression of a somewhat innocent 'love letter' which, if not formally perfect, is overflowing with sincerity.

A more personal note to Woodaba: Holy Ghost Story strikes me as a very convincing debut game. I very much appreciate the willingness to step out of one's comfort zone to explore other themes and I respect the choice to face the critics. I didn't think I would be playing the game, but deep down I was curious to see the product of a brilliant mind – not all of whose opinions I share, but that's natural. You have, I think, identified the pitfalls of the title through your retrospective and this is a solid foundation for the future of your creative adventures. It seems to me that the idea of reinterpreting the visual novel's conventions is a solid concept, especially when coupled with the themes you explore, but the shortcomings in the technical execution make the ensemble feel a bit disjointed, and it struggles to acquire a real subversive force. Anyway, I congratulate you for this first project and wish you a lot of success for your next projects!

A mixed bag. I think this game is probably worth playing if you want a milder take on institutional pressures and how they effect subjective worth, more intense versions of that tale can be found in harsher portrayals like the No One Can Ever Know, the christian trauma of We Know The Devil, and the wandering inadequacy found in Life Tastes Like Cardboard . Holy Ghost Story instead glides for a more tonally mundane relationship to such insecurities, giving a possible tonal alternative to the ideas of such suffering as this usually climactic limit-experience that breaks through to some comfort. Though it should be mentioned I highly recommend prioritizing those works if you can handle them.

That's why it's actually worth talking about seriously, since a more impressionist watercolor portrait of these issues is not seen much around. In theory, this game is really adding something totally profound and useful to the table by taking such subject to the ghost story, as it allows us to view the problems more in relationship to an abstracted past than a post-traumatized present. It allows the reader to 'refresh' from the sins of a bad grade or a failed semester. Yet at least in my view it's held back by scattered execution and sophomoric presentation.

The best parts here are in how word choice and sentence presentation reaffirms the overall theme of being too paralyzed by your own mental shortcomings to push forward.

In particular, that theme of guilt-bearing insecurity is found through how sterile a lot of the text part of the presentation is. For example the scroll of the text is at such a pace where you will be outpaced by the scroll itself while still feeling its effect. Then, the text itself is in a unfamiliar font style, what the font checking system brought up to me as blackboard, apparently mainly used for formulas in textbooks. The effect of these two operations in tandem is like looking at "letters grouped together but making no words that looked like anything to me", to quote the ghost girl protagonist Siobhan. This overall translucent makes it feel like the reader is constantly fazing in and out of focus with the text and this is a great effect genuinely as it connects well to the feelings of perpetuity. These are reinforced further by the use of classical piano riffs in the empty classroom sequence giving a hauntological 'failed learning' element added intensity. Classical music is a go to for studying and learning, but if you've ever actually tried it then like me you probably found it far too disorienting to actually keep on for very long. By using the simplified melodies that repeat rather than move through the whole movement, that hauntological element of being trapped in the past is there. Now people have almost entirely technologically adjusted to using electronic ambience or lo fi hip hop instrumentals, giving these orchestrations even more of an antiquated effect. It really captures that reality that this is in part about trying to make peace with the hauntology of past pressures. Of a tradition and feeling of learning that you may have been subject to and is familar but is not entirely your own. This is Siobhan's story, and she makes damn well sure to remind you of that at more than a few points in the narrative.

This effect on it own already produces one problem, the overall disjointedness and passiveness means that you're not going to be taken in by Siobhan's tale all at once and your initial relationship will probably be one of irritation before settling in properly. She just starts talking to you as if there's no trouble at all, and the sentences flow gives a sense of tedium and impatience that isn't really settled evenly in advance. While narratively fitting, it also relies on a profound amount of reader persistence that is likely exacerbated when considering the games weaknesses of giving the average player nowhere else to focus their attention.

For example the visual presentation in general falls much further with how rudimentary the rest of the visual information is. Siohban has her hand stuck permanently ajar her hip, with no other change in character gestures. The school space itself is so generic I was constantly wondering in the back of my mind whether it was using the same environments as Doki Doki Literature Club (altho the Prologue and Resolution settings were stellar). A lot of the dialogue is flat and there's no striking vocabulary or unique word choices for the reader to weigh. I bring this up not to be mean spirited but instead to point out that a visual novel is great for giving information in a way that distracts from the weight of the tone, the eye candy is meant to give readers something to latch onto in distraction, for particularly literary works, the point of the visual novel format is to capitalize on these distractions to such an extent as to cause the reader not to feel irritated by the oppression. Finally the 'hideki anno' style title card transitions read for me as just abruptly distracting, and just felt like a homage. Sure, the dreamlike fragmentation and the feeling of being shattered into the next piece of text is neat, but it was ineffective to me due to that minimalism.

I'm very sympathetic to the addressed reasons why the work is as rudimentary as it is, mostly being as Woodaba mentions in their own retrospective, to quote:

"Anxiety prevented me from reaching out to talented artists and musicians I know about commissioning stuff that would have helped give the game an actual visual identity to call it's own, and I don't want that to happen next time.".

The only reason I want to call attention to it at all, is because more visual novel readers weirdly don't even seem to give a shit about this quality at all in how they overall feel about a work, instead moving for philosophical or moral critique. In my mind, Milk Outside a Bag Outside a Bag is probably the best in terms of maximizing its visual information and transitions in ways that help the reader give focus away from the brutality of the work, and to no fucking avail in that case. At best you'd get an aside of admission 'its pretty' before reveling in a critique of the abstract representation of mental illness as being shallow. For a lot of people it seems the overall effect of Visual Novels matters mainly to them only how much they liked the characters and how 'shallow' they thought the thematic undertones are. This is something I know that I won't individually change at all, to the point that calling it out is probably just grandstanding. It's just hard to convey how intensely frustrating and reductive that approach can be to progress in the arts.

Due to a lack of focus given to the mechanical or formal aspects of the medium, people instead move to needless moralism, and the fact is Visual Novels as a genuine medium are not taken seriously so it makes sense why there's not a large push for those nuances. It's not until we actually start respecting the medium and even seeing these niche indie projects as worthy of critical value will we be able to see a reasonable dent in the isolation here. So as not to soapbox too much more myself, I think the best way to view this work is as an early public manuscript and prototype for getting the bearings with renpy. Otherwise it's almost entirely hard to justify the merits of it being in the visual novel form when a purely text driven system like twine would suit it 'better'. That's not to say I think it shouldn't have happened though, I think its important to ask ourselves 'would this games story and presentation fit better in x engine/medium' and then realize that if the answer to that is 'yes' and the game is an early work, its probably intended to springboard the creator into better familiarity with the engine in question than be a fully fleshed masterwork. Without that heuristic, it's easy to be unnecessarily cruel to any text that passes you by. That said I think it's still acceptable to let such distinctions affect overall opinion.

With that said there's also a lot of typos to the point the strains the immersion people tend to have with typos, which I'm quite surprised have been so overlooked by others. Last time typos were mentioned about a work that was written by a regular of the site (Post-Night Devil Disclosure) the author went back and cleaned up the typos. So maybe that's why people are not even mentioning it, because they realize such a complaint would seem dated? Nonetheless, they are frequent enough to make for a very jagged ride.

A part of me is unsure about how to feel on how choices are handled. The first 2 dont matter and the last one matters a lot, but comes as a complete refutation to siobhan's powerful characterization of self agency. However overall the character portrayal of siobhan is great, it shows her as a combination of plain and yet feisty, a combination typical I tend to see in christians I've interacted with. I do think it would have been more effective in terms of the descriptive elements if a spare adjective was thrown in now and then.

Regardless, I look forward to Woodaba's next venture here if it comes to pass. I think they have a good understanding of the foundations outlined. It's always cool to see this process of game creation demystified to as it creates the conditions for others to try it out for themselves.

I will say though for anybody reading, and I quite honestly do not mean this as a slight to this game as this is just something I've been thinking about reading obscurity projects, but if you make a game and even if you publish it publicly, its completely optional to add it to this database. This probably seems painfully obvious but if you don't upload it, odds are nobody else will either, and so you don't have to have this looming fear of having your passion projects judged by online bullies in advance. I've seen people upload internet films they've made to letterboxd and then regret it so I feel like its worth noting that immortalizing the work in a public database is optional but likely difficult to remove after including it.

Similarly, Do not add Woodaba's or any other user on here's games to IGDB without their permission. Not everything needs eyeballs, and your +1 to the games you've played is not that worth the potential detriments there. I hope I'm not stepping a line by mentioning the importance of that here.

This review contains spoilers

In the closing moments of 2022, a ping on discord alerts me that the game I spent most of my Christmas break from work finishing up has been added to IGDB, just in time for me to mark it as my GOTY for 2022. It is of course, not actually that, but something about the misplaced arrogance of doing that, ironically or otherwise, really tickles me. I giggle about it to myself for the rest of a party in a far nicer house than I have scarcely been in for my entire life that puts me on edge about it the entire time I am there.

But, of course, in order to mark it as GOTY, I have to mark it as played. And the easiest way to do that is to give it a star rating, which, of course, was 5 stars, on the urging of a voice in my head telling me that if I'm not going to give the game 5 stars, who will?

In a turn that feels immensely humbling, others have in fact rate it 5 stars. Which I am grateful and mortified about, but also thankful because it lifts from me the burden of having to mark this as 5 stars.

I don't know if other people feel the same about this, but I find it extremely difficult to look at something I've made holistically. I was there for every step of the sausage being made, after all, so maybe it's just natural that I all I see are a thousand tiny pieces, a jigsaw that has no clear overall shape. What this means is that when I look at Holy Ghost Story, I can see lines, scenes, moments and beats, but the whole picture is unclear to me. I think it's a real weakness of my writing, getting lost in the weeds and losing sight of the larger whole. Which is probably why this is twice as long as I planned it to be and has some scenes that an editor probably would have cut, but which I retained because I liked the way the light caught them, irrespective of their place in the wider thing.

Unlike some of the other entries in this mini genre, which comprises some of my favorite pieces on this site, I don't know if I have anything enormously interesting or cool to say about holy ghost story. As something that was originally planned to be a short and sweet project I could cobble together for Halloween, it ending up two months late and maybe twice as long as I intended does feel like something of a failure. Truthfully, I don't know how I feel about this and it's likely that I won't for a while, and if my track record with this sort of thing is any indication I'll probably come down pretty hard against it.

But right now, all I have are the pieces, and I can still pick them up and turn them over in my hands. I know I like reading about game development and the way these things come into life, so in lieu of any actual insightful thoughts or analyses, here are just some little tidbits from the time I spent making this game.

(spoilers, obvs)

- The whole thing was inspired by a riff I had with two of my friends about ghosts whose Unfinished Businesses were incredibly mundane. The ideas I had ballooned out during a visit to the Tate Modern the next day, and then contracted in again while I tried to siphon out the actual core of the story.

- The original title, inspired by one of the pieces in the Tate I saw, was "...almost religious awe..." but ultimately I could not resist the gag of evoking The Holy Ghost. Sorry, big man.

- I wanted to avoid any explicit queer/trans themes for this. A lot of my creative and critical work exists in this space, and I kind of wanted to avoid it for this. Not because I have anything against such works - far from it - but just because I wanted to go out of my comfort zone a little, into the moderately different comfort zone that is Catholic Guilt.

- Embarrassingly, the logo/cover art was partially inspired by the HD Remaster OPs for Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, specifically the bits naming the various Gundams. I'm so sorry.

- This was originally going to be made in Visual Novel Maker, something which appealed to me because of my past work in RPGMaker. However, while RPGMaker as a toolset has it's ups and downs, I think VNM is something of a disaster, with an incredibly clunky interface that is catastrophically less intuitive than the python-based Ren'Py, which is where this ended up.

- Following on from above, the entire script was written in a word document before Ren'Py was opened even once. I future, I think I will play around much more with visuals and music as I am writing rather than writing everything and then making visuals and sounds around that, but I do think inputting the final script manually was good, because it allowed me to do some final last-minute editing and drafting that ended up with some of my favorite lines.

- Originally, the POV character, or "genius", was a much more passive person, who spoke in the present tense, and had almost no internal monologue or interiority. However, through successive drafts, more of a character started to creep in as I started to move the didactic qualities of the script into Genius as a character. I have mixed feelings about how Siobhan is presented but I do feel good about where Genius ended up, this kind of unpleasant, unempathetic, well-meaning but patronizing figure. Despite them being almost completely absent in the original outline, I think the story ended up being as much about them as it did about Siobhan, which I do like, even if it did take perhaps too many drafts to reach that point.

- Accordingly, the scene with Genius by themselves was a late addition that didn't get as much redrafting as the rest of it. I think it's better with than without, but I also side-eye it even more than I do the rest of it.

- My actual favorite thing in the game is Siobhan's name turning pink during the "flashback".

- Do you know how difficult it is to find public domain visual novel schoolgirl sprites that aren't very horny? Let me tell you: pretty fucking difficult!!

- ? speaking in a more formal tone was something inspired by Squigglydot's Post-Disclosure Devil's Night, and it's use of purple prose, to suggest my interpretation that ? was in some way separate from Genius without saying it outright.

- Let me tell you - it has been pretty nerve-wracking working on this while an emerging trend of people in my activity feed crept up of taking random itch.io games, writing a scathing dunk of them, and then others who, clearly, would not have liked said game, downloading and playing it anyway to get their own hilarious dunk in. Which is not to say that I don't think there aren't going to be people who find this to be nails on a chalkboard and will write a funny dunk review of this, but I do think the one thing that would make me regret having made this would be if it became something people crowded around to get the boot in.

- Kevin MacLeod is such a real one dude

- If I had to sum up the lessons I learned from this project, I would say that researching and testing out software with miniscule practice runs is essential even for a "small" project you undertake to "learn the basics" of software, and also that I think I need to divorce myself entirely from the prospect of "true" "solo" development. Anxiety prevented me from reaching out to talented artists and musicians I know about commissioning stuff that would have helped give the game an actual visual identity to call it's own, and I don't want that to happen next time. When I write that Siobhan scowled and yelled, I wish I could have properly conveyed how I wanted that to look.

I hope this has been interesting at all! My nerves and anxiousness around this title have yet to dissipate, so I likely won't be reading anything about it for at least a few days, but knowing that people took the time to check this out means more than I can say, both for the people who enjoyed it and the people it didn't. I'm really looking forward to reading people's thoughts once I feel able to do so without my nerves exploding at first brush.

Hopefully I'll see you again sometime in 2023, hopefully with a less played-out theme!

This review contains spoilers

CW: Suicide attempt

I wasn't the best student.

Though there was no divine judgement looming over my back, there was the fascist state of Americana that we were forced to worship at all times. Get good grades and you'll be spared from the wrath of poverty. Get good grades and you'll be able to provide for yourself. Get good grades and you'll be loved. Pray to the flag, the iconography of empire, or risk being ousted.

I saw the worst of this because of how poorly I did in school. The first time was simply because I was overwhelmed by the radical change in schooling styles from elementary school to high school. It was a whole new level of workload from before that the faculty was not interested in helping me adjust to, not helped by the fact that I would not be diagnosed with autism until I was almost done with schooling. The second time was when I fractured my femur in three places. I couldn't walk, so I had to be taught from home, and being taught from came with its own challenges and a lack of connection that I didn't realize I required to thrive.

The third time was when I attempted to take my life when I was 16.

I often think about how much different my life would have been had I not taken that choice. How much more pressure the school put on me simply for having a moment of weakness like that. I often come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter, because the systems that we live in would have led me to that outcome regardless, even if it had taken longer. And the schoolwork would pile up and pile up, crushing me under its weight, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of death wishes.

I graduated only two years ago, which is weird to think about, because it feels like it's been so much longer. I have recurring nightmares about what it was like to be in that place. About the constant dread of what would happen if I failed. And the worst part is that, much like our ghost girl friend in this game, I blamed it all on myself. I thought that if only everyone did their best, things would be different. If I hadn't happened upon communist literature toward the end of my time, then I'm not sure what would have happened to me.

I thought a broken system was perfect because it was all I had ever known.

Thank you, Woodaba. For sharing this beautiful story.

When I saw that one of my favorite reviewers on the site, Woodaba had made a short visual novel, I knew I had to sink my teeth into it as soon as possible.

Woodaba's writing style within their reviews (both on here and on their Youtube channel) are incredibly captivating, so I was very excited to see how that would translate to something in a VN format.

It translates very well.

From the start Woodaba's prose captured me in building up the mystique of the prologue scene, painting this picture of a dark encounter with something beyond comprehension, and leaving me curious and interested to see where it would build.

As the main story unfolds, the interaction between our protagonist and the dead girl winds up feeling surprisingly natural. The way the two bounce off of each other at first does have the vibes of your traditional comedy anime meeting, but as we get to know more about both characters, it builds to what feels like real people having real conversations about their lives and specifically the impact of the educational system.

Yeah, that's the part I definitely find the most interesting, and I'm gonna say minor spoilers here because its a relatively important theme to the narrative of the game.

Beyond the super-natural horror Woodaba goes for, the very real horror of Holy Ghost Story comes down to how the educational system (in this game it's Ireland but honestly the critique could apply to any country's as far as I'm concerned) fails those trapped within it.

From the endless amounts of all consuming stress to try and satisfy the constant memorization to get the highest exam scores, and such stress burning out young people to the point of total exhaustion.

It's entirely relatable to anyone who has ever been in school ever, while I myself never studied to such an extreme degree, the oppressive nature of school was always felt. The constant clocking in and clocking out and forcing pointless information into my brain was always the worst aspect of the system, making school less about actually learning and more of just being fed as many answers as possible.

Holy Ghost Story in particular criticizes Catholic School and religion in general, as the constant lingering visage of the man on the cross fills the characters with a deep sense of sadness, as if he is guilting them throughout the education experience.

Of course, this could just be how I internalized it, but I much appreciated how this critique wove in with the supernatural elements, giving us both abstract and yet very real, down to earth horror at the same time.

The ending of the game, much like the opening, left me with many questions. However, I think it's good that way. I think a good story always leaves a few things unanswered to let you piece together in your mind.

Of course I don't want to spoil the experience more than I already have so go give it a shot yourself, I think you'll find yourself similarly enthralled as I was.