“Being touched makes me feel safe. But at the same time it also makes me anxious. After all, I have no idea how I could ever repay someone who makes me feel this happy. I can’t find the words to say. With just a simple hug, all of these feelings are revolving around inside me, and I’m just so afraid that I’ll end up crushing this moment into dust. And just like that, the happiness has faded away completely, leaving nothing but coarse anxiety coursing through my heart. Am I just not used to dealing with kindness?”

“Maybe I’m a little lonely.”

Okay now were those quotes from Sayoko, the protagonist of the video game Ghostpia after the first time someone was nice to her in so long that she can’t remember the last time she physically touched anyone, or was that a quote from Ina, the me who’s writing this little thing about the video game Ghostpia four months into an acute mental health episode that my doctor recently described as “really concerning”?

Jkjk obvi these are quotes from the first few minutes of Ghostpia but I did find myself struck throughout the ten or so hours I spent with the game just how well it captured with words the vibe of Being Depressed, which I do think is really hard to do in the format that developer Chosuido has chosen for this story. Being a visual novel with absolutely no player input beyond proceeding the text and which never leaves Sayoko’s perspective means you’re really sitting in the sludge with her, and while she’s a really engaging character, she’s often a difficult one to be around. Unmotivated, sad, and anxious, she actively avoids her friends in the early goings of the story, and even by the end of the game she is still largely nonverbal in group settings. But a combination of incredible scene direction, one of the most clever localizations I think I’ve ever seen, and a really lovely score help bolster an already very strong character voice. I think it’s a lot easier to communicate a VIBE of depression than having to constantly assert the fog of it with a running first person narration, but Chosuido makes it look easy.

“Hopefully I’m not so empty that the wind blows me away.”

Ghostpia takes place in a city surrounded on all sides by a vast desert of snow, populated by immortal people who live nocturnally and whose forms are painfully melted by the light of day. If they’re ever caught by the sun or otherwise killed, they simply reform and wake up within a couple days at the local garbage dump, which also happens to all inanimate objects in the town upon damage or consumption. The population is small and fixed – no one has ever been able to leave, and no outsider has ever shown up. There’s a fascist church that nominally runs the town but given that it’s difficult to cause any permanent harm to anyone or anything, even stuff as extreme as murder or arson seems to kind of slide out of consequence if the perpetrator gets away with it for more than a day or two.

Lots of things “happen” in this game and lots of things “have happened” over the course of ghostpia’s five episodes. It becomes evident pretty quickly that the literal only thing Sayoko is good at in life (death?) is killing people, with guns, with her hands. She’s amnesiac and the church seems to have a vested interest in her not remembering the circumstances around the last time she and her only two friends last tried to permanently escape the town. She gets to know professional worlds both legitimate and criminal. Schemes are hatched, assassinations plotted, battles beyond the scale you might expect are waged. None of this really coalesces into much of anything though. There’s a lot of worldbuilding, and it’s all interesting. There’s a lot of teasing, a lot of implication, hints that there is a coherent vision of What’s Going On here, but Ghostpia is firmly Season One of a planned two seasons and the core of this game is obviously an emotional one, uninterested in answering literally any of the questions it opens up.

“She’s so dazzling, I can’t help but look down at the floor to avert my gaze. She and I are different. The two of us are actually quite distant from each other, but only just so happen to be physically close right now. Just thinking about it like that makes me want to cry.”

The throughline that ties the season together is the arrival of the town’s first ever New Person in, well, no one is sure. Nobody keeps time, they don’t age, they don’t measure things, there’s no real point. All the days are the same, and over time it becomes evident that the milieu that consumes Sayoko enough that she rarely leaves home and doesn’t bathe or eat without instruction is silently haunting everyone. Everyone’s going through their motions, and the thing that makes her different is that she doesn’t have any motions to go through. The ghosts don’t technically have physical needs, so doing things like eating and bathing and staying warm are comforting rituals they keep going to make themselves feel like they’re retaining what they guess to be their essential human nature. Performing humanness is to some degree an essential part of a ghost’s life, and it’s ambiguous how seriously we’re meant to take it when early on one of Sayoko’s friends says they haven’t really hung out with her for several years.

So when a new girl shows up, immediately on the church’s bad side, and Sayoko rescues her, and gives her a name, and a place to crash for a while, well, it becomes immediately harder to be isolated. So as much of the game is taken up by the intrigue of the new girl, Yoru’s, situation, and by association the aspects of the lives of Sayoko’s other friends that she had either forgotten or never taken enough of an interest in before to learn about, the core of the experience is really just hanging out. Conversation. Establishing and re-establishing bonds. Learning to be vulnerable, and getting to know someone well enough that you can be vulnerable with them without being open with them.

“I don’t understand why you believe in her so much.”

“She doesn’t know what it means to love someone. She’s only ever been loved...That’s all she lives for...I find myself unpleasant. I know my mind is warped and repulsive. But I want to keep doing what I’m doing as long as I can.”

“I don’t understand you. But I might be jealous.”

It’s very easy for me to focus on the bits of Ghostpia that I connected with, because they resonate very strongly with me and I think when the game is on it’s so fucking on. I find the main cast pretty uniformly incredible – there’s Pacifica, who is tall and kind and shrewd and confident and ambiguously evil (no one is QUITE sure what her job is but “criminal kingpin” seems not implausible); Anya is handy and moody and warm and deeply invested once she opens up, which comes easier than she suggests it does; Yoru is bubbly and crude and perceptive and unreadable. Sayoko herself, when she starts to feel safe again, never stops being awkward but it does seem like she is kind of just Like That in a way that is flavored differently from the way people clam up when they’re anxious, she’s also a little bit genuinely cruel and deeply empathetic.

Each episode ultimately revolves around Sayoko’s ability to connect with one of her circle of friends or otherwise deeply relate with a side character, often ones who are hostile and cruel. Everywhere she goes she finds mirrors of her loneliness, her fear of vulnerability, her anger, and her aching want for the relationships she thinks other people have. And while this isn’t a game about “getting over it” or otherwise shrugging off depression, through those mirrors Sayoko is able to find a version of herself who is comfortable and able to believe that the people around her want to be there, and believe that when they tell her they feel about her the same way she feels about them, they’re being genuine.

“YOU JUST DON’T VIBE WITH HER.”

That shit isn’t the totality of the game though. Ghostpia is a lot of things, including, often, zanier than I would prefer? Not that I dislike jokes, and I do in fact like a lot of the comedy here, but there’s a juvenile streak that feels really out of place with the rest of it. A strange fascination with the word “poop” that spans the entire game, a mean-spirited running bit aimed at a homeless man that thankfully disappears relatively early on, and a bunch of out of left field otaku goofs at the eleventh hour stand out the loudest in my memory as Goofers that just don’t hit, but Ghostpia’s wacky diversions fall flat for me as often as they hit. If the characters and their dialogue weren’t so compelling through pretty much any scenario they get pitched into this stuff would be way more of a problem for me structurally.

This extends to action and violence too. The game is outright gruesome, and I think it’s to the writers’ credit that when they choose to play that gruesomeness for drama or horror it works really well even though characters are constantly reminding us and each other that death has literally no meaning for them and in fact would often get them out of the pickles they find themselves in. But probably 85% of the time the violence (which is usually like, A Lot, is what I want to emphasize) is played for comedy by the narrative even if Sayoko is taking herself seriously – the people of the town call her The Ninja because she jumps around and is so good at murder, and whenever she’s about to get into something there’s a cartoonish Ninja Flute Musical Cue to herald the coming bloodshed. Characters are bisected, mutilated, impaled, sometimes graphically, almost always for The Bit and I’m not OPPOSED to that sort of thing (I’m a documented sicko and in fact with one character who is the most consistent target of this to the point that it’s a running joke I think it’s pretty funny), I just don’t really get what we’re going for with the tone a lot of the time here. The weirdest bits are when the stakes of the genuine character drama are tied up in this cartoonish violence that otherwise comes off as a really dumb bit. The main plot of one episode revolved around one of the main characters being abused by her employer but the circumstances of this abuse are so brazenly stupid that it’s hard to feel the way I assume the developer wants me to feel about the scene. Nothing really offensive happening, it just feels a little at odds with what feels like the game at its best in multiple other directions.

“I don’t really wanna say something like ‘that’s the power of friendship’ because that’d be so cheesy. So I say it ironically. As a joke.”

Obviously, though, I HAVE connected pretty strongly with Ghostpia. I don’t think of those things I was just complaining about. I think about Sayoko’s endlessly evocative narration, and the soundtrack when it’s jaunty and the soundtrack when it’s melancholic. I think of the way all of the main characters are united in their hatred for Clara, the local nun in training who is so genuinely cheerful and naive that our misfit losers can’t help but be intrinsically disgusted by her mere presence.

I think of how, in chapter one, when she’s reconciling with Anya after going no contact over a slight she can’t even remember anymore, Sayoko says I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and Anya tells her “you don’t have to say it twice.” And then I think about how, at the end of the game, when Yoru is at her lowest and she’s testing the boundaries of the shaky relationship she’s developed with Sayoko, and she’s admitting to her that she knows more about everything and everyone than she lets on but that she can’t say any of it, and needs to know whether Sayoko could understand this, whether she’ll stay with her, Sayoko says “Of course I do. Of course,” and Yoru replies “I get it. You don’t have to say it twice.” I think about stagnancy, and transformation, and how to be content. Those things seem bigger in hindsight. I think Sayoko might agree.

(review as the of the end of volume Final)

A game I completely discounted on release, Blue Archive is a perfect example of how gacha soshage have really taken the torch from the 00s/10s eroge scene. Of course, this has been the direction the space has taken since Fate/Grand Order's raucous success, but this one to me feels like the moment. Its hard for me at least to discuss the game except in comparison to its main two competitors in the Story Gacha, FGO and Arknights. Those games I often feel--as great as they are--get away from themselves, with their grand stories and rotating casts often running away from the presentation of the plot--if I was a smarter person, perhaps I'd make some reference to how Grand the scale of those games are and how the small phone screen ill-suits them, but I am not a philosopher.

Blue Archive keeps it simple. Its a game downright obsessed with the small, every day--even the most minor cursory thoughts about how Kivotos as a place works makes the whole thing crash down, but that same small nature just makes it work better for the phone format. I could easily shotgun entire chapters of Blue Archive while at work in a way I struggle to with FGO or (especially) Arknights. The focus on the more day-to-day "nichijou-kei" sort of writing helps this as well, I think.

But all of that would be missed if the writing wasn't up to par, which is where Blue Archive shines. The game's so endearingly optimistic and even the bit characters have too much charm that you can't not love them and buy into their struggles or lackthereof. It even made one of the worst character types--the person who Talks Only In Video Game References--arguably the best, most realized character in the game. The plots themselves can get quite grand in scale--be it Ancient Blood Feuds or Literally The End of Existence of Every Dimension Ever--but they never stop focusing on these girls, and your role in helping them overcome their various traumas, quirks, feelings, or whatever.
Which is where I should put my subnote--yes, the premise is that you're the good-hearted sensei who teaches these girls, and yes they are all very voluptuous and a lot of them definitely do want to jump your bones--but I was honestly shocked by how wholesome the whole game is. Its horny in practice, but in spirit? I'm not as convinced.

I actually really liked how far it takes the teacher conceit--although your character does take definitive action in the stories, it always comes from a place of growth for the girls you are helping. It has a lot of emphasis on how part of the reason Kivotos as a place is fucked is because the world ultimately does not help these girls and there's no mentorship, no people helping them out except themselves--this is exemplified by all the main antagonists being pretty explicit metaphors for methods of control and coercion of the adults these girls should be able to trust and rely on(and, mechanically, this is also tied in by the main character's Otona no Card--literally, adult card, translated into english as your credit card, an object that the other antagonists who are adults should have but don't because they don't accept that responsibility to the students). And that sort of sense of, I don't know, fulfillment? , is what makes the whole plot work.

And its beautiful.

As to the game? Its a passable idle game i guess, but who really cares about that.

A Libertarian's dream come true. Underage girls falling in love with adult men, a gun for every child, and crippling debt imposed by unfeeling megacorporations. All adding up to a pretty mediocre gacha money hole with a fairly polished presentation.

This is probably the most sus I've ever felt while playing a video game. The sheer amount of grooming that happens in the character stories is unhinged. I truly cannot imagine a sane adult playing through this game without ever feeling skeeved out at some point. This is truly video games' The Police's "Don't Stand So Close To Me." The very definition of a red-flag game.

Music's pretty good, though.

I absolutely loved this VN. It was dark, funny, and even a little touching and gay.

The scene direction is incredible, with a ton of CGs, and the music is great. It had me cracking up regularly.

Seriously, incredible game.

Just copying over my steam review:

Ghostpia is a wonderful story about learning to cherish your friends despite your world weariness. I just finished this game, and it was an incredible ride. Everything about this game is amazing: the visual presentation, the music, the characters, the writing. There's a lot of heart in the exploration of Sayokos struggle to find her place in the world. She tends to get very negative, but gets quickly pulled out whenever her friends are around. It's very sweet seeing that dynamic evolve over the course of those 5 episodes.
I also really appreciate the great english translation work. The dialogue is definitely my favourite part. The game is in my opinion at its best when the characters' interactions bounce off of each other with their funny remarks and witty observations. Once they get going the scene really starts flowing, and that's both in thanks to the writers having a great grasp on who the characters are and the amazing translation transforming that writing into really enjoyable scenes.

I highly recommend this game. It's a real treat