Ghost Master

"You cannot run, and you cannot hide, you gotta face it baby, thing's go bump in the night"

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.... Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against it's hills, holding darkness within... and whatever walked there, walked alone
- Shirley Jackson (The Haunting Of Hill House)

'Why doesn't anybody ever play with her?'
The boy squinted at him, cocking his head;.... cupped his hands beside his mouth to tell a dark secret. 'Because she's awful'
- Peter Straub (Ghost Story)

The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple... Her eyes were fixed on Danny's, glassy and huge, like marbles. She was grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace.
- Stephen King (The Shining)

Oh ****ing hell, something brushed my arm, ****, ****, ****, ****, ****!!!!!
- Yvette Fielding (Most Haunted)

Everyone loves a good ghost story. Tales of plucky teenagers alone in the woods, haunted by shadowy figures; of young children terrified of the things that are moving in the dark space beneath their beds; of houses that are still home to their former owners long after their death.... From children telling spooky stories around the campfire, to big budget chillers on the cinema screen, you just can't beat the rush that you get by being scared by a piece of make-believe about things that go bump in the night. But not many of these stories tend to be told from the perspective of the ghosts themselves (a certain Bruce Willis movie aside...), and as such it can be hard to appreciate just how much effort goes in to making us mere mortals cack ourselves with fear. Which is where Ghost Master: The Gravenville Chronicles comes in - for once, you control the living-impaired fellas, as they go about their nightly routine - making us all scared of the dark again...

Alas, these are troubled times for the dark denizens of the spiritual world. The average mortal just isn't afraid of them any more. In our cynical and scientific age, the idea of supernatural beings just doesn't wash, and as such there just isn't much for our ghostly chums to do. It's time that things changed - the powers that be have decided that it's time to put the fear back in to a mankind that has grown complacent, and the appropriately named town of Gravenville has been selected as the place where the ghosts and ghouls begin to fight back. It's the perfect place to start and - wouldn't you just know it? - it's up to you to get the job done. Let the haunting commence!

Upon firing up Ghost Master you are instantly treated to a wonderful, mood-setting intro in which a troop of plucky All-American adventurers (most probably with names like Dirk, and Misty) foolishly decide to play with a Ouija board - which, in a nice touch, you use to enter your name - before unwittingly summoning more than they bargained for. Needless to say, they get the bejeezus scared out of them by some suitably terrifying ghouls. This is all presented in an FMV of the highest quality - your RGB SCART lead will be weeping tears of joy at the bright colours, crisp character animation and beautiful cartoon stylings on offer. Eager, you press the start button, ready to see more. You head to the first level, ready to play with the great cast of well-animated, larger-than-life spectres you've just had the pleasure of seeing in the intro (a personal favourite of mine is the creepy fellow who literally rips his head in half with the metal hooks that he has for hands). The loading screen fades away and you are presented with..... a zoomed-out, isometric cross-section of a random, rather empty, building, and instead of an army of the undead waiting to obey the very slightest touch of your analogue stick, you have a small cursor and some menus at your command. What the deuce....?

Yes, Ghost Master is a strategy game, which immediately makes it noteworthy, since the genre is severely under-used on the XBox. Sure, we've had a few management sims, and a few good RTS titles, but compared to the fast-flowing tide of racers and FPS games out there, the average strat fan hasn't had a great deal to shout about. But with it's fairly unique concept (the only game I can think of with a similar theme is Haunting: Starring PoulterGuy on the Mega Drive), and it's quirky, tongue-in-cheek charm, anyone who loves spending time moving their units about and fretting over their resources may just have something to get excited about here.

Surprisingly, the game that first springs to mind when starting up on Ghost Master is PC classic Commandos - like that seminal World War Two kill-fest each mission sees you taking control of a small squad of ghosts, each with their own unique skills, with which you must undertake your given task (which, at heart, usually boils down to scaring a set number of people out of the area using whatever ghostly powers you have at your disposal). You have your fairly dull ghosts that can attract mortals to whichever area you want them to be in, you have your mind-altering ghosts that can put mortals to sleep (which can be quite handy, as many mortals have the power to fight back...) and ghosts that can be used to tamper with the environment, revealing hidden items that will prove useful to you in your quest, but let's face it, these ghosts, while necessary, are really kinda boring. You know as well as I do that the ghosts you want to be playing with are the ones that wreak havoc on your poor victims - the ones that cause the whole room to shake, or set the unwitting humans on fire: these are the sort of ghosts that scared you as a child, and these are the ones that are the most enjoyable to get to grips with. It really is quite satisfying watching the humans run scared as you unleash hell upon them - and in a nice touch you can really get to know your victims: as well as having full stats on all the ghosts at your command, you can call up information on all the humans in any given stage. They all have different personalities and react to different types of scare in different ways - while some are terrified of loud noises and things they can't see, some don't get scared until they can see what's tormenting them. It adds a certain flair to proceedings.

Naturally, however, this simple 'scare-everyone-and-move-on' formula begins to wear thin after the first few missions, and so developers Empire start to stir things up a little (although scaring everyone remains your top priority throughout the game). Before long you'll find that your missions become far more complicated - often you'll find your missions include several different objectives to be carried out at one, such as releasing trapped ghosts, and using humans to summon more powerful demons. While the ultimate goal will always be scaring folk, you may find that some of the people that you are out to terrorise play important parts in your plans - for example, you may need a certain character to find a key for you, so you can't scare them so much that they flee before fulfilling their destiny - keeping characters just above breaking point is surprisingly tricky when you are trying to break everyone else around them. This adds more depth to the game and is very welcome - after the relatively shallow nature of the game at first, it's good to see that things become more involved and challenging.

And the game certainly does become difficult really quite quickly. You'll soon start encountering Mediums and Witches, who are much harder to scare, and can, in defiance of all logic, actually kill your ghosts with their own supernatural powers. Not to mention that you are under a strict time limit - in true Dickens style, the spirits must do it all in a single night. A clock is constantly ticking away in the top right-hand corner of the screen - when dawn breaks at Six A.M., it's game over for you. Before you know it you're tackling missions with several objectives, scaring off resilient witches while trying not to scare off the far more vulnerable mortals, and keeping one eye on the clock. It really becomes quite an engaging challenge, though it must be said that it can become very frustrating to be almost at the end of a tough mission only to have to start over due to the clock. By the time the final missions roll around you really can't afford a single mistake - everything in your plan must run like clockwork because even the slightest delay could well mean that you run out of time. How problematic this proves to be really depends how patient you are - having to repeat twenty-odd minutes of perfectly executed play just because of a minor slip-up late in the game can be agonising, and it really is a pity that there's no option to save midway through a mission.

The visual presentation in this game is actually quite disappointing. Following on from the near flawless FMV intro, the isometric levels come across as far too blocky and lacking in detail. While there are some nice touches (such as the stolen traffic cones and ... ahem... 'naughty' posters that litter the frat houses), the various environments just don't look that great. In addition to frustrating glitches such as the occasional graphical break-up, the buildings all look far too blocky - not a problem in the more modern surroundings, but quite jarring in levels set in old rickety shacks in the woods, and while fine from a distance, the characters look very shoddy when you zoom in to get a better view of the action. In addition, the camera movement can become quite jittery when you are trying to move your view around an area where a lot is going on. On the Playstation or a low-spec PC this would be acceptable, but the fact is that in this day and age you just don't expect that sort of thing from a console game, especially one that clearly isn't pushing the machine to it's limits. Commandos 2 showed that the XBox can handle this sort of game very well indeed, so it's a shame that Ghost Master feels at times to be more like a high-spec N64 game than a next-gen title. That said, though, some of the more devastating supernatural powers, both from you and your various foes, do look rather special.

The sound, though, is delightful. The narrator's voice is extremely camp and cheesy, sounding very much like something out of Goosebumps, or Tales From The Crypt. It really suits the slightly cartoonish atmosphere that fills the game, and adds to the game's charm no end. The tunes too, while often quite subtle and unimposing, perfectly match the tone of the game - spooky, but in a Nightmare Before Christmas sort of way, as opposed to a Nightmare On Elm Street sort of way, and I'm almost positive that one of the tunes is based on the theme tune to the old cartoon 'Tales of the Cryptkeeper'.

Ghost Master: The Gravenville Chronicles has 'Cult Classic' written all over it (not literally, that would just be silly). Released with little to no fanfare at a budget price, it's likely that not many people picked it up. It looks very rough around the edges, and it can be extremely frustrating, but at heart, it's a challenging, fun and relatively original strategy game amongst the sea of average FPS and Action games on the console. It probably wouldn't appeal to those gamers who like more of a quick-fix gaming experience, but for those patient enough to look past the fact that you can't save mid-mission, the fact that it looks quite glitchy and ugly, and the fact that it gets difficult fast, Gravenville may well prove to be a very rewarding place to spend a dark and stormy night......

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/18/05, Updated 09/12/06