Ghost Keeper | PC Early Access Review

I have been gaming for a while. A handful of games really stuck with me from my earlier years. Games like Baseball Stars on the NES, Uniracer on the SNES, and Double Switch on the Sega CD. On the Sega Genesis, a game that has stuck with me is Haunting Starring Polterguy. You’ve heard me mention him in some other reviews because I have been chasing the ‘You are the ghost doing the haunting’ style of games ever since. Ghost Keeper has arrived in Early Access. It is the absolute closest I have ever come to reliving those magical days in the 90s. It delivers everything I have wanted, though it has a few hitches I hope the developers iron out. Come along for a quick ride on what I hope becomes a Game of the Year candidate for me.

A Haunting Premise

The narrative hook is delightfully simple: you are a spirit using supernatural powers to evict the living from your home. The intro scenes do a great job of setting the stage and introducing the spectral cast. As you progress, professional ghost hunters arrive with specialized gear to neutralize you. Avoiding these threats while executing your haunting strategy adds a layer of tension that keeps the gameplay loop engaging.

Keyboard Comforts and Haunting Hiccups

On a fundamental level, the controls are excellent. Moving through the mansion’s architecture is intuitive and fluid. You can leap between floors with a single keystroke, and the camera movement (controlled by holding the right mouse button) is responsive and reliable. Zooming in and clicking on objects or areas to move is remarkably simple. It’s a comfortable game to play with a mouse and keyboard; they don’t overwhelm you with more than 10 commands. Unlike some other mouse and keyboard games before it, I didn’t spend time hitting every key on the keyboard trying to remember an input that I used one time about two hours ago and have since forgotten. The “Timing” is where the current joy meets a brick wall. Because Ghost Keeper is in Early Access, the haunting mechanics feel sluggish and aggravating. For instance, to haunt a writing quill, you have to predict exactly when a human will sit down. This, by itself, is easy enough since the characters walk around the house in a loop. The problem arises when you have to account for the ghost’s float animation, the “possession” delay, and the object activation. Often, by the time the quill finally moves, the human has already stood up and left the room. I spent a solid 45 seconds waiting for one NPC to complete their walking cycle, only to miss a haunt for the twelfth time in a row. It is a pacing issue that actively drains the fun out of the experience.

Sights, Sounds, and Small Spaces

The haunted house aesthetic here is undeniable. The locations are beautifully realized and designed. The rooms, themselves, are a bit small. Once I started worrying about the ghost hunters’ locations, haunting the residents became a bit cumbersome. A friendlier word that some might choose is “challenging.” Even on a 27 inch computer monitor, I felt a little cluttered within a room and had to zoom in. Meanwhile, I am not paying attention to the ghost hunter because I am too zoomed in on this room that I am trying to haunt. Perhaps that is part of the design. I “UGH”’d multiple times, though. Take nothing away from the development team’s attention to detail and design decisions. Speaking of which, the sound is amazing. Creeps and groans galore, all of the glorious sound effects you would expect from a haunted house game are here in Ghost Keeper. The jolly screams filled the halls as I built up the fear factor of each inhabitant. (To be clear, I was jolly about the screams. The residents were fleeing for their lives because, yes, they can be scared to death in Ghost Keeper.) https://youtu.be/F35tJXGYi1o