![]() ![]() The real draw of this game is the writing. The game is really mostly fetchquests and exploration, trying to find things for people who might help you escape from the prison or help to find your wife. What you enjoy about this game is probably not going to be the gameplay – sure, the stealth bit is decent enough, but the mechanics never really evolve because instead it focuses around disguising yourself to pass as various people to get others to help you out. ![]() At this point, it becomes possible to walk past and talk to every guard in the place, and the game goes from a stealth game to being focused on exploration and, ultimately, doing what amounts to fetch-quests for a number of NPCs. Once you complete this disguise, weighed down in heavy, oversized rat armor, you pass yourself off as a runty new rat recruit who was supposed to be transferred in. But Tilo is a kind creature, and the NPCs are so cute… how can you not want to help them out? The weird thing about this game is that while it appears like it is a stealth game at first glance, it actually only is one for about the first quarter or third of the game – one of the first quests you get is a quest to sneak around the keep and gather pieces of guard armor to make yourself a disguise. Everything you believed might be wrong, and your benefactor, Silas, warns you not to trust anyone – even him. Thus, as you explore the keep and try to make your way to freedom and find your wife, you also learn more about the world and the people around you, and find that things are nowhere near as simple as they seemed. The whole game takes place in a very small area – a single fortress and a bit of surrounding wilderness – and there’s only about a dozen real characters in the game, but there is more to almost all of them than meets the eye. The game, thus, subverts the player’s expectations about a setting like this, and the game keeps doing so throughout. The mice you run into in the game are thieves, and it becomes clear when you read more about the world that a number of mice have been rebelling against the rats – and while their treatment as second-class citizens is perhaps unjust, a number of the rats seem to be sympathetic towards mice. But it quickly becomes clear that the rats are indeed the heroes of the setting, and that the mice betrayed them in ancient times to a terror known as the Green Flame. It seems at first like the racism of Redwall is present as well – the rats are at first depicted as being rather mean, and the mice as good. They walk on two legs, but Tilo will scamper on all fours when he runs, and they’re all designed to look rather like real animals. This is a world akin to Redwall, where all of the people are anthropomorphic animals – but only slightly anthropomorphized. And so the stage is set for a stealth game, as our cute little mouse protagonist scampers and sneaks his way around the world. One of the first people he runs into, a frog, entreats him to murder a snoring guard, but Tilo refuses, on the grounds that he is no murderer – or indeed, a criminal at all. But Tilo is a tiny little mouse in a world full of rats, magpies, and other larger creatures. One day, Tilo finds a key and a note hidden under a piece of bread delivered to his cell, entreating him to unlock his cell and sneak through the fortress meet with his anonymous benefactor on the top of the highest tower in the keep. Ghost of a Tale stars Tilo, a mouse minstrel who has been unjustly imprisoned in the crumbling Dwindling Heights, a great fortress built over the tomb of the hero Dunlain, but which is today little more than a prison where rat soldiers who have screwed up one too many times are given jobs as punishment. That may sound like a joke, but it really isn’t. Ghost of a Tale stars Ghost of a Tale is a very densely packed Stealth/Fetchquest game. Ghost of a Tale is a very densely packed Stealth/Fetchquest game. ![]()
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