Love, Ghostie Review (PC & MacOS)

Love, Ghostie has to be the most adorable game you can play right now. It gives you the power to nurture friendships and relationships among none-the-wiser residents at your manor. Now, you may have to break the rules of engagement every so often. But it’s all for the greater good, so your subjects can live happily ever after. 

If you’re looking to kill time or just want to kick your feet up and play a relaxing game on a slow Sunday afternoon, check out our Love, Ghostie review, which is out now on PC platforms, both Windows and MacOS.

Love Rules

The game’s name is pretty intriguing, making you wonder what spooky ghosts have to do with romance. But after the premise, it all becomes pretty clear. So, apparently, you’ve kicked the bucket. But wipe your tears away because your adventure has only just begun. More precisely, becoming a ghost brings a ton of benefits, among them the power to nurture love. 

You’ll need a mentor, Ghostina, to walk this new path of brewing romantic relationships. She gives you the keys to a lovely manor and charges you with the freedom to choose which tenants to allow through the doors. The rent is free, so whichever tenants you pick won’t need too much convincing. 

You’ll start with four characters, all so adorable and distinct in appearance. You’ll meet gigantic cats and cute giraffes, each with unique personalities. As your new tenants settle in, you’ll haunt the corridors of the manor, collecting as much information about them as you can. 

It can be useful information written down in the tenants’ private diaries, which you have the power to snoop into. You can find useful information from the decorations the tenants have put up in their rooms. Either way, you’ll start to form correlations between the tenants and identify potential matches. 

Matchmaking at its Best

Now, it’s figuring out how to put two potential matches in the same room or bring them closer. The manor requires maintenance and upkeep, most of which is taken care of by the tenants. So, you can take advantage of errands and assign the same tasks to tenants who are likely to fall in love. 

These are definitely not-a-date scenarios that you can sheepishly cook up and watch your matches take the bait. Keep in mind that setting up naughty dates will cost you an action point. And when you start the game, you only have a limited number of action points. Thus, you have to use them wisely; only the matches that you feel confident will bloom into romance.

Some tenants, however, may need a little push to find love. One way you can nudge them to develop feelings for a potential match is by stealing items around the house and gifting them, along with a card that says their potential match sent the gift, of course. But you also need to be careful when gifting. 

It needs to be intentional, with the information you gather about a tenant through their diary or room decorations playing a significant role in the type of gift you give them. Only the most intentional gifts will result in tenants loving the gift and, therefore, giving the sender a chance.

Get Innovative

Alternatively, you can steal and sell items around the house on eep! Bay. With the money you earn, you can buy more appropriate gifts that will increase the chances of the tenants falling in love. Still, all your efforts will pay off. If a tenant doesn’t love a gift, for instance, they may still appreciate the effort that leads to friendship.

It brings you to the other aspect of gameplay that focuses on an individual character. You can assign self-care to a tenant who seems to be feeling low. As a result, they grow happier and decorate their room more, giving you the perfect opportunity to steal better gifts—a win-win, so to speak.

If you’re struggling with fostering thriving relationships, you can always head over to the Deaddit section, which is like Reddit for all ghosties. It gives you tutorials on how to go about nurturing thriving friendships and relationships. Plus, the posts are always available to read through at any time. 

When you successfully pair a thriving couple, they are free to leave the manor. And then the cycle continues with a fresh crop of tenants to help find love. And on and on, the cycle goes on until you’ve helped all the characters find love. Now, that said, some characters will simply be impossible to please. 

Vacation Mode

You’ll meet characters who simply don’t find pleasure in the dates you set up for them or the gifts you trick them into taking. Some characters simply don’t like the tenants they live with at the manor. For those tenants, you can send them on vacation and, in place of their vacant space, invite new tenants to potentially match-make. 

In that sense, Love, Ghostie is deeper than you may expect. It’s flexible, too, allowing you to come up with solutions to problems in unique scenarios. 

Level Up

You’ll gain in-game currency with successful matches, which you can spend in the market section. Here, you can spend your hard-earned currency to level up. You can buy more action points, for instance, that allow you to actualize more tasks in your day-to-day life as a matchmaker. You can also unlock mini-games that can potentially instigate exciting conversations. 

It’s pretty fun; you can unlock new spooky songs that you can play for your tenants and scare them into conversation. It comes in handy to learn more about your tenants because, as much as you get a brief description of their personality, most of the information about what makes them tick is retrieved from paying attention to the gameplay. 

From the decorations to the diaries to the dialogue, characters often reveal their nuances through the actual gameplay. For that reason, Love, Ghostie feels beefier than most games. It knits clever interactions that immerse you in the gameplay. Moreover, the dialogue is pretty funny, and the writing is stellar. Some of the puns are pretty memorable and engaging. 

The two-dimensional visuals, on the other hand, are pretty standard. Sure, they are clean and polished, but they also don’t particularly stand out from the crowd. Still, the character designs are some of the cutest graphics you’ll see in gaming. When you’re done with your playthrough, you can boot up New Game+, which keeps a record of all the interactions you’ll have instigated, allowing for faster matchmaking. 

Lots of Combinations

Speed is pretty important because the game gives you 12 characters in total. You can match them however you want, regardless of their gender or personality. As a result, you have up to 65 potential couples and storylines you can explore. This paves the way for lots of combinations and replayability. 

It also helps that you can test the waters, placing a potential match at the cinema, for example, to see how they might evolve. You always have the freedom to rework and change matches at will, exploring all the possibilities at your own pace. For that reason, Love, Ghostie is a must-play for lovers of simulation and experimentation with different characters and personalities.

Verdict

Most games will have you directly building a friendship or relationship with another character. But Love, Ghostie puts you in charge of the matchmaking process itself. It gives you breathing room to approach connections at your own pace. If you like to be thorough, it gives you room to collect as much information as you can about your subjects, whether snooping through diaries or studying the decorations in their room. Alternatively, you can jump straight into experimentation, keeping in mind that you have a limited number of actions you can take. 

The more you play, though, the more upgrades you unlock, including more action points and mini-games to instigate more scenarios. Love, Ghostie soon grows into a more profound gaming experience that requires thought before making a move. Yet, it never gets too difficult to cause frustration. Ultimately, your playthrough feels like a breeze. It’s calming and relaxing gameplay that you can play whenever you need to feel at ease. Plus, the matchmaking processes are snappy despite running on an in-game 24-hour clock. Still, friendships and relationships develop quickly enough to move on to the next one. 

Very few issues are worth mentioning, as most of your playthrough runs smoothly. Controls work seamlessly, and the 2D graphics are clean and polished. The UI, too, is pretty intuitive, and even as you read the text dialogue, it’s pretty clear and pretty funny and clever, too. If I were to nitpick, the mini-games could have unique dialogue. At present, characters have the same dialogue when playing a particular mini-game. The playthrough can also feel a bit too easy. However, I suspect the intended audience is gamers looking for a chill and cozy time—nothing too demanding.