ghostpia Season One from PQube and Chosuido is an interesting lo-fi picture book-style visual novel on Nintendo Switch. Learn more about it in our ghostpia Season One review!

 

ghostpia Season One from PQube and Chosuido is an interesting lo-fi picture book-style visual novel on Nintendo Switch. Along with its distinctive style, it’s different from most visual novels out there in that it’s not going to offer branching story paths or quick-time events to complete. What it will do is focus on telling its story about friendship thanks to the dynamic visuals it presents, with a variety of hand-drawn locations and characters, as well as some animation here and there.

As you’ve probably guessed from the trailer and screens in this ghostpia Season One review, the game takes place in a town full of ghosts, a utopia for ghosts, if you will. At least, that’s what your first impression will be. But is that really true? You’ll be taking on the role of Sayoko, one of the ghosts in the town, who is looking for answers in a town where she doesn’t really fit. Oh, and for some reason it seems that everyone in town keeps forgetting things, which is certainly mysteriously weird!

 

The people of ghostpia live during the night and go home as dawn is about to hit. Why is that? Because as the sun rises, their clothes start to melt… and so do they! Ghosts are very much in pain during this whole process, so they figure they might as well be home in bed for it. Once the skin melts off, it will expose the muscles that dry up and become stiff when they come into contact with the air. Any wind current will make it feel as if someone is taking a knife to their exposed tissue.

There’s a huge church that casts its shadow over everything and everyone. For some reason, a huge missile is lying in the middle of town that crashed without exploding. Sayoko is certainly not afraid of it since she ends up kicking the thing within minutes of you starting to play. To make that even weirder, the missile has the name of every single ghost in town etched all over its surface.

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Going any further and saying anything else about what you’ll experience during your time with ghostpia Season One. There are some interesting twists and turns along the way that help to accentuate the cheerful, colorful graphics and the overall story arc. The different characters that you’ll meet are also very interesting and make for a fun – yet dark – romp. There’s nothing majorly violent or anything gruesome since this one is, after all, Rated T for Teen, but it’s definitely not an all-ages experience!

This release has Season One right there in its name, and it leans into that element by splitting its content into episodes. You’ll be pressing the A button a lot as you move through each dialogue, or you can press the Y button to enable the autoplay that will allow you to experience this one without much hassle. As each new dialogue pops up on the screen, the Joy-Con will vibrate at a steady pace with a solid use of the HD Rumble feature.

 

Since we’re talking about episodes, there’s also the option of rewinding things by pressing left on the left analog stick, the right analog stick, or the D-Pad. You can then fast forward as needed to get back to the spot you left from. There’s even a CRT filter activated by default that gives this release an old-school VHS look – video glitches included. For those of you that have never heard of VHS, imagine if the shows or movies you stream were stored in plastic rectangles that had to be inserted into a larger rectangular device.

ghostpia Season One is an interesting visual novel that does things differently from other releases in this genre currently available on Nintendo Switch. Sure, it ends up being a very linear experience, but that’s exactly how the development team meant this one to be. There are no branching story paths nor any complex dialogue choices to make along the way that could lead you toward a different ending. What you see is what you get, and that’s certainly not a bad thing considering the game’s overall story arc. There’s also some solid use of the HD Rumble on the Joy-Con, which is always a plus, and you can even sometimes use the gyro on the right Joy-Con to gently move the on-screen images a bit for some extra vibrancy. ghostpia Season One is available on Nintendo Switch with a $19.99 price tag.

Disclaimer
This ghostpia Season One review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by PQube.