Ghostlight Manor Demo

Even casual games have to feature some kind of a challenge, otherwise boredom sets in rather quickly and it doesn’t really matter how colorful or approachable the game is. Thus, people love to solve puzzles or perform delicate tasks that require concentration, at least in the name of fun. Replay value is key, since it’s quite nice to come across puzzles that can be solved in multiple ways.

Ghostlight Manor is a puzzle game played in a turn-based manner, in which your goal is to deal with ghosts and acquire points in the process. In essence, the gameplay mechanics revolve around your ability to think ahead and plan for several moves later, otherwise you get overwhelmed. Hence, you can only make one move per turn, and it has to be a good one.

Your ship has the ability to shine a beam of light toward one of the ghosts, and this allows you to destroy it. Some ghosts become enraged, while others require a specific type of beam in order to be banished. The ghosts descend in a Space Invaders manner from top to bottom, so it’s imperative to achieve your goals before the whole army gets to you.

Although the task is fairly simple at first, the rules expand along the way, and it gets significantly harder to deal with the incoming ghosts as you progress through the game. Each turn becomes very important later on, since one bad decision or mistake can lead to an early loss. However, you have plenty of time to accommodate before that becomes a real issue.

The only actual problem with the game’s mechanics is that everything moves rather slowly, including your robot. Although you use the mouse to go from one side to the other, this process is very slow, although there’s no need for it to be, given the fact that the movement is done in between the turns. Thankfully, you are usually preoccupied with the action to care about this, but it can be very annoying.

In spite of its shortcomings, Ghostlight Manor is more than enjoyable most of the time, especially if you don’t back down from a challenge. It also comes with a lot of levels to keep you busy for a long time.