The Ghost and the Golem Reviews

I highly recommend this game. It's an exceptional and gripping narrative that, in addition, gives a strong feeling of agency. It's an intense, beautiful and terrifying historical setting filled with characters with whom I strongly sympathize and whom I deeply care for. For some context, I enjoy narrative-focused games but rarely play true text-based stories (I got this game recommended to me). The writing is incredible, varying from witty and believable banter awkward domestic scenes to haunting visages of ethnic tension. I was so invested in the well-being of my family and village as the onslaught was no doubt coming, I was invested in the riled-up peasants and the indifferent soldiers, I was even thoroughly invested in the romance, in the future life I would be building. My personal check is: can I imagine these people living their lives if the inciting incident of the story never happened or blew over? And the answer is, I can't stop imagining their normal lives, I almost crave to hear more from them. I was fully immersed in the lives of these Jewish people living in Imperial Russia, and continue to think about them and their fates now that I've completed the game. As for the historical setting, it felt very grounded. I could immediately conceptualize the surroundings clearly and the magical elements strike more as "folkoric" than "(urban) fantasy". I was not taken out but instead drawn in further by its nuanced presence. It felt like I was introduced to someone's culture at a thought-provoking pace. As far as I can tell, the player agency is very strong. I felt constantly under pressure to save my family and my village, but also drawn in by the mysteries the game presented, and the factions you can connect with to try and improve the outcome. The choices felt clear enough that I could make informed decisions but also had enough mystery about them that I was unsure how much of an impact they would have - and fortunately, I found out many times that they did end up having an impact. The character creation and choices you can make feel natural and define your position society (being perceived male or female, for instance, matters a lot in a village in 1881). The world of The Ghost and the Golem is so vibrant I was constantly compelled to roleplay and become fully immersed in its potentially tragic story.

I saw many people saying such good things about The Ghost and the Golem, but ultimately I was left somewhat unsatisfied. The plot may have had a lot of potential, but it also lacked substance and was over just as it was picking up speed. This ended up being another example of the lack of care put into characters. I didn't learn much about any of the people my character surrounded themselves with, and I use the term "surround" loosely because none of them really had much screen time at all. Meeting romance options for the first time and then having to decide then and there if my character is in love with them, and five minutes later if I want to spend the rest of my life with them is just so underwhelming. This, of course, isn't the first time a novel has pushed such an empty romance onto the player but I can never understand the decision to do so; is it just because romance options are expected in these types of interactive fiction books? I honestly couldn't say. All I know is, that even at the end, I still didn't know much about any of the characters - none are going to be memorable for me. The story, although interesting in theory, left a lot of things unanswered. Am I expected to poke through the story in a different way to find out why certain things happened? If so, then my first playthrough didn't leave me interested in doing so. I also couldn't get a solid grasp on roughly how old my character was supposed to be. Some of the bickering made me feel like they should probably be just a child but that would be rather inappropriate for this kind of tale; then again, how the entire town acted upon finding a corpse was also jarring to the point where I had to shrug and go with it. I can appreciate the layout of this novel - having a narrator guide and speak to you throughout was an interesting quirk and something I haven't fully experienced before. The downside of this is that it somewhat felt like I was being told a bedtime story where grandma was pretending I was the princess in a fairytale. I didn't feel any strong emotions throughout but a lot of people are stating otherwise. Why did I not connect with the story and characters at all if others did on a deeper level? Again, I don't know. Maybe I've just become a fussy reader over time. Having said all of that, I do recognise the effort that went into certain aspects; because this game is about a Jewish character and their community, there is an option for Yiddish with a glossary on the stat page. If flicking back and forth deciphering things isn't your cup of tea, you can turn the Yiddish off at the start of the game while conversing with the narrator. It's definitely a neat little touch. Now don't get me wrong, these are just my personal opinions of the novel and I'm glad that everyone else appears to have enjoyed the story and characters - I guess for whatever reason, it just didn't satisfy me like it did for others.