Ghost of a Tale's castle feels like a prison at first but ends up feeling like home. In the course of 20 hours searching for a way out, I've slowly fallen in love with the place - its feathery falls of afternoon light over mossy stonework, its leafblown ramparts and canted mausoleums, its small, hard-bitten population of anthropomorphic rats, mice, frogs and magpies. Part of the setting's allure is that it carries the echoes of many great virtual fortresses. Indeed, this slightly muddled third-person action-RPG's greatest strength is probably how it adds to that architectural tradition, though the witty, affecting, politically resonant writing runs a close second.
There's a touch of Square Enix's winding masterpiece Vagrant Story to certain overgrown, shady courtyards, and a generous dollop of both Zelda and Moria in the shape of a magnificent underground vault, woven around a circular puzzle structure. The view from the keep's belfry recalls the view inland from ICO's fortress walls, yellow crenelations biting into blissful green distances. Above all, there's the spectre of Dark Souls - a game with which Ghost of a Tale engages in fascinating, not always successful ways. As with From Software's Lordran, Dwindling Heights Keep is a purgatory for lost people and things that is much taller than it is broad, stretching from a bone-strewn shoreline up through catacombs and sewers to a barracks, kitchen and armoury. Like Lordran, it's a persistent environment bound together by a profusion of cunning shortcuts, unlocked one by one - rope elevators that whisk you from the gardens to the signal tower, doors that open from one side only and secret passages cheekily visible through rusted grates.
Working out how the game's spaces thread into one another, letting their twists and turns sink into muscle memory, is as integral to Ghost of a Tale's appeal as its hypnotic good looks. The act of stitching those wayward, ruined chambers together also chimes with the narrative, a story about rediscovering the past and building trust across racial divides that is a lot more searching than its parade of waggling tails and frog beards might suggest.
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