Ghostpia: Season One review

Where ghosts are more human than most human characters

If you’ve spent most of your life watching blockbuster movies, the arthouse film might seem unappealing at first. Big-budget commercial films are made for mainstream appeal, driven by lighthearted romantic entanglements or extravagant action sequences. Like fast food, they’re crafted to be effortlessly consumed and hastily digested by broad audiences. And like a visit to the drive-thru, satiation can feel short-lived.

Art films often attempt to offer a more nuanced assessment of life experience and human relationships. Habitually leaning toward the more cerebral, they frequently require deliberation to appreciate their more ambiguous worldviews.  Largely, that’s also the case with Chosuido’s Ghostpia: Season One, a five-chapter visual novel that extends dreamlike ruminations.

Those who enjoy VNs packed with titillating fan-service or carefree escapism might be deterred by Ghostpia’s intentionally glitched visuals or contemplative approach. But if you’re seeking an experience that challenges how we identify with protagonists or eschews conventional storytelling logic, Season One deserves your attention. This is poetry, not dimwitted prose.

Spirited Away

Ghostpia’s inaugural episode tells of a town blanketed by snow, adjacent to a derelict train station. Inhabited by precisely 1024 ghosts, the population fills the streets at night. Day is perilous to ghosts and they’ll whither away when exposed to sunlight. But as spirits, they don’t actually die. Instead, they suffer agonizing pain but return to their snow-plagued purgatory. However, it becomes evident that the novel’s ghosts aren’t all that supernatural with their world exploring the tribulations faced by the living.

Unnoticed by most, the wintery city is afflicted with stagnation. Instead of capitalizing on the possibilities of immortality, the inhabitants rarely change or long for anything more. Some even spend their eternity working, their labors providing little possibility of economic advancement. If Ghostpia had been written thirty years ago, it would have been set in a war-ravaged, industrial town where the populace attempts to justify their living situation. Yes, there’s even a derelict missile jutting from the center of town, making for a peculiar gathering place.

Mistaken for a Ninja

But every sleepy hamlet needs a nonconformist who longs for escape. Ghostpia’s resident malcontent is Sayoko, who is occasionally mistaken for a ninja. Living in a tiny apartment, she can’t shake the feeling of being an outsider. Despite the presence of old friends, she yearns to go back to her hometown. But given a general apathy toward time and her vanishing memory, Sayoko isn’t quite sure how long ago that was. At the very least, she’d find solace in being able to fit in and accept her new living conditions.

If you’ve ever felt like an outsider, Ghostpia’s first episode offers an authentic, if slightly oblique take on the experience. Here, loneliness and isolation are sporadically disrupted by events like the appearance of a new girl in town. As this breaks the 1024 ghost limit, the general public is apprehensive about her appearance. Of course, societies that treat newcomers with excessive alarm are usually problematic in both literature and reality.

A Separation between Church and Sayoko

At first, it’s easy to identify with Sayoko. After all, she’s rightfully skeptical about concerning matters- such as the amount of influence the local church has over the town residents. Instead of uplighting the ethereal townsfolk, there’s just a bit too much influence going on. But it’s here that Ghostpia ventures toward an unexpected trajectory.

The novel’s visual delivery and occasional moments of revelry between friends recall the sunny optimism of a children’s book. But repeatedly, the town’s beloved and perpetually cheerful nun-in-training suffers a succession of agonizing mistreatments. Without spoiling anything, Sayoko doesn’t come to her aid or try to console her, which threatens to unravel the empathy we have for the character.

Purposeful Glitching

Initially, I wasn’t exactly sure what Ghostpia was attempting to convey. Was the novel a cautionary tale about groupthink? Was the message that commercial films and games oversimplify the complexity of the human experience? As I neared the last chapter in Series One (purportedly, one additional season will be made), I wasn’t quite sure. And that’s a quality that’s common with artistic works: intentional ambiguity is far more interesting than obviousness. After being force-fed a procession of plotlines that explain every detail, a bit of equivocality feels thrilling. And that’s Ghostpia’s greatest virtue.

Much like the novel’s plotline, Ghostpia’s visuals resist simplistic clarity. Instead, the game mimics the look of watching a worn VHS tape, showcasing deliberate artifacting, noise, and jitter. Completing the stylistic choice is a system that lets you rewind each episode by using the right analog stick, which feels more elegant than forcing readers to review a conversation log. Since Ghostpia is a linear visual novel that shirks branching dialog or multiple endings, the technique works well.

Ghostpia: Season One was played on Switch
with review code provided by the publisher.