Dancing with Ghosts first impressions: A beautiful start

Cozy games come in all shapes and sizes, with some focusing on core mechanics like farming or fishing, and others emphasizing emotional and engaging stories. Dancing with Ghosts falls into the latter category, pairing a soft aesthetic with a deep story. 

The demo for Dancing with Ghosts provides a glimpse of a promising title – while it has some quirks, it was still a delight to experience. Here’s The Escapist’s first impressions of Dancing with Ghosts based on the demo, looking at everything from the story to the art style. 

The Escapist recaps

• Dancing with Ghosts is an upcoming narrative-driven game from HumaNature Studios, with a charming, hand-drawn aesthetic and emotionally charged story. 
• Players control Mai, a young girl who is grieving the loss of her parents and still trying to help out the other residents in her village. She ends up befriending a ghost of another young girl, seemingly being the only person who can see the ghost.
• The story was well-written and engaging, with bittersweet and emotional moments. The game touches on some heavy themes, like loss and suicide, and it handles them with grace and care.  
• While the core gameplay loop of exploration and mini-games was enjoyable, there were a few quirky elements, like animation tags, abrupt zoom-ins during cutscenes, and a frozen asset in a mini-game.
• Despite this, the demo for Dancing with Ghosts was promising and highlights a strong future for the game. The art style, narrative, and overall themes made it a soulful and charming experience, and it’s sure to appeal to cozy game lovers. 

Full of spirit and whimsy

In Dancing with Ghosts, players see the world through the eyes of Mai, a young girl who is struggling with the loss of her parents. As Mai navigates her grief and attempts to find a sense of normalcy, she ends up befriending a ghost girl who wants to help her. 

Mai lives in a vibrant, waterside village, packed full of interesting characters who need her help with tasks like ferrying them to the bakery or preparing the ingredients for green papaya salad. While dealing with her grief, Mai also has to deal with other issues like financial insecurity and school bullies. 

The core gameplay loop involves exploring the village and completing mini-games to help villagers with their desired tasks. Completing these tasks rewards Mai with either money or karma; once the karma bar at the top of the screen is full, a new main objective will be unlocked, usually involving Mai speaking to a key character.

It’s a meditative gameplay loop, emphasizing the story and themes within. The mini-games range from a simple rhythm game to popping sparkly bubbles. They’re not overly challenging, but they’re fun and fit in with the style of Dancing with Ghosts, particularly the dancing rhythm game. 

The game manages to stay whimsical and light, despite dipping into difficult topics like suicide and loss. If you’re someone who finds the former topic difficult, it’s worth noting that the protagonist has a moment where she wonders aloud about what it’d be like to die in this way. It’s not graphic and it’s handled sensitively, but worth being aware of. 

Dancing with Ghosts offered a realistic look at grief and living after a loved one has passed, with the demo managing to highlight Mai’s conflicting feelings and struggles in a way that felt sensitive and compassionate. 

Promising, but has some quirks

In terms of technical quality, Dancing with Ghosts looked gorgeous, with a vibrant, hand-crafted art style and well-designed world. It was exciting to explore the village and have a look around the various buildings on the map, with a pristine level of care clearly being applied to each area. 

We did experience some visual quirks and issues while playing the demo, though. Some elements felt unfinished – characters would have “working animation” written above their head while not moving, for example, and there was one instance where a quest/task icon was entirely unresponsive.  

Additionally, cutscenes would sometimes zoom in or cut away from characters abruptly, somewhat taking the viewer away from the scene.

A one-off issue that popped up was that the ghost mini-game – a fun sequence where you fly around as the ghost and collect sparkles to help the villagers work through their issues – seemingly did not trigger correctly, leaving the ghost static on the screen and unable to move. 

This would’ve been manageable if it weren’t for the ‘exit game’ function being bound to the escape key. When attempting to back out of the game and continue the demo, we inadvertently closed the game, losing an hour’s worth of progress due to there seemingly being no save points. 

Outside of this, the Dancing with Ghosts demo was a charming and heartfelt experience, painting a positive future for the full release of the game. Despite having a few quirky elements in places, it was a joy to play through, with a beautiful aesthetic, well-written narrative, and a realistic yet hopeful perspective on loss and life after death. 

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References

1. Dancing with Ghosts on Steam (Steam)