Now Playing: Ghost Town (VR)

In Ghost Town you play as Edith Penrose, a psychic medium living in 1980s London on a quest to find her missing (and irritatingly whiny) brother. It’s a VR puzzle adventure game by the same developers of The Room VR which I reviewed back in 2021. Ghost Town does feel like a good step up, but not quite the leap I was hoping for.

Like The Room, Ghost Town is a very visually impressive VR game, but unlike The Room, it also offers a full free range of movement within its environments. The environments may be small, but they’re packed with detail and fun to explore. This is also a more narrative and character driven experience than The Room.

In that game, the story was told purely through written letters found within the world. Ghost Town features a voiced protagonist and several supporting characters – including several ghosts you’ll encounter as you progress. Edith is a medium who specialises in freeing trapped souls and you do this by locating items of power that are keeping them tethered to the physical realm.

Or at least, that’s a part of what you do, because the focus of the story is actually finding your lost brother and investigating a mysterious cult. Your adventure takes you through several varied locations, each of which has several puzzles to solve. The puzzles are good, but nothing super challenging, although there is a hint system available if you do get stuck.

As you’d expect in a VR game, the puzzles are very tactile and interactive, often featuring curious mechanisms to play with. There’s a nice mix of puzzles too, each level offering something a little different. And it’s a very polished game. It runs smoothly, looks great and maintains a persistent quality throughout.

So why do I feel it’s not quite the leap I was hoping for? Because like The Room VR, it’s a very short and ultimately unsatisfying experience. I always say games should be ‘as long as they need to be’ and like The Room, Ghost Town ends on a rather abrupt note that feels a little hastily cobbled together. As much as I’d enjoyed the game – and I’d enjoyed I quite a lot – I was left with a rather disappointing ‘is that all?’ feeling.

I completed Ghost Town in about three and a half hours and good portion of that is just wandering the environments or talking to other characters. The puzzle aspect only really lasts a few hours at most. Ghost Town really needed a few more levels to play with, perhaps just focused on Edith’s day job before we really get stuck into the hunt for her brother.

That said, I still had a very good time with Ghost Town and I’d still recommend picking it up on sale.

7/10