ranzware
Happy new year all! And what better way to kick off another undignified 12 month crawl toward the next Xmas holiday than with the news that one of my favourite dark fantasy storybook extravaganzas, Ghost Of A Tale, is getting a sequel.
The newness of this news is in question, admittedly. Developer Lionel “Seith” Gallat and his team have been working on another helping of haunted mouseketeering since 2022. But this is the first time they’ve properly blogged about it, sharing details of a gruelling switchover to Unreal Engine 5 and a couple of new screens. They still haven’t updated the title to make the obvious pun, but perhaps a title as pungent with whimsy as “Ghost Of A Tail” is beyond the trumpeted capabilities of Unreal Engine 5.
If you’ve not had the pleasure, Ghost Of A Tale is sort of a whole game set inside the Undead Parish of Dark Souls, except that it’s also sort of set in Redwall. You are an incarcerated mouse minstrel, Tilo, who must escape a monstrous clifftop fortress full of gangly rat guards. Along the way, you’ll plunder spider nests, strike deals with reclusive alchemists, practice songs with preening rat lords, don some fetching disguises, and unravel some surprisingly well-imagined species prejudice, rooted in a mythological battle against an apocalyptic Green Flame.
There’s a sparkling cast of anthropomorphic animals with jovial character portraits, some absurdly handsome, tumbledown environments, and a fair bit of fun writing. The stealth kind of sucks, mind, but it’s nothing you won’t forgive when you’re handed a quest to identify mushrooms in a sun-dappled courtyard using a parchment fungipedia. Redwall and Dark Souls aside, the game’s other inspirations include The Secret of NIMH, Ico (probably the more natural comparison than From Software’s output, here), The Dark Crystal, and Zelda. The words “love” and “lovely” appear no less than eight times in John Walker’s (RPS in peace) review from 2018.
The original game ran in Unity, and that’s the engine they were using for the sequel, to begin with. Seith – a former DreamWorks animator – and his collaborators have also developed a new in-house tool for quests and dialogue – the “previous off-the-shelf tool was little more than a glorified text editor”, apparently.
The game had been in development for a “couple of years” before the team found that Unity wasn’t cutting the mustard. “We were spending more time fighting the engine rather than actually creating gameplay systems and assets,” Seith writes in the blog post. So he decided to switch to Unreal Engine 5, despite “not having liked at all the earlier 4.x iterations”, after talking it out with designer Paul Gardner and programmer Cyrille Paulhiac.
Changing to a different game engine mid-production “almost never happens in the industry because the consequences are too dire to contemplate,” Seith notes in the blog post. “Normally you would have to go through a storm of unpleasant meetings, convince the heads of the studio, look producers and investors in the eye and say ‘we need to scrap those last couple of years of development and start again from scratch’. Unthinkable!
“Thankfully in our case it turned out Paul and Cyrille were willing to trust me and bite the bullet,” he goes on. “Still, Cyrille was doing a lot of the back-end pipeline like data management, saving/loading system and authoring tools and it meant for him to ditch everything he knew and had accomplished in C# and move on to C++. Not an easy prospect by any stretch of the imagination.”
Gardner, meanwhile, had “to revert to early stages of testing and participate again [in] the initial development of a new system of dialogs and quests, intricately interwoven with game design” but thankfully, investing in their own tools for dialogue and quests “meant that the nature of Paul’s writing work wouldn’t be affected too much by the game engine change.”
The reset has also given Seith and his collaborators a chance “to refocus on the game’s strengths and essence, which we might not have done had we kept on plowing ahead as initially planned”.
Changing to Unreal Engine 5 has involved a “lost” year and a half of development time, Seith concludes, “but I’m very glad to say today that it was all well worth the time, pain and money. We’re now at a stage we would never have reached with the previous engine.” You can assess the results yourself by means of the screenshots, creatively dotted around this article like mice peeking over parapets.
I’ve given Ghost Of A Tail Tale much love over the years, though as with many games I cherish, I’m not sure I’ve ever written anything that measures up to my enthusiasm. It’s the first and only game my life partner has ever watched me play from intro to credits. What I want from the sequel is: make the stealth a more organic part of exploration and questing, and less of an irksome capital-S system (with grating encounter music) you have to appease along the way to the Good Stuff. Do clevererer things with disguises, too. And give me an even more elaborate mushroom-picking quest. I wouldn’t object if the entire experience were about foraging.
Kurt Indovina
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