Delightful dark fantasy fable Ghost Of A Tale, aka Ico meets Redwall, is getting an Unreal Engine sequel
rockpapershotgun.comHappy 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
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