by gate.
Give Up the Ghost is an excellent new puzzle game from the creator of last year’s delightful puzzle-platformer Control the Body. It’s especially good as thinky puzzle games go, which is saying a lot these days – the genre’s having a bit of a renaissance right now.
What I really like about this game is the sheer volume of weird mechanics it plays around with, which include:
- A very elegant lock and key system
- Portal blocks that teleport you around, and can contain other levels, Patrick’s Parabox style
- Cloning tiles that make copies of whatever you push on them
…and a few more besides! The first couple of levels sort of just throw all these mechanics at you, and it’s fast and playful and fun and for a while I thought that’s what the game was going to be. But after you’ve had a chance to warm up, the game reveals itself to be something much more devious – slower and more deliberate, with excellently designed lynchpin style puzzles that require careful thought. Highly recommended.