Ghostrunner is a first-person puzzle platformer. It’s like Mirror’s Edge if you were a robot ninja.

I played the demo after seeing a few streamers’ videos about it. It certainly looks neat, but man is it clumsy. When you get it right the game feels amazing, all running off walls, slicing dudes in half, etc. But most of the time the game isn’t that, it’s mostly “where did that bullet even come from?” “who is even shooting at me?” “how am i supposed to flank this guy?”, etc.

My primary issue with the game (at least in the demo) is that air control (slow time / air-dodge) is on a multi-function overloaded key (shift) which is also used for dash. Press on the ground for dash. Press in the air for dash. Hold in the air for air-dodge. Oh you didn’t have charge because you dashed? Though.

Lots of mechanical issues too. Oh you need to grapple? Grapple didn’t grapple? Welp, restart the room.

Restarting rooms is fast, not quite Celeste fast, but fast enough to not feel like it’s holding you back. Sort of needs an auto-reload, though.

Is it good? Idk. It’s definitely not $60 good. It might get better outside of the demo, as I saw stuff from streams where you can reflect shots (probably by holding shift again!), and that’d remove a lot of my frustration. I’ll give it 6 months. If it drops to below $10 on Steam or shows up in Gamepass I’ll pick it up. Otherwise, pass.