Listen, I’m a gamer, so naturally I enjoy pain and suffering more than the average person. Ghostrunner, a first-person action platformer, is abundant in pain and suffering. Which is why I thought it would be fun to take someone who doesn’t play games and force them to play a very difficult one. This is where Stella, my friend and The Wolf’s editor-in-chief, comes in. Through some divine miracle, she agreed to try Ghostrunner. To set the stage: Stella has one hour to get as far as she can in the game. That’s it. That’s the whole idea. 

After getting acquainted with the controls, Stella came across her first major challenge: a double wall run. One of the main points of confusion for her was the idea that you needed to look in the direction that you would like to go in order to go that direction. This was largely the reason why she had trouble making it across the gap. But after many profanities and lots of persistence, she made it across and on to the next area of the level. 

This level has a rotating fan that requires one to dash through at just the right time. On my first playthrough, I had serious trouble getting through it, but surprisingly, Stella made it through on her second attempt. 

Now, we’re on to the first major combat encounter of the game. Three enemies are scattered around the map, all of whom die with one hit. Stella’s approach to this conundrum was to swing her sword with reckless abandon with no regard for the distance between herself and her opponent. While greatly amusing, this tactic proved fruitless, and she had to come to the realization that she couldn’t just spam the attack button. After realizing this, she quickly progressed to the next section of the level. 

At this point, our time was beginning to dwindle. After struggling a bit on a parkour section that required her to use the shift key while also moving forward in the air, we got to the final stage of the level. This stage requires you to put all of the skills you’ve worked on in this tutorial level to the test. Interestingly enough, one of the problems Stella ran into repeatedly was randomly stopping in front of a bad guy, to let it shoot her. We tried multiple different approaches to the level, and almost completed it, but each time we fell short. Unfortunately, with a total of 146 deaths, we ran out of time. 

  To conclude, I talked to Stella about her experience:

Q: What would you rate your experience on a scale of 1-10?

A: 10. I had a lot of fun and would definitely play it again.

Q: Would you recommend it to other casual gamers?

A: No. If you don’t have a certain type of eccentricism, you won’t enjoy it as much.

Q: What would you say you struggled with most?

A: The keyboard placement and not being able to spam to kill people.

Q: Was there something that would have made it easier/more enjoyable?

A: I have trouble in first-person, so if there was an option for third person, I definitely would have tried that.

So there you have it! Hope you enjoyed this little experiment, and if you’re a fan of challenging platform games or are looking to try something different, definitely give Ghostrunner a try.