I'll write the review now.
Bottom Line: Ghost Song is a gorgeous, melancholy Metroidvania that nails atmosphere and combat feel but rarely surprises you with an idea you haven't seen before — and on Switch, the technical compromises actively work against it.
The Gameplay Loop
Ghost Song's core loop is orthodox to the point of formality: explore, find a wall you can't pass, find the thing that passes it, come back. Old Moon doesn't subvert this. What it does is pace it well. The gaps between ability acquisitions are tuned tightly enough that you rarely feel adrift, and the map's interconnectivity means new shortcuts open with satisfying regularity.
The friction shows up in backtracking. Lorian is designed for atmosphere, which means long, winding, deliberately slow corridors — beautiful the first time, tedious the fourth. Fast travel exists but is stingy, and the map interface is functional rather than clever. This is the single most common complaint in player reviews and it's legitimate: the game's mood and its convenience are in direct conflict, and mood wins every argument. Whether that's a design failure or a design decision depends on how much patience you brought.
Combat
This is where Ghost Song earns its place. Combat is fast but deliberate — closer to a 2D soulslike than to Dead Cells' blender. You have a ranged cannon, a melee attack, and a dodge, and the heat mechanic forces constant rotation between all three. Hold the trigger and you'll overheat at exactly the moment you can't afford to. The result is a rhythm: fire, fire, close, slash, dodge, vent, repeat. It feels good, and it feels good early, which matters more than most developers admit.
Bosses are the highlight and the sticking point. They're readable, pattern-based, and hit hard. Several are genuinely excellent set pieces with real presence. A few lean on damage sponginess to manufacture difficulty — a cheap move when your combat system is already interesting enough to carry the encounter on mechanics alone.
Progression and Builds
The module system is smarter than it first appears. Modules are limited-slot passives, so every addition is a subtraction. Do you want the one that improves heat venting or the one that boosts melee damage on a full magazine? You can't have both, and that scarcity is what makes it a build system rather than a shopping list. Combined with the upgrade tree, there's real room to specialize — a melee-forward Deadsuit plays substantially differently from a ranged one.
Where it thins out is discovery. Most upgrades make you stronger at what you're already doing rather than granting new verbs. There's no moment here on the order of Hollow Knight's Monarch Wings or Ori's Bash — no ability that reframes the entire map you've been walking through. The traversal toolkit is competent and expected. For a genre whose highest highs come from re-seeing an old room with new eyes, that's a real ceiling.
Onboarding and Friction
Ghost Song is confident enough to explain almost nothing, which suits the amnesia framing but occasionally spills into obscurity. Some systems — the specifics of heat scaling, what certain modules actually do numerically — are left for you to infer. Charming for a while. Less charming when you've sunk twelve modules into a build you can't evaluate.