Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of playing a game called Hauntii. It’s an indie title by Moonloop Studios where you inhabit a recently departed ghost, hunting for your memories in an effort to connect with yourself and seek closure on your life. And I really enjoyed it! It’s an experience one can only describe as a journey, one in which I became increasingly invested as my playtime grew. In fact this piece was initially going to be about it alone, as the way it ludically played with memory tickled me greatly. Hauntii is a very special game, and there’s a lot to say about how uniquely it tackles its core ideas.
But those ideas themselves? They aren’t totally unique.
While whispers of an idea for a Hauntii essay had been bouncing fruitlessly around my head for months, I played another title that, while absolutely distinct, shared some core DNA with Moonloop’s collectathon. Very recently, I finished Capcom’s Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, and I loved it. I’m a big fan of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, another game by Ghost Trick’s director, Shu Takumi, and the games share a lot of DNA. Witty writing, clever puzzles, and intensely lovable characters that end up feeling like family by the game’s credits. And really, none of these are traits I’d really associate with Hauntii. It’s a traipsing, reflective treasure hunt, whereas Ghost Trick is a messy web of cause and effect. What’s the connective tissue? Well, to answer that, I’d like to let the latter’s synopsis speak for itself.
In Ghost Trick, you play as a recently murdered ghost, hunting for your memories in an effort to connect with yourself and seek closure on your life. Sound familiar?
I don’t mean to make this comparison in order to belittle either game, or to imply any plagiarist intentions. In fact, the two games’ connection is one that I only became aware of as I neared the end of Ghost Trick. As I said, they’re very disparate in very many ways, narrative execution chief amongst them. But I find the intensely similar subject material interesting, to say the least. Given that games are able to invoke a more intimate relationship between their audience and characters than many other mediums, the subject of memory, specifically memory loss, can get… messy. After all, you as the designer cannot force the player to lose their own memory, not of the basic phrases present within the art form nor of any given title’s specifics. You can’t press a new brain into their skull, fresh, spongey, and ready to absorb the total newness of a world they no longer know. As such, Hauntii and Ghost Trick start you at a blank slate. Neither game even gives you the chance to forget anything, and while this is clever, it’s not a solution that necessitates the invocation of the paranormal, nor one that is especially unique to these titles, or new at all. So why do both of them have such similar narrative frameworks? Why do they find themselves going in such resemblant directions? What is so special about death that makes memory such an enticing topic to view through its lens?
***
Hauntii does not allow you to even consider such a question before you’re thrust into the thick of things, though. You, a little black ghost, pop into place within a sporadically lit void, and find yourself meandering aimlessly until the darkness swallows you whole. Shortly, you’re accompanied by an angel (or Eternian, as Hauntii calls them) to a city, a spot in which you can presumably ascend past your ghosthood. But before you’re able to flee the vacuum you find yourself within, you’re yanked away from the Eternian by an unseen hand, and plopped into a forest. It’s a fairly brisk opening, but despite its succinctness, the events are hazy. There’s a vague sense of obligation, of course. You see a city, you’re torn away from it, you want to get back. But there’s nothing in this world that exists for you. Death has offered you nothing but the unfortunate reality of a lost past, and the foggiest glimpse of a vague future.
That past, though, isn’t lost for long. And this is Hauntii’s gambit: Memories are your collectables. At the outset, they’re all that really drive you forward. To explain a little further, progression in Hauntii is defined in two ways. Firstly, it is defined by the mechanical growth of finding new stars, which help you unlock memories, which help you unlock stronger abilities and the way forward. Secondly, it is defined by your narrative desire to learn more about yourself as you try to reach the city once again. I found the latter definition to have much more staying power in my mind, ultimately speaking, but only by considering both avenues by which Hauntii approaches memory can you truly understand its perspective on reflection.
Memories are discovered by finding stars littered around the map, and filling out constellations in order to upgrade yourself and play a brief cutscene displaying a snippet of your former life. Extrinsically, the upgrades are nice bonuses. After all, who doesn’t want to be rewarded for their scavenging? Furthermore, these memories are necessary stones in the path to the city you so desperately want to reach again, and progression is only possible through them. You must complete a certain amount of constellations in order to move from area to area, so you are incentivized to find as many stars as possible. That being said, I found that the much more valuable reward was intrinsic, lying within the experience of watching each recollection unfold, painting the picture of what I was like before I died. I got to see my childhood, through sickness and health, and watch as I grew older, found love, and partied. It was soothing, and impactful. I pushed forward not for the upgrades, as nice as they were, but for the promise of more insight. I wanted to know who I was inhabiting, and become more in tune with them as I grew familiar with the new world I found myself in. In every respect, memory is the driving force behind Hauntii, the only means by which a player can continue to progress, and it is this ludonarrative harmony that gives the game structure. After all, without their past, what does a ghost have?
Hauntii first poses this question when its careful foundation is shaken by the winds of change. You see, as I’ve hopefully made clear, for a decent portion of the campaign, progression is achieved by collecting stars which unlock memories. Gaining memories is ostensibly the only way forward. But there is one more collectible I’ve neglected to mention, one that irreversibly alters the player’s relationship with said memories. That collectible is known as a Key Crystal, and it is obtained by completing a certain amount of recollections within several areas. These Key Crystals must be spent at certain moments within the narrative in order to play any further, and on its face, this sounds no different from any other of the game’s progress-enabling goodies, but where it stands apart from the rest is in its narrative framing. Key Crystals are described as the physical manifestations of the memories you’ve experienced thus far. They are your life, your personality, your psyche given shape. To relent them would be to relent the core of your very being, would it not? As such, you fight to keep them, resistant to the notion of giving them away so freely, even in order to return to a city you so desperately want to inhabit. Once again: Without their past, what does a ghost have?
After some time, Hauntii answers. When you are finally forced to let go of your first Key Crystal, it’s presented as a sacrifice. After all, you’ve let go of your past, everything that you are as a citizen of the afterlife, with nothing but hazy hope urging you onward. But once that Key Crystal is gone, it’s worth noting that… Nothing changes. You don’t lose your upgrades. The constellations remain filled out. And, in what I found to be most affecting, you, the player, don’t forget a thing. This is Hauntii’s gambit. It does not argue for the erasure of memory, the emptiness of a clean slate. Life is messy, and gross. In step with this, not all of the game’s memory cutscenes are wholly comforting. They’re tinged with a melancholy regret, like peering at a raindrop soon to be wiped off a window pane, leaving little but a trail behind. And this is key. Instead of advocating for this devouring nostalgia, Hauntii asks you, the player, to let go, and continue your upward trajectory with the Eternian’s hand clasped within yours.
As you accrue more Key Crystals, letting each one slip away as you push towards a new and exciting future, a stark denial of consumptive recollection becomes evident within Hauntii. When taken into consideration with the game’s other aesthetics (Hauntii takes place in what is ostensibly purgatory, with NPCs constantly commenting on how much they love their unwavering existences, until a climax where you finally free yourself and ascend to heaven(?) in the warm embrace of the Eternian you’ve come to love), its message is crystal clear. Live in the moment, and look forward to the moments to come. Let the past teach you, comfort you, and push you forward, but do not let it pull you back, or consume you. When our world is seemingly set on playing the hits, reminding us of how good our lives once were, it is a message falling not upon deaf ears, but desperate ones. Ears searching for a reason to keep going, and being graced with perhaps the strongest ones possible: Love. Connection. Hope for the future. Hauntii uses not only its progression mechanics but the player’s mind itself to hit this message home, and reveal that, just maybe, life is more than our flesh and blood.
***
This emphasis on mentality rather than physicality is taken to its logical conclusion in Ghost Trick. In it you play as Sissel, a recently departed soul who has been granted the ability to take control of and manipulate objects. What’s key, though, is that Sissel has no body, and can only move around by hopping from object to object, or by travelling through phone lines. He is truly and utterly left to the whims of the environment around him, and this is made all the more infuriating by his recollective predicament. You see, as I alluded to at the beginning of this piece, Sissel is a wholly blank slate. He dies and wakes up completely at a loss, not a single memory to be found within his head. So, given his body-less state, his sole aim before disappearing at dawn the next day is to figure out who he was, if only for some much-needed closure. Memory, much like in Hauntii, is your only driving force in Ghost Trick’s opening, and takes you from a place of stasis to one of action in the blink of an eye.
Unfortunately, this mission is not without its roadblocks. The path to Sissel’s safe retrieval of his memory is paved unevenly, and he consistently finds himself tangled in the web of a seemingly unrelated criminal case while he pursues his past. This puts him squarely between well-intentioned detectives, shifty superiors, and malicious outside actors who will stop at nothing to keep the case closed. This, of course, includes killing, and this is where Ghost Trick’s mechanics begin to blend with its premise quite masterfully. Not only can Sissel manipulate the common objects around him, but upon the discovery of a freshly-killed body, he can go back in time to four minutes before their death and perform his Ghost Tricks upon the surroundings in order to stop the death before it ever happens. Changing these fates is quite often the only way that Sissel is able to manifest sweeping change in the world around him, and once he has completed his prevention, gains the ability to speak to the would-be victim inside their mind. This is key for two reasons: Firstly, Sissel is able to gain information about who he once was, and how he fits into this now-alien world. But secondly, he builds connections. The people he saves become his only tether to a world that has no room for him, and upon repeated conversations, some genuinely meaningful bonds are built. Through his exploration of the moments before one’s passing, the past becomes not only a tool for Sissel to more deeply understand himself, but a gateway to a more meaningful present, one that may not last but nonetheless matters.
And this present soon takes priority over the maligned ghost’s shaky yesterdays. Throughout his travels, Sissel meets a variety of people: A fiery detective named Lynne, a loyal pomeranian named Missile, and a resigned inspector named Jowd. While at first, all of these interactions seem like brief steps taken in service of regaining Sissel’s memory, he begins to run into these people more and more often. They become familiar to him, and as he becomes increasingly intertwined with their mission to solve a longstanding case, his past begins to take a backseat. He goes from a lone wolf to a member of a pack, and while he often claims to be singular in his focus, he eventually caves and admits that his interest now lies primarily in helping his newfound friends and allies. After all, there is little intimacy as strong as entering the mind of one’s life you just saved. Robbed of his body, Sissel is afforded the opportunity to see the people around him as not just a means to an end, but individuals with their own pasts, and more pressingly, their own presents and futures. This newfound focus is only further exacerbated by the existence of a manipulator, another ghost who acts against the investigators and their mission by way of invading the minds of crucial figureheads and taking control of their bodies and mouths, if only for a brief moment. When this force is made known, the once-solid past becomes hard to trust. Sissel’s is no longer the only memory that has been compromised, as the manipulator’s fog clouds not only one’s actions, but their recollections. As such, the present becomes all the more important, as none can undo or even truly comprehend the moments that lay behind them.
Though that’s not for a lack of trying. Missile, Lynne, Jowd, and even the manipulator Yomiel, each find themselves trapped in cages of their past’s creation (sometimes literally), fruitlessly swiping at keys just out of reach. Missile, whose best friend Kamila was killed long before Ghost Trick takes place, spends years waiting for Sissel to die, all in order to help him save Kamila in a new timeline. Lynne, who was taken hostage as a young girl by a pressured Yomiel and forced to stand by as he was shot at by a young Jowd, fights against the justice system to free him. Jowd, convicted and imprisoned for the alleged murder of his wife, awaits his impending capital punishment with a grim resignation and long-standing guilt from his encounter with Yomiel. Yomiel, wrongly accused of a crime he never committed and then killed in his encounter with Jowd, seeks revenge on him, Lynne, and everyone else who put him in that position. Each of these people find themselves unable to fight off the skeletons in their closets, and bury themselves in their memories as a result, struggling to claw their way out but only digging the hole deeper still. That is, until Sissel, someone initially unburdened by his past (much to his own chagrin), helps pull them out. He helps them tie up their loose ends, turn their heads forward, and see the world for what it is, not what it was. Much of Ghost Trick is spent wading through the swamp of an unresolved yesterday, but as the game persists, the present takes precedence, yanking each character out of their stupor and into a much more hopeful existence than the one they’d inhabited prior.
When taking into account its mechanics, it’s certainly true that Ghost Trick seems, on its surface, unconcerned with the weight of the past. After all, Sissel spends much of the game toying with it, tearing it apart and rebuilding it. But throughout all his changes, what never goes away is his memory. He is forced to live with the pasts he left behind, and ultimately lets them motivate him to make each new future better. Beyond just Sissel, while this memory is less solid amongst his peers, the impact that the past has is undeniable. Each tweak Sissel makes is in service of a brighter future, and unbeknownst to much of the cast, the ripples created by these changes are more like waves. Ultimately, Ghost Trick is a game of cause and effect, both mechanically and narratively. Ghost Trick is not interested in erasing the past’s impact on our present, but rather easing our oft-consuming obsessions with it.
Much like his newfound family, Sissel’s life is itself altered as well, not only as a result of his ghost tricks, but also of his lived (or rather, unlived?) experiences. By the time the curtains close on Ghost Trick, Sissel has found a new family, and made new memories. The past is firmly behind him and those he loves, and though it has helped him find his place, he can shed its weight and live in his present, one in which he is safe and comfortable. And in this, Ghost Trick says its piece, much like Hauntii did its. We are inextricably linked to our history, and motivated by it. Unlike Sissel, we cannot go back and change it, but the impact he has when he does is only further evidence of its cruciality. That being said, their impact can only go so far as motivating us. To remain transfixed on a past long gone is dangerous, and keeps us from truly living, free of the shackles our amygdala often imposes upon us. Our memories are the cause for many things, but we cannot let them bear down upon us, and keep us locked in place. Though Sissel’s journey began as a quest to regain his past, it ended as an admission of the joys of his present. Even despite his limited tangibility, he found meaning in his new life and satisfaction in his old one, letting his memory guide him but never control him.
***
And really, this is the thesis of both games. As I’ve alluded to from the outset, they’re very similar in a thematic respect. But what I’ve failed to do as of yet is answer the question of why they’re similar. What do these ghastly games have to tell us about memory and humanity, and why do they use ghosts to do it?
Really, it’s because the existence of the paranormal invites an interrogation. What does it mean to be “alive”? Of course, both Hauntii and Ghost Trick feature characters who are, categorically speaking, dead. But they think, communicate, and connect. They undeniably live, with or without their memories. And this is the gambit of these experiences. The undead have no futures, at least at the outset. Their presents are perpetual and hollow. So naturally, they chase the only semblances of lives they can fathom, which are their pasts. But in this chase, they create presents, and they envision futures. They find lives within their deaths, and in this demonstrate their answer of what life is. It is our experiences, often motivated by our memory but nonetheless taking place contemporarily. It is our connections, the people we choose to take each new step forward alongside. Through this lens, physicality and verbality fall to the wayside, and something vital is revealed. No matter how much our memory may mean to us, how important that growth may have been, and how much we may be guided by history, we cannot exist in the worlds left behind. Only by moving forward can we live, lest we be trapped as spectres of our pasts forever.
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moons stuck in a time loop is an amazing piece of art. i am desperate to direct it as a play and i wanted to ask theoretically how would you feel about that
oh my god. yes please go for it! i would appreciate a link back to my original post, maybe? or like some kind of…program mention? but it’s not like i didn’t create this by bouncing off someone else’s creation (the “moon’s haunted” og meme is v close to my heart) so by all means PLEASE keep the game of creative-telephone going.
if you do honestly stand up a theatrical adaptation and you’re somewhere on, like, the upper eastern seaboard of the USA….maybe let me know where/when. or film it!
Do you mind if people take inspiration from it for their own stories?
(Expansions on detail, fics with more character moments, Trial of Frank, Frank redemption arc, the events from the perspective of the employee's stolen lunch; that sort of thing)
Also, have a nice day. And a restful night, besides
thank you so much! PLEASE take inspiration for your own stories if you want to?!? i would be thrilled to my absolute core. please tag me because i obviously wanna see them if you write anything!! nothing would please me more. INCREDIBLY curious as to the lunch’s perspective - i imagine it as some kind of promethean existence.
i hope all your days and nights are just what you need and want them to be.
Fantastic little fic, about the moonloop. What did that spiral out from? Also what happened to the paradox werewolves?
thank you so much! i honestly don’t 100% recall, but it absolutely had something to do with it having just been groundhog day when i wrote this back in february. also i’d been on a big time loop fix-it fic kick in a certain fandom at the time (👋 stranger things!) and that def contributed. also the original moon’s haunted meme is one of my favorite things ever. and i’m also low-key always thinking a little bit about time loops, like a program running in the background of my mind at all times.
i have no idea what a paradox werewolf is but now i’m gonna be keeping an eye out for them.
i’m so glad you liked it!!! also, i LOVE the phrase “moonloop,” incredible.
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"Devocean" es el segundo trabajo de estudio de los barceloneses Moonloop, y supone un serio paso adelante respecto a su ya de por sí disfrutable disco de début, publicado cinco años atrás. Muy respetados en la escena local, Moonloop aún no gozan del reconocimiento general que probablemente merece su calidad musical, pero cabe confiar en que esto cambie gracias al discazo que es este "Devocean",…
