Review: Love, Ghostie is an extremely wholesome game that leaves you feeling cozy and accepted

Love, Ghostie is a special little game. Sometimes repetitive styles of gameplay can feel lifeless and grindy, but not this one. You start each day eager to see the chore board and new items that you can pilfer.

I find this game to be a good influence of doing what makes you happy and healthy. Every character in Love, Ghostie has certain attributes even down to some traits we may consider lesser than like messy or lazy. Those aspects are celebrated and embraced.

I’d seen some buzz on Twitter/X about people getting emotional and while I could definitely understand how the sweet and positive atmosphere where differences are accepted and cared for could hit emotionally, it was the ending that got me. I was kind of surprised, honestly, that going through the end stages of the game bubbled up emotions.

We all need kind things said to us, so Love, Ghostie was a joy at every step. And, just in case you haven’t been told lately: you’re special and even the things society or others try to make you feel bad for are important. You are uniquely you and that’s beautiful. 

Love, Ghostie

Even I didn’t know that I was going to start this review going off on a bit of a tangent, so let’s hop back on the rails. Love, Ghostie is an adorable little matchmaking game where you play as a ghost and match up residents that move into the manor you reside in.

There are 12 characters that range from different aesthetics, species, and interests. From what I can tell, all pairings work, but some may have bumpier roads than others. So, don’t despair, all of your matches are entirely valid and you won’t be locked out of your faves.

At first, you can only have four characters in the home at once. For the first batch of move-ins, you get to hand-pick the ones you want to play with, but once you move out a couple or send someone on vacation, they will enter the home at random. Later, you’ll be able to upgrade the home to have more people around.

In your day to day, you’ll have several options at your fingertips. You’ll notice that even in the afterlife, you’re connected to the internet. You have three options to choose from: “eep!Bay”, “eep!Mail”, and “Deaddit”.

In eep!Bay, you’ll be able to buy and sell items. Scattered all around the home are items that you can steal that have different values and traits assigned to them. These items can be used to give as gifts to residents or sold on eep!Bay for money. That money can then be used to buy items that pop up randomly on eep!Bay.

To pick up items around the house, it will cost you an action point. At first, you only have four, but you can upgrade this later in a shop that I’ll talk more about later.

Think of actions like spoons or bandwidth, you can only do what you can do.

In eep!mail, you’ll notice that you’re initially locked out of this feature. It’s something that you’ll have to unlock in the upgrade shop I mentioned. Once it’s unlocked, you’ll be able to send scam emails to other ghosts. But, no worries, our mentor, Ghostina, is very clear that they were scammers first. 

Doing this will get you more gold, but it does require a mini-game. You’re given a template of an email and have to fill in three blanks. There are options that you can choose from that flash fast-paced on the screen with symbols on them. The more symbols you can match, the better the email. It’s quite speedy, but there is a setting to turn the options way down, so you don’t have to worry. Doing this uses an action point.

Lastly, in Deaddit, you’ll be able to see a forum of other ghosts talking about things relevant to what you’re experiencing. As you unlock things, the forum will update with questions and answers that act as an adorable little refresher for things you’ve been told in the tutorials.

After three days of matchmaking, Ghostina will appear and mention her shop where you can use a special currency called RelationChips that you earn by making your residents happy. She only comes every three days, so you’ll want to prioritize what you go for.

In this shop, you can unlock a bevy of things like the ability to add more characters to the mansion, get more skill points, learn to play songs, unlock your eep!Mail, access accessories for your Ghostie, increase the effectiveness of something on happiness or relationships, and even unlock a decoration mode for the home.

Unlocking songs means that you’ll be able to play these tunes when your characters are in a room and if two people are in the room at the same time, it will affect them both. You can scare them from a room, increase their happiness, and more.

♪ Doot doot, skaboot ♪ Something like that, but entirely not that.

What I loved about it is that it’s three notes and you use your directional pad to sing it ala’ The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was a pretty cute little bit of nostalgia for me.

When it comes to decorating, you have two options. You can decorate the common rooms with the items that you’ve picked up and you can move the items around in your character’s rooms. They aren’t always the best decorators, so if the placement of something is bothering you then you can fix it!

You’ll notice that there are two boards, one in the kitchen and one in the common area. In the kitchen, you have a memory board that will show you dates, conversations, and even epilogue scenes from completed matches. When you replay the game, if you start over from the same file, your progress here will not be reset. You can even restore a relationship with RelationChips if you’d like.

In the common area, you have a Chore Board. You have three options here for “Definitely Not a Date”, “Self-Care”, and “House Helper”. Dates are a two-person activity and the others are singular. All of them can affect happiness, but the house helper will help improve your relationship with all of your housemates for being a considerate roomie.

Now that I’ve kind of run down that list, I wanna talk about the attributes. Each item and character has their own traits like adventurous, dark, messy, unusual, fancy, etc. While characters can share traits, their patterns are all unique.

When you match up gifts, dates, or activities with the same traits, you get more bang for your buck. Obviously, they’re going to like things that they enjoy far more than something random.

If you’re wondering; dinosaurs and pizza go a long way for me…

It’d be very easy to lose track of traits since there are over 20 traits and each character has several. Luckily, there’s a tracker! Not only that, but the information tracker in the top left will let you see those attribute tags, your residents, how their relationship is with each other, the items they have, and notifications.

I found the tag tracker to be the thing I referred to most. At first, it’s blank, so you’ll have to do some guessing as to what each character may like. Luckily, at least one attribute is obvious either by their little introduction comic or the first page of their diary. When you give them something they like, it’ll put a heart on that trait and if you’ve tried a trait they don’t like, a line will appear to remind you that that certain thing wasn’t for them.

Speaking of diaries, each character has one and while they don’t write in them every day, they write enough for you to get a feel for their thoughts on a character.

All in all, Love, Ghostie is a shorter game, but since you can mix and match every character with the other, there’s a ton of replayability.

I really had the best time playing and I thought the interactions were thoughtful and sweet. Not all of my pairings had the best chemistry, but I wouldn’t change some of my choices for the world.

If you want something low-stress and charming, Love, Ghostie should be your next addition to your cozy library. You can get it for $17.99 over on Steam. And if this isn’t your wheelhouse, maybe you’ll want to check out the review we did for the hilarious Thank Goodness You’re Here!