Ebenezer and the Invisible World has its moments of fun and rewarding exploration through completing optional sidequests and finding secrets. It looks great, too. However, its big swings in the form of ghost management and stiff traversal/combat lends to a less than stellar experience. May this experience become better in the future with more time and polish? Absolutely, but it’s worth waiting to see what happens.
When most of you think of Ebenezer Scrooge, you most often think of the phrase of “BAH HUMBUG.” Or, if you’re a goose/duck expert like me, you think of Scrooge McDuck diving into a sea of gold coins. For those who think of the man behind the Bah Humbug, your experience with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol may cause you to think of the ghosts of Christmas’ past, present, and future attempting to change Scrooge from being and old stingy man into a benevolent benefactor of London.
Ebenezer and the Invisible World is a Metroidvania that includes elements of A Christmas Carol without strictly reiterating Dickens’ novella. It leans heavily on Victorian themes from men in fancy top hats, enemies in witch doctor masks, ghosts in flowy and ornate dresses, and biomes that connect with steampunk and olde English architecture. It stands out from other Metroidvanias by emphasizing hand-drawn character sprites and seemingly festive thematics of the looming holiday season.
Is it a true tale of Christmas? Eh. Not really.
Ebenezer’s departure from A Christmas Carol emerges right from the start in the form of a dense introduction. It’s a shock to see so much presented to the player in cutscenes up front instead of the lore-desolate introductions other Metroidvanias tend to utilize to establish airs of mystery and isolation. Ebenezer’s 17th century London feels real, albeit ghost-ridden, and teeming with life.
The other key uniqueness of Ebenezer involves its ghost collection. Throughout Ebenezer’s travels, trials, and tribulations, he comes across wayward and trapped ghosts with unfinished business in the mortal plane. Upon helping them complete their tasks, the ghosts tag along and bless Ebenezer additional traversal and combat powers. The traversal ghosts are blue and are interwoven into the main quest, granting Ebenezer the ability to dash through walls, bounce on balloons, catapult/hookshot upwards, and double jump (among others). The red combat ghosts, on the other hand, are entirely optional additions save for a few that are easily completed and granted when following the main quest line. These combat abilities are pretty cool but take a bit to get used to because very little is explained about what they do; instead, the menus are chock full of lore detailing who the ghosts are.
Managing the ghosts is easily accomplished at first when you have a few unlocked. Just use the right joystick to select your chosen ghost’s portrait that rests in the lower right-hand corner of the screen while moving around the map! Once you’ve unlocked several, though, it becomes complicated to remember which ability is assigned to which ghost and you’re left with swiping through the entire roster of ghosts before settling on the one you want. The blessing in Ebenezer’s favor is that these combat ghosts aren’t tied to progression nor a requirement for defeating some enemies, so you could very well go on your business with a select few and do just fine. Once you’ve used a ghost enough times to kill enemies, it leveled up and was granted an additional effect.
On paper, the ghost collection is cool. In practice…not so much. There came a point where I simply stuck to using three ghosts because they were the most consistent in dealing damage and I didn’t have to worry about wasting a chunk of mana through opting to test out the other ghosts’ abilities. Sure, my reliance on three ghosts (out of many more) I had unlocked had created a self-fulfilling prophecy thanks to me upgrading them and no one else. I needed a reason to use the new ghosts, though. I wanted the other ghosts to serve a greater purpose.
I was able to freely manage Ebenezer using the “heirloom” system. Think of it as this game’s version of Hollow Knight’s pin system. You unlock heirlooms as you explore the world, but you can only equip four at any time. I appreciate how the system adds a level of creativity to character-building and comes in handy in specific situations, but only being able to equip four at a time is quite restrictive. Some heirlooms are must-haves over others, like the movement-speed boost.
Ebenezer’s movement has a stiff and stodgy feel to it that makes the game feel slower and laggier than it should. Some Metroidvanias rely on instituting a slower early game to make the mid-to-late game feel faster and connect with the idea of the player growing more powerful. Sadly, this is not the case for Ebenezer. Traversal upgrades like the dash and bounce have a slight input delay pre- and post-animation, only adding to the game’s stiffness. I would have expected the dash (which also takes me through ghostly gates) to be near instantaneous and more controllable; instead, it forces you to commit to the dash’s entire distance. For the case of dashes, especially, I’ve become accustomed with them being gap closers and movement boosters. I expect dashes to help me cover large gaps where double jumps can’t help me while tactically useful for boss fights when I’m dodging bullets and attacks. For most of my playthrough, I relied on Ebenezer’s dash for its intended purpose of getting through ghostly gates rather than cross large expanses or speed up my movement.
The other oddity is that of Ebenezer’s backwards dodge. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when games take big risks in breaking players’ habits, but the implementation of the backwards dodge was hard to get used to and ended up rarely being used altogether. Usually, when I think of a dodge, I think of being able to move forward while dodging – or having the ability to choose where to dodge. Here, it was only backward. Dodging backwards ended up being a risky decision that could, but not always, feel good against very specific types of enemies. The biggest downside of dodging backward here is that most enemies’ projectiles flew directly at the player; dodging backward would keep the player in harm’s way. Maybe I wasn’t using the backwards dodge correctly, but I wanted to have more uses for the dodge.
It’s unfortunate about Ebenezer’s sticky traversal because it put a damper on the game’s power fantasy. Despite growing more powerful and connected to ghosts I’ve saved and assisted, I felt as though I was more fragile than not. In the game’s gigantic levels, I wanted a means of speeding through them when I was retracing my steps. Instead, I couldn’t really do that in an efficient nor expedient manner.
That said, I did a fair amount of backtracking and exploring in Ebenezer and the Invisible World. Like most Metroidvanias, the typical gameplay loop involves the player exploring one of many paths until they can’t, then retracing their steps to explore a new direction. Rinse and repeat while fighting enemies, finding secrets, defeating bosses, and most importantly, obtaining upgrades (ghosts) to improve the player’s traversal to continue exploring paths they couldn’t earlier in the game. Some players bristle at needing to backtrack, especially in gigantic games where the player has to visit multiple biomes to complete a single quest or attempting to figure out where to go next. Thankfully, Ebenezer has spirit train stations that takes him to previously explored biomes. No biggy.
My biggest complaints about the levels’ design are that they’re massive and tend to follow a similar structure with a handful of platforms and enemies. I needed variation from the levels’ layouts. I would have greatly preferred the ghosts’ abilities assist in complex traversal patterns for the sake of variety and increasingly difficult platforming. As a result of the gigantic level design and lack of platforming variety, backtracking felt too straightforward for my tastes. The levels’ designs are quite pretty, though; I’ll touch on that in a moment.
This game is not linear, though. The use of optional sidequests that unlock additional combat-focused ghosts means that I was constantly moving in random directions. Even more, I wasn’t able to fully explore biomes because of how the early locations required traversal upgrades I wouldn’t get until much later. This meant that I had to return at some point. In my review of CONVERGENCE, I critiqued its level design for its linearity – once I explored a biome, I had really no reason to return. Fast forward to now, Ebenezer’s biomes require repeat exploration to get further into the depths.
Enemies are clearly visible and mostly variable thanks to their unique designs and bright purple borders. Most enemies are melee and can be quickly dealt with using a few bonks, but the floating and flying enemies can be a pain to eliminate when they teleport away or fly too high. I love their 17th-century inspired designs, too.
Bosses are a mild disappointment. When I think of Metroidvanias that implement boss battles right, I think of those that utilize the new power introduced in the boss’ biome and present the player with a complex challenge involving clearly telegraphed but powerful moves and multiple attack patterns. They should look formidable, too. Ebenezer’s foes ended up being cool-looking sponges with massive amounts of health. Their patterns varied, sure, but I rarely had an opportunity to use a traversal-ghost to its fullest extent. Instead, I was left to spam the attack button and use combat ghosts when/if I had built up enough mana.
I wanted to save the best part of Ebenezer and the Invisible World for last: It’s an incredibly pretty and thematically cohesive Metroidvania. From its hand-drawn character sprites to its vivid backdrops, I just loved the details present in-game. The backgrounds of the levels felt grim and thorough, featuring folks going about their business in coffee shops and attending to each other all the way to asylum patients flailing about in their rooms. The designs of the ghosts, enemies, all the way to Ebenezer himself look unique, too.
Ebenezer and the Invisible World has its moments of fun and rewarding exploration through completing optional sidequests and finding secrets. It looks great, too. However, its big swings in the form of ghost management and stiff traversal/combat lends to a less than stellar experience. May this experience become better in the future with more time and polish? Absolutely, but it’s worth waiting to see what happens.
A review copy was provided by the publisher for the sole purpose of this review.
