To preface this review, I will try to mark story spoilers with spoiler tags, so you can still play the game blind after reading this.

I found out about The Outbound Ghost via Twitter and was honestly pretty excited for it, being a life-long Paper Mario fan and having yearned for an indie Paper Mario type game on Steam for years. After having played it to completion, I feel.. conflicted.

First of all, Steam Deck compatibility is near perfect. Some areas will drop some frames and the scaling is a bit off (player level counter is cut off, the cutscene borders don't extend to the very top/bottom, in extreme circumstances some text can be cut off on either side, unwanted assets visible at the bottom of the screen), but gameplay wise it works perfectly.

Onto the game itself now, let's start with the good bits:

The music is easily the best part about The Outbound Ghost. Every song slaps and encapsulates the mood very well. Some of the tracks even make you feel like you're playing a new entry in the Paper Mario series. I actually went out of my way to pull them up whenever I needed to vibe for a minute.
The setting is also quite appealing and I haven't seen this trope done before, especially the burdens keeping the ghosts in this purgatory-esque state, which they need to resolve in order to ascend to heaven (or hell, i suppose) is a really good idea.
The graphics and assets are also really well made and quite beautiful. If your system can handle the grass, you should leave it on, since it adds quite a lot of atmosphere. The sprites for the characters, figments and apparitions are also really nice and quite expressive, even with their design fundamentally being relatively simple.
I quite liked the dialogue as well, even though the story itself is.. something (we'll get to it soon).

Okay, let's ruin the cheery mood with the bad bits now, shall we?

Even though the graphical capability of this game is quite high, the level design is something left to be desired. Some of the areas are quite fleshed out and have neat quirks to them, but these get immediately undermined by the connectors between them being basically a straight path thats always fenced in (could you have not used other level geometry to keep the player on the path?). A few areas were also quite empty (like most houses), which makes the whole world feels kind of eerie, but not like the game wants it to be regarding the story. Also a personal gripe I had was the sheer amount of impassable objects thrown at you waaaay before you can actually get to said blocked off area (why show me stuff 8 hours before I could even try to get to it?!). Also, making the player traverse quite long distances to get to the next story event is not a good idea in my opinion, since you could easily get stuck not knowing where to go if you need to travel 30+ areas.
The battle mechanics are quite solid, don't get me wrong, but after the 700th battle facing similar enemies, I just decided to avoid them all together, which isn't a great sign. I also wished for a little more nuance, since you mostly end up using the Attack or one/two spells.
Unfortunately the story is also very.. weird. I thought about it a lot before writing this review, trying to make sense of it, but there were just so many tangles, twists & turns and unexplained parts, that I just cannot be satisfied with its conclusion in the game. Many of these things could be touched upon in a sequel or prequel, but I don't even know if that's the right solution to this (maybe just abandon it and move on to writing a better story next time..?) (How did the main character die? What's their burden? Why did Adrian decide to do what he did? Etc., etc., there's just a lot of unanswered questions)
I also understood what the game was going for with the recap section, but in my personal opinion, it went on too long and ultimately did not end up helping the story.
Another gripe I had, but this is to be excused, since it technically served the story: Why am I only playing the supposed main character for the first 3 hours of the game?

So all in all, would I recommend The Outbound Ghost? Yes. Even though I seemed quite harsh on it in the last section, I think what it tries to do is quite remarkable in itself. It definitely deserves a playthrough, just for the music alone (trust me, it slaps). Don't go in it expecting Paper Mario level quality from an Indie dev, then you'll be alright!
I am definitely looking forward to the next project this developer decides to tackle, hopefully they get a dedicated story writer though.