Paper Ghost Stories: Third Eye Open Review

Ohh Paper Ghost Stories: Third Eye Open, what an amazing and emotional story. You kinda broke me but I loved the journey and was in awe with the artwork during the whole game.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: I would guess around 14h without a guide
Estimated achievement difficulty: 4/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1 + chapter selection
Is there a good guide available: Not yet when I write this
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Hard to answer, there is chapter selection. See below for more info
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty option
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

In Paper Ghost Stories: Third Eye Open you play as this young girl who just moved to a new neighborhood, and outside you will meet your first friend… One problem, it is the ghost of a girl a bit older than you, so everyone around you can’t see her and think this is your imaginary friend. And while this spirit is friendly.. will all of them be so friendly? And how will the people close to you react when you keep saying you can see ghosts, even when you’re getting older…

In this game, you’ll follow Ting through her childhood. You’ll see her schools, her friends, a short vacation.. just everyday situations, but it isn’t everyday stuff when you can talk to a spirit that is with you a lot of the time.

Paper Ghost Stories: Third Eye Open is an awesome adventure game with some heavy subjects around being different and living in a family where there is some tension. The game gives you some dialog options and some mini-games but most of what you’ll do is find objects while exploring areas. It took me a bit of time to get into the story. It always feels weird to play is this very young child, but the developers did a good job and it also gets easier later on as you know more of the story and are growing up.

I’m very impressed with the beautiful “paper theatre” style, inspired by the Joss-Papercraft of Southeast Asia. The game is just stunning. Another thing that I’m impressed about is how emotional the story gets. I have cried many times during this game. The game does such a good job of touching on emotional subjects and telling the story. There have been over 24 hours between finishing the game and writing this review, I did need a moment to progress the emotions that this game brought up in a beautiful way.

It feels wrong to bring this up next, but I love achievement hunting, and Paper Ghost Stories: Third Eye Open has a lot of them. A bunch of them are for completing the story. Some are for secrets found or finishing a chase without getting caught. And there are achievements for choosing different options. I’m missing quite a lot of them when I write this. Most of them are for doing chases without getting caught, or in one go.. because most of the time I needed some time to figure out the mechanic, or was surprised by a prompt to evade something. Gladly there is a chapter selection option when you make a new save file, but some chapters are about an hour long. And there is no way to quickly skip the text, so you probably will still need around 40 minutes or so to get to a chase at the end of a chapter. I wish the game would have ways to start more in the middle of some chapters, for example, chapter 1 a and chapter 1 b, so you don’t always have to start from the beginning of the chapter.

I give Paper Ghost Stories: Third Eye Open 4.5 out of 5 stars and I highly recommend it to experience this story fresh, without knowing too much about it when you start.

This review for Paper Ghost Stories: Third Eye Open was written on 6 September 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has XX achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.