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Playing through OFF – the newly remastered version of Mortis Ghost’s French language indie RPG – it’s easy to see why it became such a cult hit after first releasing in 2008.
The game, which was developed with a French language script using RPG Maker 2003 and released for free before eventually earning itself a fan translation, was the sort of ‘indie game’ that press and players weren’t quite ready for back then – I’d certainly never heard of it until this remaster was announced.
A fan following built on Tumblr and among Let’s Play enthusiasts; coming into the game now, numerous fan theories, art pieces, wikis and guides from the last 15-odd years are all well-maintained and smartly documented.
OFF: down to basics
OFF is a turn-based RPG boiled down to the basics. You play as The Batter, a man who uses his baseball bat to purge evil from the mysterious lands you’ve been plonked into.
Watch the OFF trailer.
Guided by the Judge (a cat with too many teeth and a penchant for verbosity), you travel through the various ‘zones’ that the game offers, battling increasingly distressing enemies and slowly coming to grips with the game’s plot, which is heavy on metaphor and symbolism.
Throughout the game, characters will occasionally acknowledge you, the player, by the name you provided at the start of the game – you are the puppet master, they remind you, pulling the strings on The Batter’s every move.
You’ll visit smoke mines, haunted malls, and an extremely ominous sugar factory in your vaguely defined quest to rid the land of bad spirits. It’s an odd one, alright.
OFF: significant overhauls
This new version of OFF has updated various parts of the experience – battles have received a significant overhaul, there’s a (fantastic) new soundtrack, and a few puzzles have been tweaked slightly.
It has not received a visual glow-up to its overworld aside from some new borders to fill in the expanded screen size of modern monitors, which is, I think, the right decision: the dinky graphics are part of the charm, especially when contrasted against the bizarrely detailed monster designs during battles.
New optional bosses have been scattered around the game, although they’re pretty easy to miss if you’re not revisiting zones after you complete them.
Fundamentally, though, this is the same core experience that launched a thousand Tumblr fandom blogs 20-odd years ago, for better or worse. Not going overboard on changes was the right decision, essentially preserving the bits about OFF that people have always liked while tweaking some of the less satisfying parts (and one extremely clever puzzle from the original has unfortunately had to be changed – you no longer have to poke around in the game’s files to find a solution).
Combat has been tightened up and rebalanced considerably from the original release, and is enjoyable without necessarily being super deep.
It has a Final Fantasy VII-style timing system that determines when each character on screen gets to attack, and your party – which consists of The Batter and three characterless circles he encounters along the way in an amusingly arbitrary play on the classic RPG structure – all level up and gain new abilities as you go.
It’s a system that works best in boss battles, which demand a little more long-term thinking and strategy; by the back half of the game I found that my party had a good mix of abilities and synergies that made battles more satisfying.
When I say ‘the back half of the game’, to clarify, I’m talking about the last three hours of a seven-odd hour experience. OFF is small by RPG standards, but that’s not a bad thing – it’s the size it needs to be to do what it wants.
OFF: universally fiddly
This is the sort of game that feels like it’s meant to be played through with not just a pen and paper, but a guide in hand. The puzzles are almost universally fiddly, much less about wracking your brain and more about reading a bunch of notes and then writing down numbers or odd details you encounter so you can use them later.
They’re not much fun, but they’re also not the point.
The real reason to play OFF is, and always has been, the vibes – the story, the setting, the singular strange vision of it all. There are many different ways of reading OFF – it could be that it’s about the inherent power fantasies of RPGs, or the way narratives can drive us to make bad choices, or about the effects of generational trauma (hint: it’s about all of this and more).
OFF presents a world that is a bit, well, off, and each new layer that peels back reveals further rot. The final act, where it really starts to unravel your sense of what the whole game has been working towards, is particularly interesting.
There were moments where the game frustrated me, but it was worth preserving through them to see this story through.
OFF: not particularly shocking
I will say that I didn’t find OFF particularly shocking in the ways I might have back when it was first released, but perhaps part of that is that the impact of OFF can be felt in a lot of games that have come out since and presented their own genre subversions.
OFF was a huge influence on Toby Fox’s Undertale, for instance, and Fox has contributed to the soundtrack for this new version of the game. It’s really great stuff, alternatively haunting and jaunty, and perhaps the part of this new release that feels most ‘modern’.
This release of OFF, and the increased visibility it’s receiving through a Steam and Switch release, is a good reminder that some of the most interesting games being released in the present perhaps aren’t going to be properly appreciated in their time either.
I’m talking about the freeware curios from first-time devs that manage to do something a bit different with well-established genres, the games that aren’t allowed to release on Steam for whatever reason, the true ‘alt games’ that appear on Itch or developer’s personal websites.
That OFF has gone even remotely ‘mainstream’ is a testament to how much influence it had, and it’s still worth playing today. But it’s a good reminder to all of us – press, developers, game enthusiasts – that tomorrow’s cult classic isn’t necessarily going to be found in the Steam ‘best selling’ list today.
OFF is available on Nintendo Switch and Steam from 15 August 2025.
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