Goetia

About Goetia

Goetia is a point-and-click adventure from developer Sushee, published by Forever Entertainment S.A. It launched on April 14, 2016, and arrived on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Linux, and Mac. You play as Abigail Blackwood, a ghost returning to her family estate forty years after the war. The setting is Oakmarsh near Coventry, where the ruins of a village sit beneath the shadow of Blackwood Manor. Your goal involves piecing together what happened to your lineage during that fateful February 1941 air raid. This title stands out because you are not bound by physical laws. You can float through ceilings and walk through walls to find clues, but you must possess objects to interact with the world or solve puzzles.

Gameplay

A typical session involves scanning rooms for inventory items while floating above obstacles. You will click on various objects to examine them and read notes that reveal backstory details. The core mechanic hinges on possession. You cannot open a locked door from the outside as a spirit. Instead, you must float into a key or handle and take control of it to turn the lock. Once possessed, your movement options change. You can no longer phase through solid surfaces while holding an item. This creates a distinct rhythm where you scout the environment freely before anchoring yourself to specific tools to progress. Puzzles often require juggling between your spectral form and physical objects to bypass barriers or trigger events in the manor halls.

What Players Think

Critics gave Goetia a solid Metacritic score of 79 out of 100, showing it landed well with reviewers who appreciate the genre. PlayPile data shows the community completion rate is quite low for an adventure game, with players unlocking only 16.2% of the achievements on average. The hardest challenge is "The fall of Blackwood," which only 7.60% of users have unlocked. This suggests many people get stuck or give up before finishing the story. The game often sits at a historical low price of $1.49, with recent deals hitting $0.72 on Green Man Gaming. While the atmosphere gets high praise in reviews, the difficulty curve seems to be a major hurdle that keeps completion numbers down compared to other titles in this genre.

PlayPile's Take

This title is worth buying if you enjoy old-school puzzle solving and can handle getting stuck on a single mechanism for hours. The price point around $0.72 makes the risk minimal even if you cannot finish it. You should expect a short campaign since 16 total achievements average a low unlock rate of 16.2%. The possession mechanic adds a nice layer of strategy, but the steep difficulty spike near the end might frustrate some players. Do not buy this if you want a linear narrative that flows without heavy puzzle barriers. Check your patience levels before downloading, as the rarest achievement proves that only a dedicated few see the final credits.

Storyline

The ruins of any village are the silent testament to its final moments. The ruins of Oakmarsh are no different. Their telling silence, the dust blanketing what was once a quiet village near Coventry. If you walk among the ruins you can easily imagine what it was like. The small black dots of the Luftwaffe getting bigger by the minute. The whistling of the dive bombers approaching on that fateful day of February 1941. And if you touch the charred wood, you can even hear the warning calls and the waves of panic resonating through time. And then again, maybe you’ll hear nothing at all. Maybe you’ll only feel the weight of the silence, broken only by the wind in the branches of old trees. Maybe you’ll only feel the weight of this unanswered question: could that fateful attack explain what happened here? Is it enough to explain why the whole population fled the village? That’s when you look beyond the village limits, when you look up and see its shape: Blackwood Manor. Behind its gates, the silence of Oakmarsh takes on a different taste. Icy, metallic, faint, swollen with secrets that won’t stand still. Blackwood. The name of a manor and the family that lived within. A perverted and mad lineage, a clan whose final members devoted their life to mysticism and fanatical experiments. I am Abigail. Abigail Blackwood. Recently risen from the grave, I know nothing about the last 40 years of my family’s history... But obviously somebody is keen on seeing me lift the veil on what happened in Oakmarsh - to what led to the downfall of Blackwood Manor. And it seems like I have no choice in the matter…