This dating sim about playing cupid in a haunted house as a cute little ghost has stolen my heart as well as my left sock

Do you believe in life after love? What about love after life? As it turns out, that's what all the cool spirits are up to beyond the veil. Ghostina tells us as much early on in Love, Ghostie when I first appear before her as a newly-departed soul, set to pay my dues to humanity from the beyond. I'll be doing so from my very own manor house, mine to haunt for all eternity – or at least, until I run out of new tenants to match up and watch as they fall in love with a little phantasmic help.

Love, Ghostie is part dating sim, part management sim, and part muli-ended visual novel, but it's all heart. There's something so calming about watching love blossom between two strangers, seemingly from nothing at all, while having had a hand in the proceedings all along. Some might call it a thankless task, stealing little items and "gifting" them to residents while crediting it to a would-be admirer, but that's kind of the point. This is not just a game about making others fall in love. Love, Ghostie is a game about accepting and loving yourself, no matter where you stand on this mortal coil. I'm passing a tissue your way as we speak.

Love from the other side

After completing my first three days in Love, Ghostie, I think I've got the hang of it. The gameplay is simple, but there's a calming tranquility about it. Starting off with four action points per day to use however I please, Ghostina clues me in on how to spend them efficiently. Stealing an item would cost me an action point, as would gifting said item to a housemate. I can also spend action points on assigning chores from the blackboard, where three daily tasks get refreshed each morning.

If you've already got a romantic duo – known in-game as a "ship," because hello there fandom culture – in mind, one of the daily chores involves sending them on a date. Each date corresponds to certain personality tags one or both of your couple might have, but to discover the personality of all four housemates, it's a matter of trial and error. Gifting a gothic wreath to a housemate who's more interested in sweet, bright, or playful things than in the dark or serious things in life will result in a more tepid response, resulting in less relationship gained with the gift-giver. Similarly, sending a clumsy housemate and a lazy housemate on a hiking date is sure to end in awkwardness.

But one thing I love about Love, Ghostie is how even the awkward dates can still be good ones. It doesn't seem possible to have a bad date in the game, meaning all the residents have to lose from a slightly calamitous date is their dignity. It also seems like you can theoretically pair up all of the game's residents, with none of them being bad pairings in terms of personality matchups. Still, there were times when I didn't quite like the narrative playing out between certain couples, so I swapped them around. I'm sorry, Ollin the frog prince, but you don't get to tell Gerard the angsty goth giraffe that he needs to change his style for anyone. That's not okay (I promise).

After a long hard day of gifting and plotting, it makes sense that Ghostie might need a little downtime themselves. That's where the attic laptop comes in handy, serving as my one-stop shop for all things dating sim. Here, I can sell off unwanted stolen items for ghost coins and spend them on shiny new presents via EEPbay, the ghostly online shopping platform. I can also check out Deaddit, an e-forum and message board that serves as a clever FAQ mechanic, giving me tips and advice from day to day. The attic is also home to the chest of drawers, and here, I can equip all manner of hats or ghostly trails to leave in my wake. It's the small, loving details like these that make Love, Ghostie such a sumptuous delight, every mechanic tailored to its themes in a way that feels effortlessly authentic.

Alas, all good things come to an end – including Ghostie's stint as a matchmaker. I was incredibly sad to see the game had an ending at all, and would happily play through its three and a half-hour runtime over and over again. The game does encourage replayability, with the developer recently saying on Twitter that you'd need eleven playthroughs to see everything. With so many boos to unite in so many combinations, I just know that I'll return to Love, Ghostie's house of blossoming romance again and again – and I'll be crying just as much by the end of it as I did the first time. I won't spoil what that ending is, but it speaks to the fragile yet beautiful impermanence of life – something that also applies, it would seem, to the afterlife.

Check out some of the best dating sims to play next if you're in the mood for more boos.