Ghost Haunting’s free demo returns Deponia publisher Daedalic to LucasArts-style adventures

For a while the point-and-click adventure looked like Daedalic’s past rather than its business. The Hamburg publisher made its name with Deponia, Edna & Harvey and The Whispered World, then drifted toward strategy and co-op games, and took a bruising hit with The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, the licensed misfire after which it stopped making games in-house. Ghost Haunting is the way back. Its free demo is now on Steam, and it wears its lineage openly: hand-crafted pixel art, dark jokes and a heroine who treats every locked door as a personal insult.

The developer is Three Headed Monkey Studios, a young Cologne outfit founded by filmmakers and producers Tali Barde, Marco Grönwoldt and Marian Grönwoldt. Any Monkey Island player will catch the joke in the name, and Ghost Haunting is the team’s first game. The premise moves with cartoon logic. Gigi discovers that her grumpy grandfather Giovanni is a legendary ghost hunter and decides that if ghosts can visit the living, she can visit the dead and bring her grandmother home. A talking pumpkin demon called Baron Butt(er)nut offers to help. Asking Grandpa’s permission is not on her list.

Gigi faces a glowing green portal in a cellar as dialogue options address the pumpkin demon in Ghost Haunting — Image: Three Headed Monkey Studios / Daedalic Entertainment

The idea worth watching is the oldest one in the genre: the puzzle as a character trait. The announcement describes Gigi as a problem-solver whose methods rarely leave the furniture intact, and that is the LucasArts lesson exactly. In the best adventures the inventory is a portrait of the protagonist, and combining absurd objects feels earned when it comes from who she is rather than from a designer’s lock-and-key checklist.

Gigi stands in a cluttered lab beside a coffin with an item inventory bar at the bottom of the screen in Ghost Haunting — Image: Three Headed Monkey Studios / Daedalic Entertainment

Around that classic core sit the comforts the old games never offered: a hint system for when a puzzle refuses to give, hotspot highlighting to end the pixel hunt, fast travel to cut the backtracking, and a score system. In the release, the studio pitches the demo as the feeling of rediscovering a forgotten adventure game from the nineties, “except without the floppy disks,” built on quirky conversations, ridiculous item combinations and the jolt of joy when a puzzle finally clicks.

The demo arrived as part of Steam’s Point & Click Showcase and will stay available after the event ends. It includes English and German voice acting, with interface and subtitles in French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese, 12 languages in total.

The full game is due in 2027 on PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. That is a year later than the window floated when Daedalic and Three Headed Monkey first revealed the project in July 2025, and a far wider spread of platforms than the PC and Mac release first announced.

A demo like this has one real job: proving that a team of filmmakers can time a joke to a mouse click. The early evidence is a grandfather already shouting that the kid is completely out of control. The studio has clearly studied the right teachers.

Tags: Daedalic Entertainment, point-and-click adventure games, Deponia, Ghost Haunting, LucasArts, Three Headed Monkey Studios