This isn't a game about leaving the past behind you, as the article would have you believe. This is a game about how the past says "Hey, where do you think YOU'RE going?" and slapping you in the face.
Ironically, the worst part about the ghost-images is as Geoffrey pointed out: the movement input being interrupted by their appearance. If you time it right on the arrow key and spacebar, actually, the ghosts only really take a couple frames of movement away from you. So the bigger 'regret' is failing to notice in a timely fashion when the red line pops up so you can hit the right key sequence with the right timing.
Not to mention I didn't notice a penalty for choosing an 'incorrect' option for a ghost image. The image comes back anyway, who cares if you feed it bread, wine, rat poison, or a Boeing 747 complete with emergency oxygen masks? If anything, the ghost images are fodder for 'safer' experimentation. Want to know what owls eat? Kill an owl, and then run around a little bit, and shove everything you can think of down his throat until he loves you. Kind of makes it a closer analogy to the singles dating scene. </jaded>
It seemed to me like the blue dots were carried away faster later in the game, too, which goes completely counter to the concept of regret. The idea behind regret is that you screwed up in the past, and you see it continuing to hamper you even as the rest of the world is unchanged; it is your secret, personal pain. But if the rest of the world changes WITH your mistake, then it changes from mistake and regret to something more akin to crime and punishment. You're not the one who carries your burden forward with you; the external world remembers it, and you have to suffer the consequences visited upon you by others.
I also can't say for sure, having not actually tried it, but I believe it would typically be faster and more pointwise profitable to go through the maze of the game in the best A-to-B straight course one can manage. You encounter fewer animals, have less delay, less chance of accruing ghosts, and the blue dots on missed paths will eventually get carried off anyway. In this, it's not so much about regret as conflict avoidance and safety. I guess this could be tangential to the concept of regret, thinking further on it: If you want to avoid regret, you have to avoid variety of experience. Though the point-profitability issue means the game may be advocating this avoidance, which may or may not be something that you want to communicate with the game.
Suggested changes:
- Put a list up, before the maze appears, of the animals and their preferred food items, matched. If you feed an animal the wrong food after that, then that's your own stupid fault, which is a more sensical thing to regret.
- Keep the orb-carriers' rate of speed constant.
- Allow the player to 'win back' some level of non-botherance from, say, owls, after feeding an owl (ghostly or otherwise) the correct food item. It shouldn't be much, maybe 15 seconds of reprieve, during which time of course other ghost animals still have free bothering reign. If you want to get really crinkly about it, you can add another 5 seconds to the reprieve time for every owl that consecutively gets answered correctly. This serves not only as a reward to the player for ceasing his/her screw-uppitude, but also creates a greater cognitive gap in between animals of the same type, leading (diabolically) to a greater chance that the player will forget what food belongs to what animal and thus get transported back to bothertown for his/her transgressions (which he/she will certainly regret).
