In a twist of my spooky season, Kinetic Games launched their latest title Phasmophobia, and delivered the game I never knew I wanted in my life. Giving us a ghost hunting simulator where we have to pick from a handful of different locations, each varying in a randomly picked difficulty, and have to figure out what type of ghost is haunting that location while also completing some side objectives. While the explanation is simple enough, I am thoroughly impressed with how this game plays!
Gameplay
After deciding if you are going to go alone or with up to 3 friends, you will need to load up all the items you want to bring with you for your ghost hunting mission. The game gives a default set of stuff so that you have the bare minimum needed to figure out what kind of ghost it is, but it is much easier to figure it out and solidify the correct answer by bringing all the materials they made available to you. You will have to have a few successful rounds in order to earn the money to purchase these items though, so I suggest partnering up with players that are of higher levels when you are getting started.
The full list of items includes ghost writing books, EMF reader, spirit box, thermometer, flashlights, candles, lighter, smudge sticks, salt, motion detectors, sound detectors, UV light, sanity pills, and more. Every item plays its own role in the ghost hunting job, so make sure you understand your equipment as well. Using the equipment correctly can be the difference between living through the encounter with everything you need and dying at the hands of the ghost.
If you do happen to die during your ghost hunting visit, all of the items that you brought with you will be lost. However, if you have a partner that can take a picture of your dead body then you will get insurance money to help cover some of the items you lost when you go to rebuy them. This is only an option on Ametuer and Intermediate missions though and will not work on Professional missions.
Solving what type of ghost you are dealing with will require you to find a total of three clues. Each clue will help narrow down the options, but majority of the time even having two of the three clues will leave you with two or three different possible ghost options. That means you want to try and get all the clues before deciding what ghost it is because their behavior can be deceiving. This is something I have learned the hard way. The different types of clues you can get is EMF level 5 (4 or less does NOT count), Freezing Temperatures, Ghost Writing, Ghost Orbs, Fingerprints, or Spirit Box.
To help keep you safe, and sometimes needed to be done as a secondary optional task, you will want to utilize the smudge sticks and crucifix tools. Lighting a smudge stick in the haunted room will suppress the chance of the ghost going into a haunt status, which is where the ghost actively tries to find a player and kill them. Crucifixes are a bit tricky, but I believe they are more of a charge system rather anything else. So basically, they hold two charges to stop a haunt but it can’t stop a haunt that is in play and can only prevent the haunt from happening in the first place by being close enough to where the ghost spawns to begin its haunt.
When you begin a mission, there are two optional objects you can find in the building as well. These two items are the bone and the ouija board. If you find these items, take a picture of them with the photo camera for extra points, and collect the bone. You can interact with the ouija board to ask the ghost questions directly but bear in mind that this could trigger the ghost to go into a haunt rather than bothering to answer your questions.
Expectations
The reason I say this is a near-perfect ghost hunting simulator is because of how many bugs and problems the game has. For instance, it is a mic-mandatory type of game, but yet there are multiple times where people face a mic glitch where communication simply doesn’t work between players after loading up into a map. This glitch is very frustrating, but able to be worked with because when it happens the other players can hear them, but that player can’t hear their teammates. This issue needs to be fixed immediately!
Sometimes the ghosts themselves can be a bit buggy, so it would be nice to see them solidify their spawns as well. I have had times where the ghost wasn’t registering inside the house and when it went into haunt it instantly killed me, there have been times that one of the clues simply doesn’t trigger making us think that it is a different type of ghost, and I am sure there have been countless glitch moments with ghosts for other players.
Essentially, loading into a game is where all the bugs tend to take place. This includes game crashing which can even affect the players who successfully loaded in. I am hoping to see the game loading to end up being not only smooth but a solid load every time.
Other than the issues that need to be fixed, I am hoping to see some more content added to the game. While this mainly means more ghost types, clue types, and locations, I would love to see some random event stuff that affects players. This could be unique animations the ghost makes in order to execute a proper jumpscare on the players or to just be a creepy ghost lurking. Then there are the more expansive ideas like having the ghost throw a knife in the kitchen and if it hits the player it counts as a death, that way there is more to fear than just the ghost going into a haunt mode.
Also, they need to add a few menu options that would just make sense. Add the options menu to change my settings while I am in an in-game lobby. Add an invite button so I can get friends into my lobby without having to make them look for the room in the public games list. Make it possible for players to make a private party and then turn that party into a public match, thus giving them an easy way to team up without having to worry about keeping a spot open for them. Give us a filter option to only allow players who have a mic so that those without mics don’t join lobbies where people want all players to have a mic.
Conclusion
Phasmophobia is already an amazing and addictive game, but even still it has so much potential to grow into an even better game! I am truly looking forward to the future of this game and to see how they end up both improving and expanding it for the players. It is already near perfect, so let’s find out if they can fix it up to be a simply perfect ghost hunting simulator.
