*lights start flickering*
“It’s a hunt, I’m going to the safe room!”
“Wait, he is chasing me into the safe room.”
“Do not come into the safe room.”
“I repeat, the safe room is not safe anymore.”
“He is going to kill me.”
“He is killing me.”
“He is actively killing me.”
“He is actively killing me right now.
Phasmophobia means fear of ghosts, so it is a very fitting title for a game where you have to face scary spectres over and over again.
In Phasmophobia you and up to three of your friends take up the mantle of ghost hunters who complete contracts. You have to go to a spooky place, figure out what kind of ghost haunts it, maybe do some side missions, like take a picture of it, and then skedaddle home. Hopefully with all of you still alive. Phasmophobia is classified as a survival horror game because you can’t really fight the ghost, you can hide and you can pacify it temporarily, but that’s it. If it touches you, you die.
The HQ
Phasmophobia starts in a garage which is your base of operation. You can play with a basketball, stack spray paint cans, choose contracts, and buy some gear.
The available contracts are randomly selected from a predetermined list and the difficulty is also randomised based on the level of the players. As you do more contracts, gather money, buy gear, you level up, thus being able to tackle trickier missions. The difficulty depends on the map size (there is a big difference between investigating a three-bedroom house and an abandoned high school), how much safe time you have at the beginning of the mission to wander around without being attacked, and how severely your sanity is affected by all the spooky stuff. The ghosts usually go after the players with the lowest sanity, so you usually want to keep it as high as possible or at least make sure someone else’s sanity is lower than yours.
Once you have chosen your contract, you need to select the gear you are taking with you. If you have money left over from previous missions, you can buy new stuff or just stockpile more of your existing things. Now, why would you do that, you might ask. Well, here is how the inventory works. You have a global list of all your equipment from which you can pick what you want to take for a specific mission. You might have two cameras, but you only take one with you. Now, if due to unfortunate circumstances the ghost sucks the life out of you during your adventure, you lose that one camera, but you keep the one left behind. On lower difficulties the game pays some insurance money in case of death, making it easier to buy back the lost objects.
The gear you take with you on the missions also impacts how many of the side missions you can do. You might get a quest to take a photo of the ghost’s footprint in salt. To be able to do that you need a camera and some salt. Another side mission might be to record the ghost’s movement using a motion sensor. For this, you obviously need to bring with you a motion sensor. The more side quests you manage to finish, the more money you earn at the end.
Ghostfacing
Once everyone is happy with their choices, you can start the actual mission. You arrive to the scene in a van, which has all the gear you selected on neat shelves, some monitors you can use later, and a whiteboard listing out information about the ghost and your side missions. There is also a timer, which on amateur difficulty says five minutes, on intermediate two, on professional zero. This is your safe time during which you can run around the building freely without the ghost being able to hurt you. Each player then picks up three items, since you can’t hold more at once, and heads in.
In the game you can communicate in two ways, through a radio and when you are in close proximity. The game has different push-to-talk buttons for these options. When you are all in the same room you can talk using the proximity button, but once you split up, you’ll have to rely on the radio.
Your main task is to figure out what kind of ghost took up residence in the building. In your journal there are descriptions of entities, each leaving behind different types of evidence. For example, a banshee causes freezing temperatures, an EMF level of five, and leaves fingerprints that can be detected under UV light. The ghost usually has a favourite room, so the first step is always identifying it (thermometer and EMF is a good choice), and then get all the other equipment in that room to generate different readings.
The ghost will try to spook you at the beginning, turning off the fuse box thus killing the lights, turning on the TV, throwing objects, etc. Then once the safe time is up, the ghost can start a hunt. This event is accompanied by flickering lights and the ghost manifesting (it even shows up on video cameras). To make things more interesting, it also kills the radio. The in-person communication still works, though the ghost might hear you, but the radio will just give you static, so you can’t warn your friends who are far away.
The Good
First of all, Phasmophobia is very atmospheric. You do feel like little ghost hunters, or more precisely, ghost identifiers. You grab your initial items from the van, run in, set up cameras, sensors, scour the place with a thermometer, try to find the main room, etc. It has a very blue-collar vibe to it.
The maps are mostly fine, the houses are especially great.
The game is also just the right amount of scary for me. I am not really into Amnesia-style horror, Phasmophobia is spooky enough to keep me on edge but not enough to give me a heart attack.
The walls have ears…
The game uses Windows speech recognition, which allows the ghost to listen in. It matters whether you start shouting during a hunt, and the right type of ghost will answer you through the spirit box or Ouija board. You can make the ghost angry by shouting its name and talking about murder. The game feels very interactive which makes it so much more immersive.
We are all in this together…
Since it is a team game, you personally don’t have to be in the house all the time. You are free to take breaks in the van and just look at the motion sensor data or the feed from the video cameras. This can lead to spectacular moments when you get to witness your mate’s death through the window. Or when you are bravely investigating and slowly realise that all the others are just cowering in the van, watching you on the cameras, being encouraging through the radio.
Death comes for all…
The fact that the ghost can kill you with a touch makes the whole experience intense. You are truly afraid of hunts, and as soon as the lights start flickering, you run and hide in the nearest closet. The fact that you also lose your equipment adds more pressure and also makes picking your gear quite interesting at the beginning of the game. This is especially true when you are going for a higher difficulty: you need the best stuff to be able to tackle the challenge, but the odds of dying are also pretty high.
The Bad
To be fair, Phasmophobia is in early access, therefore some glitches and bugs are expected.
The most buggy part is the voice chat. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes you all have to reload the game, never Alt+Tab out of it, hook up the microphone before launching the game, etc. Once it works, it is fine, but it did take us a couple of tries to make sure everybody could hear everybody.
The whole game is a bit rough around the edges, just look at the screenshot below. To be honest, it doesn’t bother me, it somehow makes the game charming. One mechanic is annoying as hell though, opening doors. You have to open it with your mouse and not just a keystroke, which makes it very difficult to operate during a stressful situation, for example when you are trying to quickly hide from a demon. The controls are probably set up this way because Phasmophobia is also available in VR.
Not all maps are created equal…
Some maps are quite atmospheric and enjoyable to play, while others are just plain annoying. There is a big screen in the van with the map of the building. You can look at it at the start of the mission but you can’t bring it up while you are inside the building. There is a sweet spot with these maps where you can’t know the layout by heart due to its size but the structure is logical enough that you still have a general idea of where you are. Also once you find the ghost room, the route to it should be pretty straightforward.
The houses and the high school hits that spot and are great fun to play. Even for the tenth time. The asylum and the prison, however… The floorplan is very confusing and hard to navigate, and even when you know which room to go to you sometimes still need someone in the van to guide you. I also have to mention that the asylum sounds like a creepy place, but it is not, which surprised me as well. Too much office equipment, not enough medical stuff lying around.
But how many is too many…
The last big issue of the game is that the overall story is weak. There really isn’t a story at all, to be honest. You do the same maps over and over again, with a randomly named random-looking random-type ghosts. Everything is randomly generated and the environment doesn’t really matter. There are new maps and new equipment in the works, but still, after a while it gets boring. The exciting tasks we did the first twenty times become chores after a while and we slowly lost interest.
The Co-Op
The first time you’ll play Phasmophobia will be a chaotic experience. Nobody will know what each object does, how ghosts work, what is hunt, where the ghost usually shows up. And then slowly you’ll become a well-oiled machine and teamwork starts to shine. Someone will deal with the camera, someone will have the EMF reader, one guy will keep dropping candles all over the place. Everyone will know their role in the mission and it will be beautiful.
One missed opportunity is that we can’t really help each other during a hunt. It does make thematic sense that when the ghost is on the prowl it is every man for himself, but still, there are no heroic saves.
The Recommendation
Phasmophobia is definitely fun, we played more than 25 hours at this point. Not sure how much more replayability is in the game, it really depends on the new content being added.
While it is playable with two people, we recommend more players, it is way more fun. And some maps are just not playable with two.
Make sure you have the in-game voice chat worked out and try to power through the bugs.
Info
| Release Year | 2020 |
| Genre | Survival |
| Difficulty | Hard |
| Number of Players | 1 to 4 |
| Length | 30-45 minutes per contract |
Rating
| Overall | Good |
| Story | Mediocre |
| Co-Operation | Good |