This House is Unclean!
HIGH Correctly identifying my first spirit!
LOW Trying singleplayer mode.
WTF Why is there a full ribcage in this garage?
The best I could hope for was to get out alive.
It had all started innocently enough, with a group of friends exploring a purportedly haunted house. We brought the standard tools — EMF detectors, infrared cameras, and thermometers in case we found cold spots.
Minutes were spent slowly walking from room to room, waiting for books to start flying off the shelves or for a ghostly hand to pick up a pencil and start writing in the notebook I’d left lying on a table. Then a voice on my radio started yelling that ghost activity was spiking. My partner ran for the front door, but dropped dead after just two steps.
I turned and ran until I found a pile of boxes to hide behind, and remained crouched there until that same phone voice let me know that things had quieted down. Ten seconds later I had sprinted all the way to the front door, just in time to see it slam closed in my face. A moment later, ghostly fingers pushed in from the edge of my vision, grabbed me, and yanked me into the ghost dimension, where a demon butcher was waiting to torture my soul.
…Which is a roundabout way of saying that in VR, Phasmophobia can be a harrowing experience.
Of course, that’s exactly what one would expect (and even hope!) from a first-person co-op ghost investigating simulator. No one is playing something like this to wander around a house and find zero evidence of paranormal activity. After all, they can do that for themselves without even turning on a videogame system. What Phasmophobia offers a group of players is the certainty that in every house they enter, something strange will be going on and it will be up to them to properly record and classify it.
Like most online co-op experiences, the player is expected to go back to the same locations over and over, so the key element keeping things interesting is the sheer volume of ghost types that the player can run into.
A look into the in-game manual reveals dozens of different entities, each with their own idiosyncracies. Some ghosts throw things around rooms, some wander the halls, blinking in and out of visibility. The main gameplay loop is to keep track of every piece of behavior a discovered ghost demonstrates, and then use that to identify what type of ghost it may be. No ghost shows every ability, so once the player has seen objects fly around a room or found ghost scribbles in a notebook, they’ll be able to narrow things down from over thirty options to just a handful. Every new piece of evidence gained lowers the number of ghosts it could possibly be, and this in turn lets players know which technology they should focus on using next.
Gameplay is slow and fiddly, but that’s actually a part of its charm. Phasmophobia is the rare experience that demands players engage with it in a very specific way to appreciate it. More than once I found myself standing rock-still, staring at a thermometer and willing it to dip below zero so that I could get the last point of confirmation I was looking for, all the while wondering if the footsteps I was hearing were my partners or a ghost creeping up behind me. It’s rare for a horror title to give me real chills, but Phasmophobia managed it over and over again.
That said, Phasmophobia only really works if the player is willing to fully commit to the experience. If the player doesn’t tick off two important boxes before starting, it’s almost impossible to enjoy it.
The first is the environment they play in. This isn’t something to boot up casually — it needs to be played in a dark room, at night, with no one around, while wearing headphones. It’s been suggested that the reason real-life ghost hunters only investigate creepy locations at night is that the oppressive shadows and eerie silence give the human imagination fodder to build the supernatural experiences they’re hoping to find — and whether that’s true or not, it’s absolutely what the Phasmophobia experience is built around. A player has to be willing to completely set aside their suspension of disbelief and allow themselves to be scared if they’re going to enjoy it — if they’re not going to commit, not only will they not enjoy it, it’s essentially not even a game any more.
The second, and even more important requirement is that they play with a group of people equally committed to the game. While Phasmophobia can technically be played offline, it’s barely functional in singleplayer mode. Players’ inventories are limited to just a few tools but there are plenty available, so unless a group of investigators search the location together, there’s no real chance of getting any decent evidence as it’s unlikely the player will happen to be holding the correct detection equipment when they stumble upon a spooky situation, and by the time they make it to the supply truck and back, the activity will no doubt have ended or moved to another part of the house.
Not only is co-op the only effective way to play the game, partners who are as frightened as the player add much to the experience. Every time I got on my radio to ask everyone to stay still so I could confirm that I was hearing a ghost walking around, I felt like something special was happening — this is a unique co-op experience, and one that rewards cooperation and mutual engagement like few I’ve encountered.
The biggest obstacle facing would-be Phasmophobia players is finding enough people willing to join in the shared roleplay that it requires. But, anyone able to put together a quartet of ghost investigators who are free for couple of hours on a particularly dark night will find themselves in one of the most effective co-op horror games ever made.
Rating: 8 out of 10
Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Kinetic Games. It is currently available on PC, XBS/X and PS5. Copies of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 2 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was not completed. 15 hours were spent in Multiplayer modes.
Parents: This game was rated T by the ESRB, and it contains Blood, Use of Drugs, Violence. Yes, the deaths can be scary — especially in VR — but beyond that there’s nothing here that would keep even younger teens from being able to have a great time with it. Literally the most questionable thing in the game is that players can restore their sanity a little by taking a swig from what’s obviously a flask of liquor.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Sound design is integral to the Phasmophobia experience, and the key audio cues are not subtitled. This game is not accessible.
Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable.
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