It’s been a few years now since Phasmophobia took the PC streaming scene by storm, the scrappy indie effort enrapturing watchers with a mix of tense and spooky ghost detecting and then screaming and running around as doors slammed, lights went out and ghosts went on the hunt. Now that game is coming to console… but it’s still in Early Access.
Phasmo (as it’s colloquially called) is quite a mature game for an Early Access title. It’s four years old now, there have been countless updates to it, balance patches, new additions and seasonal events. In fact, it’s launching on console during the Blood Moon event, where a bunch of levels have been bathed in red candles, weird glowing orbs, and streams of… loo roll?
We started at the very beginning, though. Nic, Gamoc and myself had never played Phasmo on PC, and my main knowledge comes from hearing some of its most popular streamers play in the background. In other words, I knew the gist, but not the specifics.
The first half dozen ghost hunts were awkward fumbles in the dark. Between not knowing how each contraption is meant to be used (outside of a relatively straightforward tutorial), trying to figure out what is and isn’t a sign of a ghost, and generally stumbling around with the lights turned off, it initially feels about as underwhelming as a real haunted house visit.
Sure I’m wandering around with an EMF reader, peeping through a video camera with night vision turned on, or triggering questions on a static-filled Spirit Box, but there’s nothing happening… until there is.
When you find those first flickers of activity, you can put everything together, try to figure out what’s a meaningful clue, check things off in the Journal and hopefully guess what ghost it is correctly.
Except you don’t necessarily have long. Whatever the spectre, they have little patience for your intrusion. Going off on a hunt as you spend more time in there and your sanity meter depletes (staying in the light helps, but then the ghost won’t want to play so much), until they come for you and try to kill you, their hands creeping in from the side of your vision. Then you’re a ghost, albeit one that’s not so malicious to your still living buddies.
A big part of that initial fumble is with the game controls and figuring out how to actually use things. There’s a few quirks, like placing a camera to keep recording, or a notebook for ghost writing needing the left trigger, there’s a mental jump for which buttons are used for interactions, it’s all too easy to drop items when simply trying to back out of using them, and then picking back up off the floor needs absolute precision, and crouching to do so.
There’s a bunch of rougher edges that want improving, such as navigating the book-like Pause menu / journal with shoulder buttons throwing you to weird places in its structure. The pre-level UI for managing the van inventory is also hampered by the achingly slow Destiny-style cursor, something which has plagued in console gaming for far too long now.
It’s in these areas that it still feels like an early access game, but it can all be improved.
So can the introduction to the game. The tutorial is fine for showing intended uses, but doesn’t really hammer things home in context. When the game says “Freezing Temperatures” as a clue, it really bloody means it – +1°C ain’t freezing, buddy – and the same for EMF reading of over 5.
Reading the clues for new players is tough, given how fleeting they can be, or how directed you need to be with a device, and that can lead to a lot of supposition and wrong guesses. It’s frustrating to feel like you had all three clues you need, only for it to be something completely different. Heck, there’s a bunch of ghosts in the game, which are purely there in an effort to misdirect and addle expert players and streamer – a big part of the game is learning to look beyond evidence for a ghost’s personality, to let you identify them with minimal clues.
While the game has difficulty levels, and ranking up gradually unlocks new haunted houses and grants access to better gear, it’s overwhelming to have two dozen ghosts from the off. A better game introduction might give an initial clue to you, whether that’s stating a room that the ghost was in or saying that the owners noticed a particular bit of evidence, just to set newcomers on the right path. It could also limit the range of ghost possibilities to help ease you in.
But as you slowly push yourself up that learning curve, things start to come together. After half a dozen rounds of really not getting it, and after multiple deaths, you start to figure out how to play, how to band together. Things like having one person in the truck looking for ghost activity, like putting the DOTS and camera together in a room and leaving them to be viewed remotely, and just quickly pooling all the tools together once you’ve found where the ghost lives.
I had the most fun with the earliest farmhouse levels. They feel more active, for one thing, despite being larger, and they’re much darker without lights on, ramping up the tension a bit. This was also where we found the first Ouija board to commune with the ghosts directly, the first hilariously bad ghost photo – literally just a few projected green dots that are barely discernible – and the first time the bouncy fun of a ghost hunt really hit home. There’s a reason why Phasmo has now been followed on by games like Lethal Company and Content Warning. Silly spooky times with your friends are fun!
There’s a bunch of rough edges from adapting the controls to gamepad, and from that initial learning curve, but Phasmophobia is absolutely that kind of game – grab a few friends, go to a spooky house, and run around in the dark calling out to “Susan” or whatever their name was. You’ll have a hell of a time while you do.
