Phasmaphobia scares up consoles in spooky style
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
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