Phasmophobia is a decent "sometimes" game. I’ve played a bunch of it with friends and had a good time, but I don’t get much mileage out of what the game offers long term. It has a lot going for it - It does suspense pretty well, opening doors or descending into dark basements with the terrible starter flashlight always made me uneasy. But if you’re playing to win, the game loses a lot of what makes it fun. This game is best played with people who are easily spooked but curious enough to take risks and interact with objects often. Interesting things can happen if you push the ghost’s buttons, but if you play it too safe then the game gets dull quickly. Just about all of what makes this game engaging is riding on how far the players are willing to go even when they don’t necessarily need to. It makes for good entertainment certainly, but as someone who likes ghost stories I find Phasmo’s theming to be seriously lacking. Ghost stories at their heart are about people, often isolated, exploited, and victimized. Even in the campiest of B movies, the idea of the tortured spirit is usually justified to some degree. But Phasmo doesn't care about people, their stories, or even ghosts all that much. Encounters with ghosts are boiled down to their barest bones: what gear to use and where. At the start of each round, we are given the name of the ghost but no information about how they died and why their spirit has stuck around to kill anyone who bothers it. The game's mission is simple: identify the ghost and leave it behind to continue its haunting. I can only presume that better spirit mediums than us and maybe exorcists will be on the way after we're gone. If it wasn't so evident that it was excluded intentionally, I would complain that the most fun part of dealing with a ghost is not a part of Phasmo's gameplay. Instead, my biggest gripe with Phasmo is that it pointedly refuses to acknowledge a story within the rich subject matter it's chosen. Phasmo is not a storytelling game but I would like it better if it was.