I absolutely love this game, but if you know how it works, you probably shouldn’t buy it.
That may sound odd, especially when it’s a social co-op game that was popularized by Twitch streams, but playing with that context may actually hurt your experience. Personally, all I knew about Phasmophobia going in was that it was about ghost hunting, it had online co-op, and it had a well-received VR mode. Luckily I had buds who were willing to buy the game even when they knew as little as I did, along with a VR headset, which makes anything scary about ten times scarier. We all agreed not to look up anything about the game, nothing about how any of the items work, nothing about the behavior of the ghosts, everything we learned would be through experimentation. The twenty hours it took for us to learn these lessons and go from “the idiots in the abandoned house” to “The Bustin’ Crew” were fantastic, since the gameplay itself is so unique, along with its satisfying learning process, and the added hilarity of learning how your friends would act in a scary situation. However, as soon as we knew how things worked, all that was left was going through the motions, doing the same things on the same maps over and over again. Repetitiveness is the most common critique to see in reviews, but I believe this issue has been aggravated due the aforementioned viral nature of the game’s popularity. If you watch a few streams of it, you’ll know the maps and how to play effectively, and will only get a few hours of interest from it before it feels tedious. If you play with friends or randoms who already know the maps, you will follow them or just be told how everything works, and the appeal will dry up quickly. It’s also natural for any game that generates its content randomly and doesn’t have a set progression path to be considered repetitive to some degree, as the only definitive endpoint is getting bored and deciding to move onto something else.
I do realize that’s a pretty bad sell for a game I want people to play, though. “Check out this game, except don’t research it, just take my word for it, and also convince three of your friends to do the same thing, and it’ll get repetitive eventually” is hardly the best way to get people to shell out cash. However, the humor, the terror, the mystery, and the uniqueness of learning how to hunt ghosts is so compelling to me that I really want people to see it for themselves. Sometimes the best experiences are the ones that take you by surprise.
That may sound odd, especially when it’s a social co-op game that was popularized by Twitch streams, but playing with that context may actually hurt your experience. Personally, all I knew about Phasmophobia going in was that it was about ghost hunting, it had online co-op, and it had a well-received VR mode. Luckily I had buds who were willing to buy the game even when they knew as little as I did, along with a VR headset, which makes anything scary about ten times scarier. We all agreed not to look up anything about the game, nothing about how any of the items work, nothing about the behavior of the ghosts, everything we learned would be through experimentation. The twenty hours it took for us to learn these lessons and go from “the idiots in the abandoned house” to “The Bustin’ Crew” were fantastic, since the gameplay itself is so unique, along with its satisfying learning process, and the added hilarity of learning how your friends would act in a scary situation. However, as soon as we knew how things worked, all that was left was going through the motions, doing the same things on the same maps over and over again. Repetitiveness is the most common critique to see in reviews, but I believe this issue has been aggravated due the aforementioned viral nature of the game’s popularity. If you watch a few streams of it, you’ll know the maps and how to play effectively, and will only get a few hours of interest from it before it feels tedious. If you play with friends or randoms who already know the maps, you will follow them or just be told how everything works, and the appeal will dry up quickly. It’s also natural for any game that generates its content randomly and doesn’t have a set progression path to be considered repetitive to some degree, as the only definitive endpoint is getting bored and deciding to move onto something else.
I do realize that’s a pretty bad sell for a game I want people to play, though. “Check out this game, except don’t research it, just take my word for it, and also convince three of your friends to do the same thing, and it’ll get repetitive eventually” is hardly the best way to get people to shell out cash. However, the humor, the terror, the mystery, and the uniqueness of learning how to hunt ghosts is so compelling to me that I really want people to see it for themselves. Sometimes the best experiences are the ones that take you by surprise.