There are a number of difficulties when making a detective game, but chief among them is in trying to give enough options to keep things interesting. Give too many options, and the player can feel swamped, or can be left picking through different options one by one waiting for the game to respond with the win condition. Give too few, and the answer becomes predictable. The general aspiration for detective games is to allow for a player to say what they think happened in a particular investigation and have the game parse it, but for various, complex systematic reasons this just isn't possible. Other games, like Return of the Obra Dinn, try to make the possible choices so large as to factor out the possibility of guessing while keeping the amount of variables you have to log small, but as I mentioned in my review for that game, it was still possible to guess a lot of the time. Instead, we have to build little conditions, little measurements or a pool of answers for the player to choose from and interpret. Keeping this interesting for even one go around is challenging, as the systems the game is built on quickly become predictable. You can pretty much forget about any replay value.
Phasmophobia doesn't so much work around these limitations as uses them to provide a different experience. Phasmophobia is a multiplayer ghost hunting game, where a team of up to four players will travel to one of six locations and deduce what sort of ghost is haunting there. You need three pieces of evidence, ranging from video footage of ghost orbs to recording ghost writing in a book and pencil. Three pieces of evidence, and you can deduce what sort of ghost you've got. Some of this evidence can be discovered early on. Freezing temperatures are almost always stumbled upon, as one of the most over powered ways of finding which room a ghost is haunting is looking for the room that is colder than the rest. If that room happens to be the haunted room, you will notice if the temperatures are freezing as soon as you discover it. A primary loop begins to form as you play, where you will start with thermometers, checking rooms until you've found the right one, and then setting a camera down and going back to your ghost hunting truck and watching the feed for ghost orbs. Both of these things can be done pretty well as soon as the haunted room is found, making any ghost with either or both of these criteria the easiest to deal with. After this, trying to talk to the ghost is usually a good bet, as it will generally respond relatively early on in the encounter. The last few clues are far more difficult to acquire. Fingerprints on doors and windows (discovered using a UV light) is strangely rare, and so easy to miss. The EMP reader fluctuates wildly around things and places the ghost is in contact with, but it requires getting a level 5 in order to count it as evidence. Lastly, getting a ghost to write in the ghost book requires agitating the ghost quite a bit, which means risking your life to get the evidence. It doesn't help that the demon ghost, by far the most hostile of the ghosts in the game, requires a ghost book evidence. Mechanically, there is a loop to follow that can often make the smaller levels a bit too easy, but the bigger levels are often front loaded with creepy stalking through hallways and into rooms looking for the temperature to drop. It's simple overall, but rather effective.
The premise is simple for obvious reasons, which is that the game is meant to scare you and your friends and give you something fun to do while it happens. Horror games are rarely multiplayer for a reason. Being with others is simply a lot less scary than being alone. Phasmophobia suffers from a similar problem, where the general eeriness of a given level is significantly shrunken when playing with friends, but there are attempts here and there to try and work around that limitation. For one, the game heavily suggests you play with in game push-to-talk, and I recommend you do so as well. When you talk within the game and not on a third party client like Steam Chat or Dischord, the ghosts can hear you and will become more active the more you agitate them. Likewise, your walkie-talkies can be severed by the ghost, meaning you can only talk to others in your immediate and limited range.
While these little mechanics certainly make the game scarier, the game hardly gets past the "creepy" stage. There are moments of spontaneous jump scares, where you could turn around and see the ghost manifested behind you, or objects moving suddenly and doors shutting in front or behind you, but the moment you die in this game all fear will drain away. It feels very gamey, and there isn't really much of a solution for it. It doesn't come close to ruining the game, but it's a caveat worth mentioning. The larger levels generally give you the most sense of tension, partially as they are creepy locations in and of themselves (an abandoned high school and an abandoned asylum) and mostly because of how deep inside them you have to get to start investigating, furthering you from the safety of outside.
When you are in the building in question, you are at risk. The ghost activity is measured on a 10 scale (cleverly the instrument measuring this is in the truck, meaning someone has to stay behind and relay the information if you want it while inside), with activity 10 meaning the ghost is hunting. The lethality of ghosts depends on the type you are investigating, information you won't know until you are ready to leave the level anyway, making anticipating their hunting stage a little more scary as you don't know what you are dealing with. Some ghosts will give you plenty of chances to get away from a hunting period, while others will be aggressive, choosing one of you and snuffing you out if you don't stop talking on the walkie-talkies and find a room to isolate yourself away from the agitated spirit. Walking out of the building during a hunting is generally not an option, as the ghost usually locks the doors when it is looking for prey.
Phasmophobia isn't a complicated game, but what it is is novel and fun, a game you can play for quite a while before it starts to feel like it has lost its effect, helped along by a somewhat sloppy leveling system that locks you out of the bigger levels early on to give you something to look forward to as you play (annoyingly, same goes with difficulty, a minor criticism). The game is still in early access, and while I don't hold out much hope the game will get better than it is, there is certainly a lot of potential in the little game if they tighten it up a bit and add more locations and ghosts. But even if that doesn't become the case, it is a fun diversion with friends, something not immediately forgettable but not quite lingering either. It will be a "remember when . . ." type of game, and I'm down with that.
7.5
No comments:
Post a Comment