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Phasmophobia is horror ghost hunting game made to play coop or solo. It's simple yet hard to master and provides tons of hours of enjoyment. MY review is from a perspetive of a solo player since I mostly prefer to play alone.
There's no story so lets move on to gameplay.
It seems simple, you go to a location and your goal is to identify the ghost and drive away. For identifying the correct ghost you get money and XP so you could unlock new equipment and buy it.
Each ghost is different and while on easier difficulties they may be much easier to identify, on harder difficulties you have to do that faster and with less evidence which means you have to memorize the unique traits of the ghosts. Like for example some ghosts don't like salt, or never touch the ground, other hunt very early or barely hunt at all, they don't like fire and so on. So you can make thew game as challenging as you want while keep learning on easier difficulty.
When you go in you look for ghost activity. Any clues, EMF, using ultraviolet light for handprints and other equipment. When you find a clue you mark it which rules out some ghosts. You do that until you have the correct ghost. But it's not that easy. The evidence doesn't always show up right away, sometimes you need to wait for a while for that to happen. What's the problem with that you ask? The problem is your sanity level – it's constantly dropping and the lower it is the higher chance for the ghost is to hunt you and kill you. You can take sanity pills but still on harder difficulties they're not gonna save you if you take forever to collect the evidence. So while the game is very repetitive it retains the suspense and surprise due to vast number of different ghosts and challenging gameplay.
It's a horror game and for some people it may be pretty scary. Playing solo obviously is spookier and I love it. You get used to the scares eventually but still even after a while you get scared because it's very well done. Sometimes scares could happen often and sometimes there could be a long time without any scares. This creates the element of surprise which makes the game more enjoyable. Rarely you will get the exact same experience in two matches in a row.
You have plenty of maps to play on. Ranging from small houses to medium open areas or large buildings like prison. Playing solo on large maps isn't a good option so I highly suggest playing in coop. But game is still extremely fun playing solo on small and medium maps.
Now onto some negatives. I can't list many. Maybe there could be more scare types to make it more scary and surprising. Most scares are sound related but I's also love to see some visual related scares, similarly to Mortuary Assistant, like very subtle objects popping in somewhere in the corner, no sound, nothing, that makes you scream.
But the biggest downside is the spirit box change. Now instead of the ghost talking you get random people talking. I understand developers probably wanted to give credit to the streamers who popularized the game but seriously it's immersion breaking and stupid. There are many ways to give credit, like posters on the walls, PC screen, etc. Current spirit box is absurd, neither funny, scary or fun at all. It's just stupid.
Another downside is no achievements. Don't know why. But it would be fun to have them.
Graphically the game looks quite good. It's not a graphical masterpiece but graphics are alright. All the areas and objects look pretty good and immersive. Lighting which is one of the most important parts of the game and creates the whole atmosphere is decent too. It could be better of course, the game could benefit from ray tracing. But hey it's not a AAA game so it's alright. I have no real complaints regarding the graphics.
Sound design is important in this game since you have to listen to various sounds the ghosts make. It also creates that creepy atmosphere and scares. Iin general i'm happy with the sound design although it certainly could be improved by adding more sound effects.
Performance is great as expected since the graphics are not AAA quality. I run the game on max settings at 3440x1440 with a framerate cap of 100fps. Playing on 5800x, rtx4080, 32GB. Performance is great.
In general a very good horror game with repetitive gameplay which doesn't become boring after 10h and that's is an sign of a well designed game. Get it if you love horror games and ghosts.
Pros

Extremely fun
Diverse gameplay
Plenty of difficulty options
Large amount of maps for any player
Scary
Challenging
Looks good
Sounds good

Cons

Spirit box is terrible
Could have more scare types
No achievements


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