Phasmophobia is ace and I'm going to talk about it because I'm kind of obsessed.

First and foremost it's a first person PC game on Steam, costs like £11/$15, and is a low budget, one-man operation still in early release. It's been out since late September, like version 0.17 or something. Set expectations for polish and production levels accordingly.

So if you haven't heard of it, it's a ghost hunting game. You know, like Ghost Adventures, Most Haunted, Buzzfeed Unsolved, those kind of shows. 1 to 4 players going into a haunted location with EMF meters, night vision cameras and thermometers.

Your main goal is to find out what kind of ghost it is. They're categorised, ie "phantom, wraith, poltergeist" etc. Each type has not only its own behavioural patterns, such as some being stronger in the dark, but also have specific clues you can detect with your equipment.

One type of ghost may have the traits of causing freezing temperatures, showing spirit orbs on camera, and leaving fingerprints detectable with a UV light when it manipulates objects. You need to investigate and narrow it down.

There's other objectives too from a random list, which get you more money and XP, things like taking a photo of specific phenomena, or lighting a smudge stick in the room the ghost is haunting, that give you extra reasons to stick around and try to provoke the ghost.

And there's where the magic happens.

The ghost AI is very fuzzy (maybe even glitchy, which helps). You may be *sure* it's one type of ghost, but it won't leave fingerprints no matter what you do. Mares love the darkness, but might turn light switches on. There's little certainty

Then there's the voice recognition. The built in Microsoft one that comes with Windows is used as the base, so the ghost can recognise you speaking. If you walk around the house saying its name, it gets pissed quicker. You may provoke a reaction. Or you may provoke an attack.

The ghost can kill, when it starts a Hunt, you need to go run and hide and be *silent* because the voice recognition means it'll hear you make any noise IRL. Sit tensely in a closet as you hear heavy footsteps pass by in the hallway outside.

You also lose the ingame radio voice comms that let you communicate across maps so you can't even tell if someone's being attacked. Everyone goes silent, a minute later only 3 of you come back onto comms. Oh dear.

Yelling "SHOW YOURSELF" often has good results if you need a photo of the ghost.

The spirit box is another tool for finding the ghost and it responds to questions there too.

"Where are you?"

"BEHIND."

"What do you want?"

"KILL."

The level of uncertainty about the ghost's behaviour means this game remains consistently tense as hell, you can never be fully relaxed that it won't attack and kill, and you can stand to lose a *lot* of expensive gear if you die.

On Sunday morning my time, the game was the most watched game on Twitch behind only the Just Chatting category. Ahead of Fortnite, Among Us, Call of Duty etc. Hell of an accomplishment for one dude.

And it's still in just the earliest, earliest release. So much potential.

Did I mention it can also be played in VR? In full cross compatibility with non VR players together? Cause that too.