Phasmophobia taught me (and my friends) that I’m a rat-bastard coward who would leave them all to die
Games Features What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Everyone likes to imagine, given the circumstances, that heroism is somehow within their grasp. We all like to think that, when push comes to shove, we’d put it all on the line for a friend, stand in solidarity with our allies, and resolutely and majestically Get The Job Done. Certainly, I used to enjoy imagining that. Then I played Phasmophobia, the new co-operative ghost-hunting game that’s burning up the Steam Early Access charts, and now I know that I’m actually the rat bastard in the horror movie who slams the door in the face of his fleeing buddies, because that’s one more piece of bait to draw the monster away from him.
Here are some of the lies I’ve told my friends in the middle of one of Phasmophobia’s ghost hunts, in order to justify retreating from the haunted house we’re supposed to be investigating in favor of the bright, well-lit safety of our cool, non-haunted ghost-hunting truck:
- “Someone’s got to check the cameras for ghost orbs!” (There are no ghost orbs.)
- “Whoops, left my flashlight back there!” (I’m already carrying two.)
- “Maybe we need a second EMF reader in order to get extra-good readings from it. (This is not how ghost detection works.)
But sometimes, I don’t even bother to lie; sometimes I just hold down the walkie-talkie button, inform my pals with a succinct and scientific “Okay, fuck this,” and bail for safety. Here’s a crazy thing about this co-op ghost-hunting game that I’m extremely scared to play but keep playing because I’m an idiot: I’ve never even seen a fucking ghost. I’m gone too soon, bailing on the haunted farmhouse or school or whatever, running immediately for my hiding spaces and waiting for one of my friends to make themselves a better target for a lethal haunting. If Phasmophobia hopes to replicate the vibe of a horror movie, then I’m in an altogether classier one than the one my friends are trapped in; they’re staring down bloody corpses and getting gruesomely murdered all day, while I’m watching from around the corner, hearing their voices go dead on the radio, and never quite managing to get there in time to snap a picture of a spook. I literally don’t know what dying in this game even looks like, because you know who never gets his neck snapped by a ghost? Shaggy from Scooby-Doo! Shaggy’s out the second things start to go pear-shaped, and his example is the one I cling to. (Although I will come back in to snap a picture of a friend’s dead body; that’s evidence, and evidence pays the bills.)
Luckily, Phasmophobia’s co-op nature means that my rat-bastard-American DNA can still be of some use to the team. There really is value in watching the cameras sometimes, and my need to get the fuck out before the ghost gets aggressive makes me a real go-getter when it comes to the initial minutes of the hunt. Still, it didn’t take long for a dynamic to emerge within my play group that I can’t help but describe as “cyber-bullying,” as my friends rapidly (and accurately) assessed that I was about as reliable in a pinch as a plastic crucifix. By the time my buddies were trying to lure me back into a darkened house occupied by what they kept describing as “a dead old lady with a scythe”—ostensibly so that I could take a picture of dirty water in a sink, one of our optional objectives—I knew they were explicitly lying to try to get me to stick my neck out even a little more than the single iota I was willing to offer. I take that as a sign that the game has brought out some true, honest cowardice in me, enough to lend some genuine contempt to my pals’ efforts to lead me to my death. From the moment I heard it, I could smell a rat; it takes one to know one, after all.
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I feel your pain.As a much younger Lurch, I used to play Call of Cthulhu.Guess who bolted for the door and ran at top speed to the nearest not-Innsmouth etc. the moment some weird local started whispering in a daemonic tongue?Guess who finished every session with full sanity intact?For some reason, the rest of my party didn’t share my joy.
You proved yourself a cowardwho would desert a dying man
You and I have similar taste in comics, friend
Achewood doesn’t get nearly enough love or recognition.
Says the guy who defends TERFS and is awfully enthusiastic for bigot ACB being appointed a supreme court justice.
I belie3ve you mean “sitting Justice ACB.”
So I was looking at itunes last night, looking at Don Delillo’s new book The Silence trying to figure out if I want to buy it, when I see this:My first thought was “god damn, a $45 audiobook!” But thinking about it after a second, I realized dude spent over 31 hours reading it aloud. And for those of you not in the know, Richard Poe, the narrator, is a titan of audiobook readings. Dude is a beast. So ya know what, I splurged and I got it. The book itself is great, I read it years ago, and I just had to have this version with Richard Poe reading it. Totally worth it.As for playing, I’m still on my Marvel’s Avengers kick. People dog the game, say it’s buggy and that they’ll wait till it’s $15 to try it, but the game is really fun. I know it’s subjective and what not, but I just really like the gameplay. That said, if anyone has this game on ps4 and has the “inhuman sanctuary” quest unlocked, can you invite me to participate in it so I can get it done? My game is bugged out and I can’t start it cause the quest isn’t on my map. I heard that playing it with someone will kick it off and allow the quest to progress. I’d offer whomever credits or what not, but don’t think I can do that, so I promise that you ain’t gotta talk to me instead.
This weekend is for finally sinking my teeth into Crash Bandicoot 4, after migraines robbed me of the last coupla weekends. I’m a few levels in so far, and it’s fantastic. The game-feel’s perfect, the levels are gorgeous and the voice acting’s charming and funny. It even leans into the series’ tradition of cartoon violence, with some shockingly dark death animations, lending a delicious sense of menace to the villains and death-traps. I’m really enjoying small touches like the test chamber flashbacks and the CTR references (with several levels seemingly spun out of CTR’s apocalypse event, complete with enemies modelled on Mad Max’s War-Boys). Hades is still my game of the year, but Crash 4 is shaping up to be the best platformer I’ve played in a long time.
Oh boy, I want to play Crash 4 so bad. I feel like I should probably finish Crash 3 first though. That 60fps Crash is calling my name though! Looks like they nailed it.
So far I’m thinking they nailed it.It follows pretty directly from Crash 3 though, so it’s worth finishing that one first.
I’m on the last world of Crash 4, and man… towards the end the difficulty spikes to straight up maso-core levels and it kinda sucks. It’s a bummer, to me, that because Vicarious Visions fucked up one hitbox in the N. Sane Trilogy now Crash Bandicoot has been permanently transformed into a franchise of brutally difficult games.
Are we talking Stormy Ascent level here, or harder still?
The final dimension is 3 levels. The first two are about on the level of Slippery Climb/The Lab/those other “hard” Crash 1 levels, and then the final level before the boss goes full fucking Super Meat Boy and makes Stormy Ascent feel like a joke.
tch, guess I’ll end up turning off lives then.
First up, I’m still playing through Inkle’s Arthurian
“narrative rogue-like” Pendragon. I went through a run at
“melodramatic” difficulty (which I think is the 4th easiest, it’s
the highest I’ve unlocked), with Sir Kay as my main character this time:The route to Camlann did take longer, and I didn’t get to
unlock any new characters. And for what seems like the fifth or sixth time in a
row, I was able to defeat Mordred, this time as the still-living Arthur.
Looking at the Steam achievements, Mordred has yet to be victorious. After that, I left the battlefields of 5th Century Britain
for A Galaxy Far, Far Away in The Sims 4,
complete with the Star Wars: Journey to Batuu
game pack:How
did it go? Well, I’ll let this tweet sum it up:
So,
rather than dealing with Star Wars, I was dealing with an absolute lake of
piss. Since I still had a Star Wars jones, I went to old reliable Star
Wars: The Old Republic. Apparently, as a cross-promotion with the
newish Squadrons game, you got a free
in-game pet in the form of a as you might be able to see in the screenshot
below:My
Jedi Knight is currently investigating starship wrecks on Hoth. After disabling
weapons and reactors on a crashed Imperial ship, I’m now interfering with a
battle between White Maw pirates and an elite Imperial force in trying to
retrieve a map of the Sith Emperor’s hidden fortress from the ship’s repair
databanks…Aside
from that I’ve been watching the UpUpDownDown guys streaming Among
Us, and Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit.It’s made me really, really want the latter despite
the cost, limited replay value and the fact that I’m the last person in the USA
who doesn’t already own a Nintendo Switch.
Over on the tabletop, I switched the
icy, cold world of Hoth for some Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden in Dungeons & Dragons 5th
Edition. From what I understand this session (our 4th) of the
campaign was more or less entirely invented from whole cloth by our DM. This
session gave my Barbarian with wolf-related PTSD the major focus this time,
with a combat encounter with wolves prompting his first rage of the campaign.
Since I’m playing rage as effectively blacking out and surrendering to
violence, which is something my character actively doesn’t want to do,
this was interesting.
My character is also hallucinating(?) some kind
of spirit guide who helped him discover religion while being a hermit. The
spirit guide insists that he should give into his rage at every opportunity, so
I’m frequently arguing aloud in front of the other party members with this guy:Who
no one else can see. We’re
currently returning to the site of my hermitage with Kevin’s’ Cairn, wherein
some Tiger tribe followers of the goddess Auril (the titular Frostmaiden) may
be desecrating a hero’s grave. The session ended with our ranger putting arrows
through the necks of the lookouts and us preparing for a new combat… I’m
following an apparition who looks like this as my guide, but I don’t know if
she’s a hallucination or not.I think she’s possibly harboring a serial killer but the party/my
barbarian would have no way of knowing that yet.
That Arthur game looks pretty great. Not a setting I tend to enjoy, but the art style is A+.
This sounds almost good enough to get me over my dislike of co-op. I’m working my way through Amnesia: Rebirth. It’s interesting; a slower burn than Amnesia: the Dark Descent and as story-focused as Soma, if not more so. I was mildly disappointed at how “safe” it felt in the first hour or two, but it picks up steam as it goes, and there are some hall-of-fame scare stuff going on in the back half. Not sure how I feel about the story yet—it’s not as existential as Soma by design, and a lot of its effectiveness is going to depend for me on how it ends. But it’s a good game so far (I think I’ve got an hour or two left?). Not as huge a deal as the first one, but I didn’t really think it would be. (I think Rebirth is actually a bit easier to get into—I started a replay of Dark Descent as well, and even though the game technically eases you in at the start, it still feels absolutely terrifying almost immediately.
“Dislike of co-op.”I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone that purported to dislike cooperative gaming; I’ve seen plenty of people say they favor single-player, of course, but you get to be my first example of actual dislike. I’m wired the entire opposite direction with my fondest gaming memories coming from co-op. This game seems pretty interesting.
Yeah, its the eternal TTRPG “looking for group” problem magnified to video games, so I kind of get that.
I understand that hurdle, certainly, and totally agree that a good gaming partner is difficult and pretty much essential to enjoying co-op gaming. My wife is also a gamer so that covers anything with two players but we constantly have to write off the larger team-based games (even things like Deep Rock Galactic) since we refuse to game with randoms, bigots, or teenagers.
I like couch coop but generally have a large dislike of online coop, personally. I don’t want a team relying on me for stuff, especially like memorized dungeon running stuff.I also want to be able to pause whenever I feel like it to take a swig of beer/light a smoke/take a leak.
I’m confused by the Amnesia games. Partly because I’m not a horror guy, but partially because I keep seeing Rebirth described as the second Amnesia game. Where does A Machine for Pigs fit in?
A Machine For Pigs was developed by a different studio than the entries on either side of it – The Chinese Room, which made Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture – and is mechanically distinct. It’s more of a scary ‘walking sim’ rather than a survival horror oriented around puzzles, for better or worse.
Machine for Pigs wasn’t made by Frictional Games, so I think people are mostly just using shorthand–MfP isn’t well-regarded either, which makes it easier to dismiss.
I’m very intrigued by what I’ve heard of Amnesia: Rebirth – not least because the studio is so good – but light management in Dark Descent really grated on me and led me to quit relatively early. Are you finding that onerous or a compelling wrinkle in their new game?
Well, I liked it in Dark Descent, so I’m liking it here too—it might annoy you even more, though, given how much the early game relies on matches (they burn out pretty fast).
Great writeup – I’ve only distantly heard about this game but it reminds me vaguely of the team dynamics in Dead by Daylight? Not sure if the two are otherwise that similar, but DbD did let you suss out which of your buddies was primarily in it for themselves and who was a team player, haha.As for me, I’m playing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword this weekend for a podcast. I’m dowsing in Lanayru Desert, which is as cool as I remembered. Localized time travel will never be anything less than amazing and I’m eager to get to the Sand Sea portion of the game, though I’ll concede that these little robots suck. Also rolling bombs is the best.
I’m simultaneously playing Crown Trick, a lushly animated but mechanically-traditional roguelite that just came to Switch. It’s a nice, slow-paced game to play before bed for sure. I’d like to see more of this on the platform (like Chocobo Dungeon or Quest of Dungeon).
I’ve watched a little bit of Phasmophobia, and from what I gather, I keep missing the most important part, where they actually get the ghost to materialize and positively identify it. So I’ve largely just seen an increasingly agitated ne-ghost-iator start off by saying the ghost’s name and asking, “Are you here?” and then “Is this bothering you?” and then eventually, 15 minutes later, “Come on, you fucking asshole, show your face, you coward!” Twenty minutes in, I go to pour myself a coffee, and when I step back to my computer, two people are dead and the others are sprinting for the van. I have not seen a ghost, even with two Twitch streams up from the same haunt.It still looks fun. The idea of just bouncing around a dark house, having supernatural forces cut the lights, using weird gadgets and cannisters of salt to try to get a ghost to show itself, having two people die so their teammates can earn $12 to put toward a crucifix or upgraded salt… it sounds utterly stupid, but the kind of utterly stupid that would be amazing as a team experience.But my Internet always gets spotty when people are relying on me in online games.Probably the work of a shade.I played through all of 13th Doll last weekend. Honestly, if they spent less time on it, it would’ve probably been a more enjoyable experience. If they’d written less back story, recorded fewer line readings, produced fewer unskippable cut scenes, and just let the house be a vehicle for a couple dozen puzzles of varying complexity, it would’ve been a better game. With the number of collectibles there were to find, and with the way I can never say no to an achievement I feel like I’m this close to, and with the way there are multiple points in the game where you lose the ability to go back to anything you’ve seen before, I had to play through each campaign of the game twice.As a one-off experience, it was pretty fun. As a concept, playing as two protagonists, seeing two poorly-acted perspectives on a night in a haunted house full of obtuse puzzles… I mean, it worked in Resident Evil. As a game, I didn’t even feel like it needed more puzzles; it just needed less of everything else.The puzzles themselves relied a little too heavily on copying concepts from the original games. There were some great original ideas, but there were also puzzles that were not meaningfully different from the ones they were copying, at all. The originals were worth my time and money, but I’m not sure why I had to do another basement labyrinth if the trick was just going to be, “The map is that one thing you saw earlier that looked like a maze!” again.A lot of hard work and love went into the game, clearly made by fans of the originals, but I wish someone had reviewed their work halfway through the project and given them an honest, “Yo, this part’s dumb. Scrap it. Keep the rest, but scrap this.” As it is, the game’s fun, but… I mean… it takes forever to get through the intro and feel like you’re playing a 7th Guest sequel.I’ll probably replay it in 5 years, and I’ll probably regret it.It’s tabletop gaming week on Steam! I picked up One Deck Dungeon and Sentinels of the Multiverse for $0.99 apiece, looked at some of the other sales, and said, “Nah, got enough games.” I bought a physical copy of One Deck Dungeon like 6 months ago and never won a single game of it, thought having a digital version would make it easier to plug through without worrying about setup/shuffling so I could work out a strategy and figure out why I never came close to winning with my physical deck.Turns out… I was playing it 100% correctly. BUT. I missed that there’s a campaign mode where you can customize the game’s difficulty, earn XP even from your losses, and unlock skills that make challenging the harder dungeons more viable. There’s a pad of campaign mode character sheets in the box, but I figured if I couldn’t even beat the easiest boss in a base game, how I was supposed to take on a whole-ass campaign? Well… if a one-off game is an RPG dungeon, the campaign is like the whole RPG, so you can choose which areas you want to level up in according to how strong your character is and how familiar with the mechanics you are.Suddenly, this game is the game I actually thought I was picking up when I bought it 6 months ago. And as a single-player experience, as much as I love rolling dice and shuffling cards in most games, I think I just prefer the simplicity of the digital version. It’s easier to track which skills you’ve used, it allows you to undo actions until after your last dice roll so you can experiment with different strategies for manipulating your dice… I mean, I love having a game with 30 physical dice, but the digital version’s just so convenient. Well worth the $0.99
Backlogged: No Time for You Old Man-annan Edition!
Just a short one this week. After finishing Shining in the Darkness about a week ago (the final boss battle came down to the wire, a thrilling finish to one of my favourite retro experiences so far), I skipped back to the ‘80s for King’s Quests II & III.I’ll be blunt; II was a slog from beginning to end, and I bailed on III after about 45 minutes. The achingly slow movement of the protagonists, the clunky navigation (if the most dangerous obstacle in your game is a spiral staircase, something has gone wrong), the specificity required of your inputs in the face of graphics that lack definition or detail… the list of sins quickly piled up. I get that this was 1985-6 I’m talking about, but still. The final straw was III’s undisclosed time limits; discovering that the villain could warp to my location and insta-kill me after an arbitrary period of time was too much, and I quickly called it quits.After beating the first King’s Quest game a while back, I remember thinking that it was the obvious evolutionary stepping stone between Infocom’s early-to-mid ‘80s text adventures and Sierra/Lucasfilm’s early ‘90s point-and-click adventures. As necessary a step as it may have been on that path, however, it’s kind of fascinating to see how poorly the text-based graphic adventure has aged compared not just to its descendants, but to its ancestors as well; a worst-of-both-worlds, evolutionary dead-end.Still, this particular misadventure was a good reminder that my retro gaming mission is a hobby, not a punishment, leading to the culling of a handful of lesser franchises from the early years of my list; a minor win against my completionist tendencies, but I’ll take it. As for King’s Quest itself, I’ve decided to jump ahead to VI and then bow out while I’m on top… but that’ll have to wait until I reach 1992. For now, it’s on to my final batch of 1991 games, starting with The Legend of the Mystical Ninja. See you folks next time!
Don’t beat yourself up. Knowing that you don’t have to be the fastest runner, just a bit faster than the slowest, is comforting wisdom.
So is the game like sitting around in the dark all night and then trying to find the pareidolia in the recording you left running the whole time?
Coward or just ruiner of cooperative video game fun?
I’ve played over 100 hours of Phasmophobia, and am nearly level 200. My number of hoops rests at 666. I bought VR almost expressly to make it scary for me again. In my view, it’s one of the greatest co-op experiences ever made. Unfailingly varied and terrifying stuff that actually feels like you’re being haunted. If you’re a jaded horror movie junkie like me, this game will make you feel alive again.
Played some FortniteMares today in between loads of laundry and I really enjoy coming back as a ghost and trying to murder whoever got meAlso, getting VERY into Luigi’s Mansion 3 which is the perfect game for the seasonFinally, picked up Day’s Gone on the PSN Halloween Sale and it’s a fun time waster, haven’t put THAT much time into it, but enjoyed it more than Vampyr….turns out I like my RPG elements “light and breezy” not “go talk to every character and pay attention or you wont get anything out of this game”
I’m really interested in playing this game, but I’m the only one of my friends who enjoys horror games. And by “enjoys” I mean, “buys them all and plays most of them for 5 or 10 minutes before turning it off in fright, then trying again before doing the same thing.” To be fair, I have finished some of them: PT, Resident Evil 7, Soma, Silent Hill 1 and 2. And I only stopped playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent because I got to a point where I died 2 or 3 times to the same monster, and the game just stopped being scary to me. So since the tension was gone, I lost interest. Same goes for the first Outlast game. Both were incredibly tense to start, but couldn’t hold that feeling.I’m hoping the same things don’t happen with Amnesia: Rebirth. I’m liking it so far. It’s not so scary (yet), but there’s been moments where it’s unsettling. Not sure when, or even if, that will change, but I can appreciate how it’s eased me into its scares so far. By the time it amped up the tension, I was already invested in Tasi and the crew of her expedition. Also, as far as horror goes, the setting is pretty novel, and I can’t wait delve into its secrets.Contrast that with Anatomy, which I still can’t play for more than a few minutes. Nothing scary has happened yet, but the anticipation is just too much for me.Also, I’ll be continuing my trek in Final Fantasy XIV to get my Amaro mount, which means leveling every combat class (except Blue Mage) to 80. I still need to raise my last 7 jobs from 77 to 80. Getting there!