By the time I started playing Phasmophobia, I had already heard a little bit about it. My friend had been talking about how he wanted to play it for a while at that point and it seemed pretty fun to me. Then it kept doing what I expected it to and that’s the biggest problem.

For the first couple of hours this game is amazing. You have no idea what’s going on and all you’re given is some equipment and you’re told to go. The first time I walked into a house the ghost set off a car alarm and I didn’t know how to turn it off so I was on edge the entire time. There’s no easy mode. You’re playing the same game as everyone else. You have no idea what’s going on and that’s the best part. This goes away as you play the game longer. The game tries its best to combat this by giving you larger maps that are a lot scarier than a house on a street, but if you know how a ghost acts in the first house, you know how it’s going to act in a high school.

This is my biggest problem with the game. It is too much of the same. Our natural human instinct is to be scared of what we don’t understand, which is why the first hours of this game are great but as things go on the game doesn’t shake it up to keep you interested. Maybe if they made ghosts that acted more erratically instead of nine ghosts that act identically but give different forms of evidence, then I wouldn’t be complaining about this now. This would also give a sort of mastery to the game where you can tell what kind of ghost it is by the way it acts instead of having to sit in a room for 15 minutes to know for sure what ghost it is.

Since I don’t own a VR headset, I can’t judge the game based on how fun it is in VR, but I imagine that it’s ten times as scary. For the keyboard and mouse version of the game, I’m going to give Phasmophobia a 5/10 rating.