For Phasmophobia To Be So Terrifying, The Devil Is In The Details

There’s an almost imperceptible sound you hear when you cross the threshold of a haunted house in Phasmophobia, the co-op ghost-hunting game from Kinetic Games that took Steam and Twitch by storm in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. As you exit your equipment truck and approach the front door, leaving the outdoor air and rain behind you, you enter a claustrophobic, dark space where a low, airy hum pervades all rooms and floors. This sound, which senior developer Ben Lavender calls “basically […] nothing,” has an outsized, unnerving effect, though when you first hear it, it’s difficult to explain why. It was one of the first details I noticed about the game, and it’s one of several finely tuned tricks Phasmophobia employs to be one of the best horror games in any era.

“Room tone,” Lavender told me, is a practice used in movies where you record how a room sounds when it’s quiet. Using it in Phasmophobia gives each map a “subtle uneasiness,” he added, to the extent that making it out the front door isn’t just a way to escape an in-game death or swap supplies; it’s like a weight has been lifted off your shoulders. Naturally, that also trains your mind to fear the inverse. When the hum is present, you know you’re within danger’s reach. Room tone is the primer you apply so that the colors you paint with afterward come through vibrantly.

“I actually intentionally left [the hum] out of the asylum,” art director Corey Dixon told me, “which is one of the maps that you unlock later. It’s this huge map, so when you step in, and you’re expecting that sound as almost like a comfort, and you don’t get it, it feels so much bigger and so much emptier than it actually is.” Though both Lavender and Dixon said they don’t personally believe in ghosts, their game and its attention to detail has a way of making you a believer.

Phasmophobia began as a solo project for Dan Knight, a programmer and today the studio’s CEO, when he went looking for a ghost-hunting game that didn’t seem to exist yet. With no avenue to have the experience he’d imagined–one inspired by the Amnesia series and ghost-hunting TV shows–he made it himself. Those humble, DIY beginnings can still be seen in the game in some ways. The animations are humorously janky, textures could use a detail pass, and the default control scheme feels a bit strange–though in that case, you can fully remap inputs anyway.

But these deficiencies quickly melt into the background thanks to an infinitely replayable gameplay loop, and the nuanced gameplay mechanics make it obvious this ghost-hunting game is as much about the terrifying ghosts as it is about the skillful hunting, challenging you to use your head and rewarding you handsomely when you do.

Phasmophobia’s long list of tools that you and up to three others can bring into a round includes real-life ghost-hunting equipment such as an electromagnetism reader, a parabolic microphone, a crucifix for warding off attacks, a video camera–complete with night vision, of course–and a Spirit Box, which is used like a walkie-talkie between you and the dead. To correctly identify a ghost, you’ll need a few pieces of evidence that these tools and others can pick up on, but the game is happy to let you make wrong deductions in the gray areas between assumption and certainty.

“We’ve changed our mechanics quite a lot [over the years],” Lavender told me. “For example, if you saw cold breath, that used to mean it was freezing in a room,” he said, referring to a piece of evidence tied to recording a temperature below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, “and now that just means it’s cold, and you use the equipment [to know for sure].”

Players have to learn for themselves that things like motion sensors and parabolic microphones can be set off by their allies, not just the ghost dwelling in the work site. They have to know to turn off the lights to use the Spirit Box, or else the ghost is liable to ignore them. Most hauntingly, if the ghost they’re searching for responds only to people who are alone, they have to be comfortable splitting up if they intend to record much of anything at all.

Even when you think you’ve identified the ghost correctly, how you conclude that is by simply circling its type in your journal. When you get back to your headquarters with your group, you’ll be paid for correct answers… or left wondering where you went wrong. If you march on with bad assumptions, the game doesn’t bail you out. You can press on to stack more evidence or leave and see if you’ve found the right answer. I’ve seen many rounds where my group and I were pretty sure we had the correct answer, but we weren’t always willing to risk heading back in for one piece of evidence because, after a short grace period early in a match, the ghost can hunt and kill you.

There’s an element of visual comedy where a crew of “expert” ghost hunters can be seen standing in the frame of the front door, pointing various buzzing and glowing objects into the darkness of the entryway, hoping some bit of evidence can be picked up from that safe distance. With right answers hard to come by, it can feel daunting to risk heading back into a haunted house anytime you’ve stepped out of it to swap tools or catch your breath.

“We want everyone to know the game and understand the game and get it right,” Lavender said. “But, yeah, I think it just encourages people to learn, because there are definitely multiple layers.” Those layers are most apparent in the ghosts themselves. Each of the 24 ghosts currently in the game, Dixon said, have “unique personalities,” which expert players know all too well.

“Once you’ve got enough [gameplay] hours in, you start learning the behavior of the ghost, Dixon continued. “You don’t even need to [bring equipment] in. You might know from research and from experience that, ‘Oh, X ghost doesn’t do that event. So I can cross that off.’ And then there might be a process like that for all 24 ghosts. So people will go in, they’ll trigger a hunt, and be like, ‘Oh, it’s too fast for this one. It’s too slow for this one.’ And then within like, 30 seconds, they’ve marked off like, half the journal.”

Those players have done something I actually hope to never do: demystify the game to such an extent that it loses its edge. I first played Phasmophobia on PC in 2020, and I could tell there was something special to it. Still, I’d spent the next four years waiting for a console port, at first because I didn’t want to play it without a controller, then later because I awaited the announced port on my preferred platform. Now that it’s arrived, I sank eight hours into it over this past weekend, ahead of the game’s official launch today. It’s been terrifying and, at times, even hilarious, but I purposely didn’t ask the developers to deconstruct the game’s magic behind the ghosts.

We spoke of the real-life international folklore that inspires most of the ghosts brought into the game, as well as the two the team invented–the mimic and the twins. We talked about the inspiration for Point Hope, a new lighthouse map based on a haunted locale in Massachusetts. Of course, we discussed how the game uses voice recognition so its ghosts can talk back to you… or track you to your hiding place if you make noise during a hunt. But one thing I wasn’t going to ask was for them to unravel the code that makes up the ghosts and their various, unique behaviors. It would feel like asking a magician to reveal how they perform an illusion. Because of its unpredictability and deep investigative elements that demand you walk toward the danger to record it as evidence, Phasmophobia is haunting, and I hope it stays that way forever.

Being a sensation like Phasmophobia often comes with a particular kind of baggage: copycats. When Knight made the game, it was because no such game existed yet. Today, you can browse the horror genre on Steam and find dozens of ghost-hunting games, each inspired by Phasmophobia or one of its earlier copycats. I asked the developers how they view that problem.

“It’s a bit frustrating when you see the ones that are, like, carbon copies,” Dixon said, “and they even copy things [like our] specific sprint system, which is very out of the ordinary. You know, your guy runs out of breath in, like, three seconds. And some of the equipment that we’ve made up, people have copied one for one, which is frustrating.

“But then on the other side, there’s some awesome variants of our formula that people have made, like Forewarned, that Egypt treasure-diving game. The core functionality of that game is very similar; you know, you go in, and you get evidence […], but they’ve themed it differently. It’s about Egypt and mummies, there’s treasure-hunting. And I’m like, ‘That’s so cool that Phasmophobia has inspired this new age of a game genre.’ But yeah, I definitely find it frustrating when people are like, ‘Oh, Phasmophobia is doing well. I’ll copy that,’ and they don’t add anything.”

“Even internally we’ve had loads of conversations,” Lavender added. “Like, there are so many ways you can apply what makes Phasmophobia good to other things. And people seem to go down the same route of ghost-hunting.”

Fending off clones is a burden of success in modern video game development, but it’s maybe a better problem to have than some others, like launching during a pandemic of unprecedented proportions or suffering a studio fire that upsets development timelines, both of which Kinetic Games also experienced. But the team presses on with a game many have called one of the scariest ever made. I asked the pair what they thought of that distinction.

“We’ve got a Horror 2.0 update planned,” Lavender added, referring to the team’s roadmap for the game that promises a major overhaul to its ghosts and how they can interact with players. “I’m glad you find it scary now. Wait until 2.0 and see what we’ve got planned.”

Added Dixon confidently, “They haven’t seen anything yet.”

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Phasmophobia is out today with cross-play on Xbox Series X|S and PS5, joining Steam as its available platforms. For now, it remains in early access.