Cult co-op horror game Phasmophobia has finally made its way to PS5. This is one of those games we’ve watched from afar, somewhat jealous of all the hilarious clips that have spread since its initial launch on PC back in 2020. Now on PS5, along with PSVR2 support, have the spooks been worth the wait? While Phasmophobia can be technically frustrating, it’s a wonderfully unique co-op experience.
The goal of Phasmophobia is to identify ghosts, but it takes a while to really get onboard with the purpose of this haunting task. If you’re anything like us, you’ll spend your opening hour or so fumbling around haunted houses, swiftly dying at the hands of some vengeful ghost and laughing uncontrollably as your friend’s screams are cut off from comms. This is really the kind of game where you need to pay attention to its tutorial.
That’s because you are ghost hunters, and the way to hunt a ghost is to perform tests. With a starter kit of equipment it’s down to your teams of four to quickly identify the ghosts locations and then use things like thermometers, EMF readers, UV lights, and camcorders to rule out certain kinds of ghosts.
On the surface, it’s a fairly simplistic gameplay loop, and once you’ve figured out what is haunting a location, you all just jump in your van and leave. But when that gameplay loop eventually clicks, it becomes a potent blend of co-op, horror, and investigative gameplay.
Communication with your team is key, using both proximity chat and walkie-talkies. Splitting up and scanning the house for various conditions to lock down the ghost’s location can be quite intense. A five minute window is allowed before the group’s sanity begins to drop, leaving the team even more vulnerable to hostile ghouls. Once the location has been locked down, it’s time to set up shop, placing cameras, notepads, laser pens, and scanning the area with UV lights.
It can feel like a whole operation, especially if you end up being the guy in the van, tracking ghost activity and sanity levels, monitoring the camera feed, and keeping up communications with the team inside the house. The deeper you get into your hunt, the scarier and more entertaining it all becomes.
This is when a level of strategy starts to come on board. Certain ghosts can imitate conditions, or have unlisted effects for the hunters, and it’s then that you need to consider the information you have and move accordingly. Digging into your journal you can read up about every ghost type, of which there are over 20. Quite often during our escapades this would lead to team debriefs, where we would discuss what we had and whether it was enough to make a decision.
Phasmosphobia has a flexibility to it, though. If a ghost is going to result in freezing temperatures, it could do it right away, but it could also take 10 minutes. That means that while the game’s mechanics and conditions definitely get easier to spot the more you play, it’s still not a walk in the park.
And then of course come the scares. Phasmophobia is not a sparkly looking game, but its low-detailed locations do enough with lighting and sound design that they are often genuinely creepy. The ghost effects in particular can be really unnerving, with flickering lights, briefly visible visages, and heart-thumping sound effects. The ghost tossing items, flicking light switches, or turning on radios and televisions is always spine-tingling, as you’re torn between running for the hills or using your tools to gather some data.
If you are unlucky enough to fall victim to a ghost, there is this horrifying animation where the ghost’s hands will reach around your eyes – something especially effective in PSVR2, but more on that later. Upon death, you become a ghost yourself, and while you can’t verbally communicate with your team, you can pick up items to try and point them in the right direction or form your own kind of communication. It can be hilarious and infuriating as the team either misconstrues or fails to understand what you’re trying to bring across.
As the team dwindles, along with your depleting sanity, Phasmophobia dons a whole other level of horror, with the ghost becoming all the more hostile and the opportunity to identify it becoming worryingly slim. But failure isn’t always the end, as Phasmophobia wants you to replay its increasingly difficult locations with improved tools.
Completing ghost hunts earns you cash, which back in a home base you can use to buy more tools and improved versions of what you already have. Items are locked behind levels, though, and the speed of upgrades is pretty slow. After five hours we had only just unlocked our first set of new equipment, with level requirements going as high as 70+ for top tier stuff.
Certainly this means that there is a fair grind for those that want to get the most out of the game, but we can’t imagine our interest in Phasmophobia lasting the dozens or potentially hundreds of hours required to unlock those final items. It is a nice feeling, though, as your team steadily becomes better equipped to uncover more hostile ghosts.
Of course, all of this is playable in PSVR2, which is how we spent the majority of our time with the game. PSVR2 vastly amps the horror in Phasmophobia. It never gets old actually holding a torch in your hand as you venture through some new haunted house, and the first time a ghost reached over our eyes we genuinely panicked.
Sadly, though, the PSVR2 experience is marred by awkward intractability. Holding a camera and peering through the viewfinder, or communicating from the other side by moving objects around your friends is a much improved experience. However, interactions can be very finicky, especially when it comes to choosing certain items from your belt, or trying to open doors – which are just endlessly awkward. Ultimately we preferred the convenience of controlling the game via flat screen, despite the obvious improvements to immersion and the fear factor.
As a final note, it’s a shame that voice interactions haven’t carried over to the console version of the game. On PC there are a number of commands that you can actually speak aloud to the ghost, egging the spirit on to “show us a sign” as an example. This feature is not currently featured on consoles due to “technical limitations”, with Kinetic Games supposedly working on a patch. However, for now it’s a disappointingly absent feature, that certainly would help amp those levels of immersion.
Conclusion
Phasmophobia is a highly replayable co-op experience that expertly manages to blend friendly fun with deathly scares. There’s a complexity to its ghost hunting as you gather evidence and test your nerves, and it’s made all the better as you bicker, debate, and scream with your friends. A slow levelling system stalls that sense of progression, and finicky controls mean the PSVR2 version of the game is a bit of a letdown. However, if you’re looking for a unique kind of co-op experience for you and your friends, Phasmophobia is one of a kind.