Phasmophobia - The Beginning of my Journey
“Welcome back…we’ve got some jobs ready for you…”
Today I want to talk about a game that’s very near and dear to my heart personally but it’s also one of the driving factors of why I set out to create the Boo Bros with my group of friends to begin with.
The Game:
Phasmophobia is a four player ghost/paranormal investigation simulator game created by an indie dev, one guy I believe at the time it was released. He set out to create a ghost hunting simulation game focused on interactions, gear and using tech to try and actually simulate a real ghost investigation without having over the top action or jump scares like a lot of horror games do. It includes different sites that you can travel to, and a slew of tools that you can use when you get there. All of this with a more and more deep progression system throughout the development of the game, leveling up your character but also your gear by earning money / xp for successful runs, capturing photos and doing challenges. Using said currency you can upgrade your items to make ghost hunting easier so that you could crank the difficulty up to harder and harder haunts.
I’ve always been a horror fan. I’ve always been a fan of all things scary including video games but a ghost hunting simulation game was new for me. I remember when this game came out. It seemed like it took YouTube and Twitch over by storm with just how silly and how scary it could be if you’re playing alone. Pretty early on people found out the different exploits and ways to tell what a ghost was without doing a lot of work and formed all kinds of money. My friends and I never really did this and always took pride in playing legit and also silencing our Discord so that we had to use the proximity chat and the walkie-talkie chat which added an extra layer of fear to the game, especially when we weren’t really sure how to play and what to do!
I have played hundreds of hunts we know most ghost by one or two clues in and even though we don’t play constantly anymore, we still always revisit the game around Halloween and around Christmas for the event badges / player cards. I remember falling in love with the progression of the gear and wanting to get the next level up of whatever device we used a lot and all of us fell into our niche of what equipment we were taking in on the first entry to every house. It became like clockwork, and it made me so interested about all the gear and all the things that went into it. Halloween a few years ago one of my favorite streamers, Mr. Sark streamed him and his friends renting a van outfitted like the Phasmo van is with a bunch of ghost hunting equipment and they went to an extremely haunted hotel or something in San Francisco I believe.
For some reason that flipped the switch in my head that my love for the game and things paranormal / horror could turn into a real activity for me and my friends to link up with in real life and as I get older, it seems like a lot of my interactions with people outside of my family are online only and the thought of doing something with my friends in person that also correlated with our love of horror got me really excited for planning our trips and doing things like that out in the world. I doubt we’ll ever be at the scale that Mr. Sark was with the other streamers that one night, but it can be close enough for me to feel like I’m discovering a new thing and learning new skills and having fun with my friends all over again.
Impact
I’m not really gonna go much more detail about Phasmophobia and why it’s so successful as a game, but I did want to share the connection it has for me and the impact that it’s made on my life. Some of my most memorable gaming moments in the last few years have been me and my friends playing that game and getting scared out of our minds or laughing so hard we almost passed out. I’m sure there’s a lot of other folks out there that can attribute their journey into looking outside of video games for more paranormal and scary things to this game. They ignited a lot of people‘s passions, and I’m sure I’m just kind of discovering what all of that meant for me.
I come at the paranormal with a somewhat grounded take of most of the times. I found a lot of the ghost hunting TV shows and people online that acted like they were professional paranormal investigators to all be a bit cringe. I don’t like when people act like they’re special, or like they have some kind of ability and I definitely don’t like when people on TV would walk around and screaming in empty houses and threaten ghost to try to get a rise out of something that they might not even believe in. Me personally, I don’t know what I believe in and that’s kind of why I want to do all of this with my friends. Yes it’s an excuse to hang out, but it’s also a way to learn more about the world, understand things at a deeper level, and at the very least get together with friends and possibly discover something new!