In pitch-black darkness, I stand alone in a stranger’s basement, giggling with a friend. “Where are you?” is all I can manage to ask the device I’m holding—it’s a spirit box, something used for communicating with the paranormal. My friend says she doesn’t think it’s working, but I try one more time. “I’m close,” is all I hear before a terrifying gurgling sound fills the basement. My ghost hunting group starts to scatter, laughing and screaming as they all scramble to different corners of the house to hide. Both the voice that responded to me and the deeper Grudge-like gurgling sounds are new, so my fight or flight kicks in just as hard as the day I first tried Phasmophobia a year ago.
My renewed love for Phasmophobia is all thanks to the Exposition update, the latest content drop after the Kinetic Games team expanded. Since the ghost hunting extravaganza launched last year, I’d played it to the point that I was feeling burnt out—hissing demons and haunted school hallways no longer scared me. I had somehow even grown immune to the “hunt,” the moment where a ghost has decided it’s done playing and tries to kill you in a hellish game of hide and seek.
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Exposition gives almost every part of the experience a facelift. Prior to the change, Phasmophobia’s spirit box had this robotic, dull voice that would respond to my questions. I had grown so accustomed to its boring tone that its response never frightened me. Now, it’s not always the same—sometimes it’s a whisper that sounds a bit like a little girl, and sometimes it’s a distorted, shaky response that I’m sure can’t be reproduced by a human. These are tweaks that I didn’t think much of after reading the patch notes, but it’s unexpected when you actually encounter it. The things you’re used to hearing and seeing in Phasmophobia were upgraded to the point that it all feels new.
We’ve got two new ghosts, too. The Goryo and the Myling join the growing roster of Phas entities that are out to grab you in the dark, but they aren’t even the scariest part. I’m far more interested in these new “smaller” changes like the singing Kinetic added to some entities. In my hunts last night, I provoked a demon with a spirit box until it began to hunt. I have never exited a map so quickly as I did when that haunting lullaby-like humming kicked in. It put the fear of god in me enough that I kept myself safely hidden away in the truck until my companions found more evidence.
Another layer of horror comes with Phasmophobia’s sweeping lighting upgrades. Its maps saw huge improvements to environmental clarity—there’s no longer this strange, grainy fog that makes everything appear low quality. The upgraded volumetric lighting reduces fogginess during your investigations, and now the black of the darkness somehow seems darker, and the lamps, TVs, cameras, flashlights, and other sources of brightness pop. It’s extra spooky during a hunt, watching fluorescent lighting in the distance burst into intense flashes while a ghost with long black hair crawls towards you.
The dangers haunting you are faster and more intelligent. Flashlights used to blink frantically when a ghost began its hunt, but now they only blink once when your tormentor gets close. Instead, ghost hunters now rely upon flashing room lighting to tell if there’s something on the prowl, so it’s wise to make sure you’ve got a few light switches flipped on to watch. Several of my ghost hunting excursions ended in death because I didn’t realize the ghost was coming until it was too close, which makes escape harder after tweaks to AI in patches before. Paranormal sounds once left me unphased since I could use my flashlight as an easy warning for hunts, but this tiny tweak means I’m running and ducking behind desks after every little bump in the dark.
Identifying the type of horror that’s lurking in your mission also got a little more complicated with new tools but in a good way. Exposition introduced the DOTS projects, which lights up rooms you suspect of housing a demon in a green explosion of laser light. When something otherworldly moves through the laser, you can see its shadow. It’s a phenomenon that damn near knocked the air out of me the first time I saw it go off on a video camera; I wasn’t really expecting the tiny form of childlike poltergeist to walk right up to the projector and stare.
Other items may not be new, but they’ve all received the same HD care the rest of the game saw. Item textures are all fancy and refreshed, making some things almost unrecognizable, but that’s not even the best part of the experience. Big changes to textures and lighting make things like your ever-so-handy video camera just feel better. The device always turns on automatically when you leave your ghost hunting truck, and the picture quality back on your home base monitor is so fresh that I get a little anxious when waiting to see a hazy silhouette.
Parabolic mics, glow sticks, and motion sensor adjustments now all have minor tweaks that make the investigation feel more dangerous. It’s the parabolic mic, in particular, that I’m most smitten with in the new equipment arsenal. The device has a long history of not working properly or just feeling confusing. Now, instead of just spitting out some number that registers distant paranormal activity, the parabolic echos faraway ghost murmurings and disembodied footsteps. After spending a year just following a trail of climbing numbers, I’m constantly unprepared for the low growl of a Jinn roaming in a distant prison cell.
Phasmophobia’s formulaic adventures were losing their luster, despite it being a brilliant game. My first review of the patch notes certainly had me intrigued, but the list just doesn’t do it justice. Having even just the smallest familiar moments suddenly replaced reintroduces the feeling of playing Phas for the first time. It’s the terror of the unexpected. Oh, and by the way, all of your electronics beep and malfunction now if you leave them on during a hunt—so you should probably turn that spirit box off when you’re shaking in a closet.
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