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| Here come da ghosts! |
In addition to the ghosts that you select to bring with you, each level has a
few resident spooks that are trapped to their fetters. They will give you a clue
as to how to free them, but it's up to you to figure out how to actually do it.
Releasing a spook may require the destruction of their fetter, an encounter with
a particular mortal, or the presence of a convenient body to possess. You can
make use of a trapped ghost's powers in the same way as you do with the ghosts
on your spook team, but you will have to manage the use of these powers as they
will draw their plasm from your reserve.
The human residents are interesting to watch as they go about their lives.
They do typical human things like talking to each other (in a gibberish language
reminiscent of The Sims), eat, watch TV, use the bathroom, etc. Before they
realize that their house is haunted they'll react to your powers in very
rational ways, such as starting a fire in a fireplace when you create a cold spot.
As you turn up the powers and start their terror growing, they begin to show
signs of their fear from nervous behavior to outright panic. Each mortal in a
house is rated in three categories: terror, mental state, and belief. When a
person's terror rating is maxed out, he or she will flee the house and never
return. Mental state is a measure of a person's grip on sanity. Finally, belief
is a measure of a person's belief in the paranormal. Those with low belief
ratings are hard to spook, and you must use ghost powers specifically designed
to raise their belief ratings before you can terrorize them. Each person also
has a secret fear that you can discover and exploit, such as a fear of fire or
of thunderstorms. If you play to their fears your frights will be more
effective, but in reality the effect does not seem to make that much of a
difference. You can still frighten someone with a fear of water by igniting a
supernatural firestorm.
Since you can frighten anyone with the same set of powers, the fascination of
watching the terror grow in each house's inhabitant tends to wear off as you
play more and more of the game's levels. Once you have the mastered the basics
of managing your plasm and turning up the frights, you'll find yourself playing
a waiting game. There are stretches of time where the only thing that you can do
is sit back and wait for the mortals to run your spook gauntlet enough times to
finally be frightened out of the house.
The waiting game is further increased if you want to free all of the trapped
ghosts that you find. Since freeing some of them requires mortals to perform a
specific action, or even a sequence of actions, all you can do is set the stage
and then hope the mortals do their part. Sometimes you are lucky and it doesn't
take too long, at others you can wait long stretches of time as a stubborn
mortal refuses to cooperate. It's very random and can at times be frustrating.
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