When you think of the horror game in this century, it is impossible to be other but this game. “Phasmophobia”. Phasmophobia is a game that gets into your head. When you're playing the real world doesn't exist. When you stop, some aspect has seeped into reality. Where this game will give you a horror experience that you have never experienced before.
Phasmophobia would be a detective game about ghosts. You play as one of up to four investigators who go into various locations, from roadside houses to an asylum, and try to identify what kind of spirit it is being haunted by, and then leave. Though there's a serious Ghostbusters vibe where there's no actual busting: you're the pre-Ghostbusters, if you like, solely there to work out what kind of threat this is. You will have various pieces of equipment, all simple in utility, stored in a van that acts as the team's command HQ at each location. There's a flashlight, which nearly always occupies one of your three inventory slots. The player character has limits. You can't move fast, you can only carry three items and so, even after working out where a ghost might be, you have to go back into the location multiple times with different equipment. Each type of ghost will (eventually) provide three types of evidence—for example, setting off the EMF at level 5 is one piece of evidence, freezing temperatures are another, and seeing ghostwriting would be yet another.
Phasmophobia's ghost will kill you but, often, they will simply freak you and your teammates out. I've been coy because talking in-detail about a game like this risk ruining some of its best surprises, but I'll give one example. It was a street house. The maps are three street houses, two farmhouses, a school (huge), and an asylum (The most huge and confusing). This was one my team had handled before, and we quickly identified a child's bedroom upstairs as somewhere the ghost favored.
The key to Phasmophobia is the sound design: you have to run voice chat through the game itself, and then there's a local chat and a radio chat option. The difference matters because the ghosts can hear you. In fact, some ghosts will speak to you and even respond to an item called the Spirit Box that allows you to ask questions, and if the ghosts called you back you will get a piece of new evidence. The hearing element of the ghosts is so much more than it might seem, because what it seems to do is pick up on the moods of your team. It responds when people are scared and say hasty things like "let's just get out of here."
As all of this implies, Phasmophobia's greatness is in the human interactions that it's set up to provoke. It knows that no ghost is ever going to be as scary as the one in your head, and shows real restraint in how it uses small events and subtle clues to build an atmosphere that, at its best/worst, can be absolutely horrifying. If you are looking for the best ghost game at this moment. I think Phasmophobia is the best ghost game ever made.