Phasmophobia: Helpful Tips For Surviving Ghosts and Bugs

It’s the month of spookiness. Normally, this is the time of year where we get excited over costumes, trick-or-treating, and visiting haunted house attractions.

But now that everyone’s being encouraged to spend Halloween safely indoors to prevent the spread of COVID, popping behind the PC and investigating haunted places with friends will have to do the trick instead. And with Phasmophobia, Kinetic Games definitely hits the mark.

So what is it exactly?

Well, it’s a four-player coop, ghost hunting game. (Also available in VR, by the way.)

During each session, you and your team visit a haunted location. You spend time gathering evidence and clues as you explore in the dark with the objective of identifying the ghostly presence. Be careful though, you never know when the ghost will show itself. And with in-game voice recognition, it definitely knows you’re there.

Here’s a short trailer if you’re curious:

At $13.99 on Steam, you’re probably wondering if it’s worth it. These three points should help you decide:

If you like horror flicks, haunted houses, and scary stories by the campfire, this will definitely get you going.

The rooms are pitch black without a flashlight. Sure, you can turn on the light in the room, but be prepared for the resident ghost to turn them back off. Careful though, turn on too many at once and you could blow the breaker. Or, the ghost could decide to be a smarty pants and just flip the breaker switch off itself.

Enjoy playing detective with your friends?

Then you’ll love going through the process of figuring out which room in the house is the ghost’s favorite spot. After that, it’s scary, but you’ll probably also have fun poking and prodding the ghost to collect more clues as to what type it is. There are different tools at your disposal to help you do this and a variety of possibilities when it comes to the type of ghost.

Got adventurer feels?

It’s definitely a game that requires exploration and rewards the brave. You’ve got huge maps like the asylum and high school. And sometimes, you’ve really gotta piss the ghost off to get any kind of definitive evidence to help you in your investigation.

Checkout this entertaining gameplay video from IGP if you wanna see more footage:

After watching that, you’ll see that some things in-game are not so obvious, hence this guide. Read on for quick how-tos that I’ve had to die in-game to learn.

The Quickest Ways to Locate the Ghost’s Favorite Room

For small maps like normal houses or the farmhouse, a thermometer is your best bet. Just point in the direction of a room, or even the door to a room and if the temperature drops below 10°C or 50°F, that’s probably the room.

You can also use the EMF, but it tends to go off when the ghost is near you, even if you’re not standing in its favorite room.

For larger maps (the asylum and high school maps), you don’t have time to go room to room.

It’s still a good idea for someone to have a thermometer and EMF handy to gather evidence, but a parabolic microphone will pick up sounds from afar and lead you to the ghost’s room. You can also ask the ghost for a sign — it sometimes rings the phone or school bell in room’s vicinity.

The Purpose of a Smudge Stick

Think of burning sage — that’s basically what the smudge stick is. It cleanses the area being haunted by the ghost, but what this actually means for you is that if the ghost goes into “hunt you down to kill you dead” mode, it buys you extra time to either get out of its favorite room or find a hiding place, or both.

It’ll require a lighter and you’ll know it’s lit when you see smoke coming from it. You can either toss it somewhere or walk around with it to cleanse an area.

Two Ways to Light the Smudge Stick
1. Your friend can hold the lighter while you hold the smudge stick. Friendo will need to activate the lighter by right-clicking on the mouse while the smudge stick is in his crosshairs.

2. You can carry both the lighter and the smudge stick yourself. Just switch to the smudge stick, click on “F” to light it.

How to Know When a Ghost is Hunting

A lot of new players have no idea how to tell when a ghost is hunting at first.

There are three definitive signs:

1. The front door to the house or all exit doors of the building will slam shut and cannot be opened from either side.
2. Your flashlight and any UV lights will start flashing.
3. Your walkie talkie signal will be dead and all you’ll hear is static.

Ways to Increase Your Chances of Survival During a Ghost’s Hunting Phase

1. It helps to know the type of ghost you’re dealing with and prepare accordingly. For example, if you’re dealing with a Jinn, you might wanna flip the breaker switch off before the hunt kicks off.
2. Identify nearby places to hide — closets, lockers, nearby rooms or bathrooms. Dash to said spot, close the door, and turn off your flashlight. Sometimes crouching in a corner and looking at the floor has been said to help.
3. Shush! Like I said, the game has voice recognition so if you’re panicking aloud, the ghost can hear you and follow the sound of your voice.
4. If you’re caught in a kitchen or living room or any other wide open space during a hunt, try to outrun the ghost and loop it around in circles at a table, couch, or kitchen island.
5. RUN. Yes, you can run in-game by holding down the Shift Key while you move using the directional keys. Honestly, it’s more like breaking into a speed walk than galloping speeds though, but hey, every ounce of speed counts.

How to Use the Crucifix

The crucifix is the only object in the game that can prevent a ghost from going into hunting mode. There are rumors that holding the Crucifix to a ghost attacking you and saying “Go Away, [ghost type name]” actually works, but I haven’t really tested this so I can’t confirm.

So far, the most reliable way is to drop the cross in a spot to prevent the ghost from initiating a hunting phase when it spawns in that area.

Again, it’ll only work if the ghost spawns in the area of effect of the crucifix so, if its favorite room happens to be a spacious one, drop a second one in another spot.

Good spots are entrances and the center of the room so you’re not blocked if the ghost decides to spawn while you’re in there looking for evidence.

Keep in mind that the crucifix has a range of about a 3 meter radius and two charges. You’ll know when the charges have been used up because it’ll disappear.

Fixing Bugs

The fact that the game is still in early access means it can get buggy sometimes. That’s another reason why I thought it’d be handy to write this guide.

Case-in-point, I’ve only had it for about a week and at least a couple of hours of the total in-game time I’ve got logged on my Steam account has been spent figuring out how to make sound work, getting out of a loading screen that’s stuck at 90% , or why the game said my mic was detected, but no one in the party lobby could hear me.

Let me save you the trouble with some tips:

1. Make sure your sound is properly set up. The microphone you plan to use in-game should be set as your default mic on Windows. Once that’s set, go into the game, click on Options, then Audio, and do the Voice Recognition Test.
2. Stuck at 90% on loading screen? It seems that right-clicking the game’s .exe file and choosing “Run as Administrator” is a fix for this. You can go to the Steam folder in your Program Files and find the Phasmophobia file. Navigation will probably be something like Program Files, then open your Steam folder, then the Steamapps folder, go to the folder called “common” and you’ll find all your Steam game folders there.
3. If you’ve tried both and still have issues with voice comms or the loading screen, a quick fix you can try is to verify the game files via Steam. You’ll need to open Steam, find the game in your Library, right-click and choose the “verify game files” option and let it do its thing for a few minutes.
4. Recurring issues? Switching to the game’s beta version is the ultimate fix. You can do this by going to Steam, right-clicking Phasmophobia in your Game Library list, and choosing “Properties.” Once there, a window should pop up. Click on the “Betas” tab and choose the option that says “opt in to betas” from the drop down. It should automatically install the beta version for you.

Notes On Running Phasmophobia in Beta

Your beta client can only communicate with other beta clients, meaning if you have a group of friends you usually play with, they should run the beta version as well so you can continue playing together. Otherwise, every time you try and join a non-beta player’s lobby, you’ll get the “Server version mismatch” message.

Connecting with Other Ghost Hunters

You can join public lobbies in any server — EU, AU, NA, and AS. There used to be an SA (South America) server, but it was announced that players should use the AS (Asia) server for that for now.

Not keen on joining complete strangers and your friends aren’t available? You can connect with other Phasmophobians in the official Discord:

Join the Phasmophobia Discord Server!

I’ve played most of my sessions using the lfg channels here and have actually made some new friends.

Just make sure you’ve got the right server region before you input the code to join an in-game lobby since lfg posts don’t always indicate the server.

If you’re interested in only playing in one region, there are dedicated lfg channels per region and a list of country community servers under the #info channel.

Happy hunting!