You'll learn the ropes by terrifying some sorority girls.Īs the humans become more and more frightened, you will gain ectoplasm, the "resource" in Ghost Master. You will also be able to give your ghosts very specific orders, specifying when to use certain powers, and on whom. If you place a spirit and leave it alone, it will get to work scaring the nearby people. Like the humans, your ghosts will act on their own. There are four sensations that will affect humans: temperature, sound, sight, and smell. You might use a power where characters are set on fire, or at least they think they're on fire, and they'll go and jump in the shower or someone will grab an extinguisher." "We aren't going for realism," Barnett said. Make a wall leak water, and they'll try to fix it. Make a room cold, and they'll start a fire. The humans of Ghost Master will go about their business-watching television, doing their jobs, and talking with each other-until you come in and get to haunting. Ghost Master will attempt to emulate some realistic human behavior, making it follow the recent trend seen in games like Black & White and The Sims and become yet another game that owes a debt of thanks to David Crane's nearly 20-year-old Little Computer People. "So once you set up the scares, you can actually go into the heads of the people and experience them firsthand, hear their hearts pounding." "You can actually go into the point of view of the ghosts and the humans," Bartlett explained. Once you start scaring, you can watch as the humans react.
There are other, more direct, powers as well. Your spirits can even trigger earthquakes. One power-called "unnatural erection"-allows spirits to stack objects in little paranormal pillars. They can cause hordes of insects to scurry across the floor or cause objects to fly about the room. Ghosts can cause the temperature in rooms to drop to near freezing or cause blood to flow from the walls. Once placed, the ghosts can begin using their powers. There will be 23 types of ghosts, and each one-from banshees to ghasts to trickster spirits-is based on the mythology and paranormal theories of different cultures. Sandmen can be placed near slumbering humans and go into their psyche to find out what scares them, while poltergeists can only bind to children. Headless horsemen can be placed only on roads. Once placed, the gremlin can cause the object to malfunction in ways that will unsettle the local humans. There are different types of ghosts, and each one has very specific uses.įor instance, the gremlin can be placed only on mechanical objects. This isn't just a matter of plunking down some specters and watching them work. In the most basic scenarios, such as the sorority house that serves as the first level, you'll simply need to scare everybody away. There's a good deal of variety both in what you can do and what you need to do, and each of your ghosts has special powers and abilities to help you achieve your goals. It's a clever premise, and it promises to be more than just a good idea. We wanted to make a game where you choreograph the scares." "There have been lots of games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill where you go in and get scared. "We wanted to do a game that was the opposite of what people expect," Barnett explained. You control a team of ghosts, and you must send them into various locales to scare off the inhabitants or would-be interlopers. Ghosts can draw upon a variety of powers, such as making a room colder.īarnett is the creative director for Ghost Master, a strategy game that will take this concept one step further-imagine a hybrid of The Frighteners and The Sims. One DVD is particularly appropriate-a copy of Peter Jackson's The Frighteners, which is about a charlatan exorcist who has his ghostly friends haunt houses and then charges the homeowners for removing the ghosts. There are DVDs and videotapes, both documentaries about supposedly haunted places and films about ghosts and hauntings (including both Ghost and The Haunting). There are books about haunted houses and paranormal investigators. On a shelf behind Gregg Barnett's desk, there's a small library of ghost-related materials.
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