After a year in Early Access on Steam, Phasmophobia is waiting with lots of new content and improvements.
Phasmophobia on the rise on Steam: In the last 30 days, an average of over 20,000 ghost hunters were active. The main reason is the latest Anniversary Update, which brought an offline mode for single players, an improved ghost book and numerous detail improvements.
After the initial much greater success, the player numbers gradually ebbed away, but for the big Anniversary Update on 18 September, many games apparently returned. The curve since the Early Access release on 18 September 2020 can be easily traced on Steamcharts.com:
In the spirit of Early Access
The solo developer of Kinetic Games achieved a gigantic success in 2020: the horror game Phasmophobia started in Early Access and was an indispensable part of the Steam sales charts for months. Afterwards, the indie developer brought new employees on board and decided to put planned features on hold in order to further improve Phasmophobia and not jeopardise its success.
Because apparently Phasmophobia is already being received enormously well: With 97 percent positive player ratings on Steam, for the unfinished Early Access version mind you, the game is already one of the all-time favourites. This is by no means usual for Early Access games, which often have to take a lot of criticism because of missing functions and technical problems.
The most important updates also show a strong focus on the community: In the Anniversary Patch, Kinetic brought, among other things, improvements to make it easier to navigate in the ghost book. An offline mode for single players allows users to play without an internet connection.
In the previous major exposition update, the movement system was reworked because players found walking and sprinting too slow. In addition, more content found its way into Phasmophobia with the two new ghost types Goryo and Myling as well as the DOTS projector as a gadget. Previously, new ghosts and maps were added.
When will Phasmophobia 1.0 be released? According to the Steam page, the full release is still planned for 2021, but could be postponed based on feedback. There are still a few items on the roadmap that developer Kinetic Games wants to complete before the ghost-hunting hit is released as a full version.
