It's 4pm on a Monday afternoon in 2021 and I'm playing Phasmophobia. I shift on the edge of my king-size sofa bed, the centerpiece of this cramped yet expensive studio apartment, with my gaming laptop wedged between my mouse and a bottle of wine. I'll be sitting here for the next eight hours or so, picking through clues in Tanglewood while bullying ghosts with my new friend Andrew as we shriek, laugh, and gripe about life together over Discord. We'd met through my paranormal history podcast. We'd go on spending almost every day together for the next 12 months, trying to forget the outside world exists.
Horror has a funny kind of magic to it, enkindling a sense of community like no other genre. It always has for me, at least, but I never felt its galvanizing power like I did during the COVID-19 pandemic. I credit a large part of that to Phasmophobia, a co-op horror game about teaming up to gather evidence of the supernatural in haunted houses – followed by asylums, prisons, and campsites later in the game's lifetime. During the pandemic, Andrew and I predominantly used Phasmophobia as a virtual meeting ground where we could hang out and have fun from opposite sides of the world. He was miserably lonely in lockdown, and I was deep in the throes of an unhappy career-fuelled depression. Three years later, having teamed up once more for another long-delayed ghost hunt, I'm more thankful than ever for how Kinetic Games captured the convivial essence of the genre to get me and Andrew – and others like us – through a global catastrophe.
