While I wasn’t expecting Citizen Kane levels of splendor from EALoGAMES’ Paranormal Hunter, its striking (but entirely coincidental, of course) resemblance to Kinetic Games’ Phasmaphobia at the very least promised an hour or two of fun gameplay with friends. Oh, how wrong we were because not a single minute of my brief time with Paranormal Hunter compelled me to play any more.
The start of Paranormal Hunter’s problems begin the moment you boot up the game. Not a lot of games can boast failing before they have even begun, but this sloppily-compiled plagiarism project somehow manages even that. For one, although Paranormal Hunter doesn’t have the very basics of settings such as brightness controls, it does treat players with the option to change the brightness of their cursor… for some reason. Strangely enough (though, not surprising by this point), you CAN change your screen resolution. However, the developers seem to have forgotten to put the 2560 x 1440 option (the most common PC screen resolution) in there. Don’t worry though, 3840 x 2160 is there despite the fact that very few gamers have a 4k monitor.
So, once you’ve discovered that you’re unable to tweak the settings to suit your setup, it’s now time to play Paranormal Hunter… or not, because now you have to complete a tutorial. I don’t think I’ve ever played a tutorial that feels so utterly needless but at the same time completely unhelpful before. It’s patronizingly basic while also explaining nothing at all.
The aim of Paranormal Hunter is to banish the ghost haunting the level. This means locating the summoning circle which has been pre-drawn out somewhere within the building, and then throwing a pomegranate and severed hand in there. Why specifically a pomegranate and severed hand? The tutorial doesn’t care to elaborate on this. Despite being a ghost hunting squad, we also don’t have the courtesy to bring our own pomegranates and hands even though these are required in every mission, we instead just hunt around the abandoned building for a severed hand just lying around somewhere and also a fresh pomegranate.
While searching for these items (have you checked the fridge yet?), the player is repeatedly attacked by the entities they are trying to exorcise. This involves the ghost first crying out to alert you that they’re on the prowl, this is done using the same cry effect each time and for every level too. The players must then switch to the UV settings on their torches to push back the ghost and temporarily banish it so they can resume searching the kitchen cupboard for a spare hand. During this time, the player’s ‘sanity’ meter will drop, the speed of which will increase when the ghost is nearby. If your sanity runs out, you just kind of faint and it’s game over.
I played Paranormal Hunter with our Audio and Video Editor, Nirav, and we failed the first mission, The Trembling House. Although we had successfully exorcised the building and the threat was gone, our sanity levels continued to plummet and our characters just simultaneously fainted like Pokémon on low health. There was no warning or explanation, we just dropped to the ground.
The second level, The Hanging Hospital, is set in an abandoned hospital and we once again had to search the area for fruit and severed body parts to complete the ritual. The hospital is a much larger map than the first, though they each have barely anything of interest in them. While hunting for the pomegranate that we could have just picked up from the supermarket on the way over, Nirav accidentally dropped his torch and couldn’t pick it up, meaning he was unable to defend himself or see anything. While Nirav searched for his torch like Scooby Doo‘s Velma looking for her glasses, I tried to complete the mission. Though by this point, not even the friendly online gaming banter could save this miserable session. Luckily for us the game promptly crashed.
Paranormal Hunter just isn’t fun, and it certainly isn’t scary. The sound effects are ridiculously cheap and repetitive and the level designs don’t even look complete. There’s nothing of interest to explore or do while attempting to complete the mission and it’s honestly just an empty experience. The ghosts have the same see-through colored design each time, despite the trailers hinting towards more physical looking entities which were much scarier.
Paranormal Hunter feels like it was slapped together over a lunch break as there’s absolutely no thought put into it, and when there is it’s just scraped from Phasmaphobia. The gameplay concepts are utterly confusing while also being painfully basic with very little challenge. While it is still in Early Access, I honestly feel like there’s too much work here to reasonably expect it to be anywhere close to a release condition in the next few years. Your biggest obstacle in Paranormal Hunter will be hunting for the will to continue.
Jess played Paranormal Hunter in early access with a code provided by the publisher.
