This review contains spoilers
Geist is a first person shooter that allows the player to take possession of NPCs and objects, allowing them to solve puzzles using character specific abilities.
To possess a mammal, you need to possess certain objects near the mammal to scare them. Usually scaring them involves two or three stages where you scare them once and they'll move to another location. Scare them again at the new location and they'll be scared enough for you to possess them.
On paper it's a very interesting and ambitious idea, but the game executes it without a lot of finesse. You possess engineers and scientists to go through doors that are restricted, possess soldiers for firepower, and animals to go through areas that are too small for a human to fit through, or instances where you are forced to possess an animal because there isn't anything near a human that could scare them.
Almost every time you possess someone with a weapon, the game wants you to use that against anything that moves unless told otherwise. I would like some variety where you could blend in with other soldiers and talk them through letting you pass, but mostly that is usually solved with a firefight that you start. Though, the game is simple enough that accomplishing those tasks is still rewarding.
That is, until the end of the game. Then it becomes insanely annoying with sudden difficulty spikes, along with instances where you have to fight off ghosts possessing you by mashing A as quickly as possible all while moving your joystick in the opposite direction of where the ghost wants to move you. They usually want to move you into an instant kill hazard like a pit. It had gotten so annoying to deal with that I mapped a button to function like a turbo A to repel the ghosts away.
The boss before the final one also has some kind of repulsion effect to the auto aim, and if you're close enough to him, your auto aim actually aims away from him rather than be fixated on him, pretty much like trying to clamp two magnets that are of the same pole.
Speaking of auto aiming, there is neither a way to turn it off, nor does the game give you options to adjust the sensitivity of aiming. Your only option is to invert the pitch. The lack of options make controlling the characters very sluggish, and I really wish they put more emphasis on giving players more options for more comfortable controls.
I think they wanted to make it different from other FPSs by having shooting not the main focus of it, but like its lack of finesse with its ghost functions, the game clumsily flips between wanting to be a first person shooter and an adventure puzzle game in first person rather than having them seamless like System Shock and Metroid Prime.
Another gripe I have with the game is near the end. An animal trainer is missing her pet rat. During that time you control another human being. You follow down a hallway into a storage area filled with rat traps. You come into another storage room where the rat is along with other wild rats. So, I would think since I am in control of someone, I can just scoop up the fancy rat and take it to its owner, right?
Nope, you have to scare the rat, take possession of it, avoid the rat traps (which the rat will gravitate towards because the bait is too much of a temptation,) and take alternate routes to the trainer because apparently rats can't climb stairs.
But enough with my rambling. Geist feels like it had a lot of ambition while being developed, and it shows as what it accomplishes right it feels really great. Unfortunately the shortcomings of its game design along the sudden difficulty spikes at the end make completing the game feel like a fight without it feeling rewarding in the end.
To possess a mammal, you need to possess certain objects near the mammal to scare them. Usually scaring them involves two or three stages where you scare them once and they'll move to another location. Scare them again at the new location and they'll be scared enough for you to possess them.
On paper it's a very interesting and ambitious idea, but the game executes it without a lot of finesse. You possess engineers and scientists to go through doors that are restricted, possess soldiers for firepower, and animals to go through areas that are too small for a human to fit through, or instances where you are forced to possess an animal because there isn't anything near a human that could scare them.
Almost every time you possess someone with a weapon, the game wants you to use that against anything that moves unless told otherwise. I would like some variety where you could blend in with other soldiers and talk them through letting you pass, but mostly that is usually solved with a firefight that you start. Though, the game is simple enough that accomplishing those tasks is still rewarding.
That is, until the end of the game. Then it becomes insanely annoying with sudden difficulty spikes, along with instances where you have to fight off ghosts possessing you by mashing A as quickly as possible all while moving your joystick in the opposite direction of where the ghost wants to move you. They usually want to move you into an instant kill hazard like a pit. It had gotten so annoying to deal with that I mapped a button to function like a turbo A to repel the ghosts away.
The boss before the final one also has some kind of repulsion effect to the auto aim, and if you're close enough to him, your auto aim actually aims away from him rather than be fixated on him, pretty much like trying to clamp two magnets that are of the same pole.
Speaking of auto aiming, there is neither a way to turn it off, nor does the game give you options to adjust the sensitivity of aiming. Your only option is to invert the pitch. The lack of options make controlling the characters very sluggish, and I really wish they put more emphasis on giving players more options for more comfortable controls.
I think they wanted to make it different from other FPSs by having shooting not the main focus of it, but like its lack of finesse with its ghost functions, the game clumsily flips between wanting to be a first person shooter and an adventure puzzle game in first person rather than having them seamless like System Shock and Metroid Prime.
Another gripe I have with the game is near the end. An animal trainer is missing her pet rat. During that time you control another human being. You follow down a hallway into a storage area filled with rat traps. You come into another storage room where the rat is along with other wild rats. So, I would think since I am in control of someone, I can just scoop up the fancy rat and take it to its owner, right?
Nope, you have to scare the rat, take possession of it, avoid the rat traps (which the rat will gravitate towards because the bait is too much of a temptation,) and take alternate routes to the trainer because apparently rats can't climb stairs.
But enough with my rambling. Geist feels like it had a lot of ambition while being developed, and it shows as what it accomplishes right it feels really great. Unfortunately the shortcomings of its game design along the sudden difficulty spikes at the end make completing the game feel like a fight without it feeling rewarding in the end.