Geist debuted nearly 20 years ago, back in 2005. At the tail end of the GameCube’s life, the game had been highly anticipated by Nintendo fans for many years. Nintendo had a swathe of titles that were pushing boundaries in that period, from Nintendogs to Battalion Wars, each with a huge reaction on release. But Geist was different. This was a game that had garnered a large following since the first mention of it in late 2003.
That shouldn’t be a surprise. I don’t know any FPS that has taken this idea and used it well. Or at all, in fact. The concept is unique; you are a on a mission to infiltrate a rouge scientific research lab called Volks Laboratory’s. They’re suspected of illegal activities. During this mission however, everything goes horribly wrong. You and your team leader get captured and have horrible experiments performed on you. These experiments leave you without your body, floating around in a ghost like state. You now have to use your detrimental condition to your advantage.
Geist – An FPS Where You Don’t Care About the Guns
The game that launched plays as a FPS with an added element of gameplay: you can possess people and objects. This is done through a system where you can possess objects at anytime (but only specified ones), and in order to possess people you must give them a good scare beforehand. This structure really governs the gameplay. You will find yourself completing many small puzzles to eventually scare someone, posses them and carry on with the story.
Being an FPS, there is of course many gun-battle segments. These are a different kind of fun, as when a body you’re in is killed you don’t die. Instead, you de-posses the body, time slows down and you get time to look around for your next victim. A Spirit Meter dictates how long you’ve got to find another host. This mechanic turns the genre on it’s head, simply because you can’t be killed. When you’re running around in a body killing people, you only die when you’re dead and have nothing left to possess.
Puzzle Phantom
The puzzle element adds a lot of intrigue to the game. Instead of simply running through destroying whatever you see, you spend a lot of time thinking through how to get your ethereal-self out of the area you are trapped in. A key element being your lack of ability to work door handles.
The general procedure is to posses an available object, activate it, see if that scared the person in the room enough to open the door/activate the switch/eat the sandwich, or what have you. If not, find another object and possess that. Sometimes there’s a set routine to follow to scare the person enough to possess them. Bigger and more complex puzzles in the game that require a lot more thinking to get through.
Multi Manifestation Mayhem
The shooting isn’t the main part of the single-player game, but it’s everything that makes the multiplayer game. There are four modes to choose from: Possession Deathmatch, Standard Deathmatch, and Hunt – a mode where Ghosts and Hosts fight for survival. Hosts fight with Anti-Spirit guns, while Ghosts try to possess Hosts and send them into death pits around the arena.
Then there’s Capture the Host. This is like a normal Capture the Flag Mode, apart from it’s a Host and you get extra points on it for every person you kill whilst on the way to the flag drop-off point. All of the multiplayer options have a huge number of bots, loads of teams to set people on and varied difficulty settings.
Geist Prioritises Ghosting over Graphics
Geist features a quality of graphics that were appropriate for the title, but hardly a standout on the GameCube. There’s few times that you’ll be overly impressed, but at the same time there’s nothing that will leave you felling horrified you paid full-price for it. As with most Nintendo releases, this title is internally stable with no glitches or patchy areas of the game at all. The sound has a nice quality to it, especially the screams you hear when taking over someone’s body.
Geist is an enjoyable game, but to many it failed to lived-up to expectations. It’s core mechanic is wonderful, and well executed for most of the game. However, it gets stale in the latter half as you find yourself repeating the same procedure time and again. The story is really the thing that keeps the single-player moving, while the multiplayer could quickly be dismissed as fun without flair. As such, Geist was a game with a lot of missed potential; perfect for a modern remake to make use of its unique premise.
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