You might not imagine ghosts having any particular strategy or tactical approach to how they scare ghosts, but 2003’s Ghost Master had a different opinion. Now revived with Ghost Master Resurrection, this classic brings the obligatory updates to the game engine and graphics, but also adds new ghosts and levels to play with.
If you’re not familiar with Ghost Master, you can picture The Sims, but instead of controlling the sims themselves, you place ghosts to scare them away. Ghosts bind to specific fetters depending on the type of ghost they are. The Cogjammer – a sort of little gremlin – binds to anything electrical, for example, whilst the standard Boo (which looks like it could be Casper’s Uncle) simply needs to be indoors.
Once bound, a ghost can activate its powers to scare nearby people. The Cogjammer can cause nearby electrical devices to malfunction and spark, Boo can move things around telekinetically, that sort of thing. Naturally this scares nearby humans who, once scared enough, will literally flee the property. As you scare humans you’ll get more power, with which you can use more ghosts and stronger powers as well. Once you’ve used them to terrify everyone out of the level, presumably tanking the local house prices in the process, you’re done.
It’s not as simple as it seems though, because each one of these people has their own particular fears, willpower, and even level of belief to contend with. Trying to scare someone with a swarm of spiders when they’re not afraid of creepy crawlies isn’t the best approach and trying to scare someone who doesn’t really believe in ghosts anyway will be less effective as well. Of course, if they keep experiencing unexplainable things they’ll gradually start to believe and your ghostly powers will become more effective against them. Then there’s willpower, which will make a mortal more resistant to the horrors as well.
At first it feels a little unclear exactly how to go about your hauntings, but experimenting quickly has you scaring frat parties and seances like, well, a Ghost Master. If you’re struggling with a specific person, you use a ghost that can reveal their fear, use undeniable powers like things that change the environment to convince the non-believers, and so on. It’s a satisfying process, though sometimes it can be a little frustrating when things don’t work and you don’t yet know why.
Whilst you’re doing all this, levels often have some extra ghosts that you can unlock whilst you’re there. To do this, you’ll need to puzzle out a way to free them. An early one involves knocking a jar that the ghost is bound to off a table using a ghost power, whilst another required revealing its corpse to a human before it could be unlocked – pretty gruesome and scary in its own right! These puzzles aren’t too challenging, though they can be a little vague in their setups, requiring a little bit of experimentation.
Once you finish a level you’ll be given a rating and are taken back to the level select screen, from which you can attend the Ghoul Room. This is actually more like a mansion and allows you to upgrade ghosts and customise their powers by spending pumpkins and points to unlock them. There are really a lot of ghosts available and they each have their own little spot in the Ghoul Room. Click them and you can change their powers by spending gold plasm or upgrade the ghost to reduce cooldowns or otherwise improve them.
This is all really quite good, and Ghost Master is still a unique premise that’s delivered fairly well. The tutorial is a little short, which is fine until you get to a level that has objectives that are more complex than just scaring everyone away – there are also ghost hunters in this game, and level specific challenges like the above revealing corpses to humans, which requires more than one to be revealed to the police are called and shut the building down. A little experimentation goes a long way, but a bit more explanation wouldn’t have hurt either.
Ghost Master Resurrection naturally looks a lot better than it used to. OK, so it doesn’t exactly look amazing by today standards, but it’s important to remember that the PlayStation 2 was the king of the consoles. It’s been a long time, so it would be difficult to update a game this old without making it look better really. Yes, even when using generative AI for art assets, which seems to be what happened here. The controls are usable, but they take a little getting used to and, though even after adjusting I still keep pressing X to interact with things in the level instead of square, whereas X interacts with the UI elements only. It’s a bit of a weird setup, but it doesn’t really get in the way too much.
There are also DLCs available for the game and a season pass. It feels a bit weird having a season pass for a remaster, but two of them are free and the other two each add a couple of levels and ghosts for under a fiver each. This is all-new content too, which is nice to see.
