Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: Ghosthunter

Written by Chris Reiter on September 15, 2003

First Impressions: Ghostbusters without the sliding traps...and Peter, Ray, Egon, and Winston...and Slimer...and the walking Statue of Liberty...and that sex scene with Janine and Louis. Grrrowl!

Horror games have dished out just about every thinkable monster imaginable, or so you'd think. Zombies, monsters of unknown origins, large sea, air, and land creatures, and those of the supernatural realms are just some of them. Ghosts, one of those most popular beings storied to be real in our world unlike these other "things" however, haven't seen their place in many games. The thing is, is that it's hard to fight off something that technically is invincible to any living thing. In movies, ghosts are transparent, floating poltergeists that plague people with their possessive powers and murder us with these attributes. Last year though, Tecmo came up with a system that while ended up becoming repetitive in execution, worked. Now it's Sony who wants to try their own shot at putting the scare on people's faces when a hovering spirit from the other side makes its way in front of the player carrying a weapon to blast it back to the stillness of death, in the Cambridge Studios made Ghosthunter.

Rookies are always the stupid ones. They are the weaklings amongst the strong. They are the dumfounded amongst the knowledgeable. They are trainees employed to grow in strength and smarts. And it just so happens with one rookie cop from Detroit, Lazarus Jones, that when teamed with his partner, Anna Steele, their investigation of an abandoned school leads to his inexperience in pulling down the lever to a machine that once encased inside of it a host of spirits of terrible power bound to our world. Out of the oven and smelling the sweet trail of human blood to spill, one abducts his partner Anna, and yet another fuses itself with Lazarus. Once merged with the ghost, it's then that Lazarus discovers he's been given a second sight to now see what other people cannot -- ghosts. He also finds out that before dying, the ghost that has jumped inside his body, Kate Heller, was once a researcher who was part of a team operating to contain evil ghouls inside the cell. With Kate's help, it's now up to Lazarus to recapture these freed souls and rescue his partner in the process before death becomes her and everyone else.

Think of Primal (Cambridge Studios' early 2003 project) as a stepping stone toward Ghosthunter. An adventure game involving a mixed bag of item hunting, puzzle solving, monster fighting, and wonderful visuals and sounds galore, the story of Primal was something new for PlayStation 2 gamers to slobber over. Ghosthunter will be something like that, as Ghosthunter will be a stir between action and survival/horror gaming based on the Primal engine. Take for example how in Primal the player could switch between its two differentiating protagonists, Jen and Scree. In the same light, Ghosthunter's two switchable stars are the cop Lazarus and his newly acquired partner of another plane, Kate. Lazarus, who's only human, can't exactly fend off specters using a fork and a spoon. This is where weapons of choice will come into play, special ones at that.

Unlike in your typical horror adventure, Lazarus can't make a ghost go bye-bye by blowing its head off or simply by blowing it up. With the help of a capture grenade though, Lazarus can throw this device like a frisbee, which in turn will make any apparition slip from its own world into reality and stay there while a handy shotgun weapon next up will take it down a peg in deathly measure. Once weakened and defeated, Jones will then be able to capture the ghosts once more. Kate on the other hand is a ghost. How can one ghost wrestle with another ghost? By possessing them is how. In one example, a giant creature of size and power can be used to break down certain structures so that their blockage is no more. It's also interesting enough that with Cambridge's known humor in games such as Primal or the MediEvil series that as frightening as Ghosthunter aims to be, it'll still have its share of light humor in situations where ghosts can stack vehicles together to form a human bodily shape, or how a giant teddy bear can use a little girl to whack Lazarus back to grade school.

One of Primal's better traits is in its ability to prove that the PlayStation 2 powerhouse can spout out some amazingly defined visuals. With Ghosthunter now, Cambridge is aiming to not only make the game look just as good as Primal, but in fact better. Interfacing its capacity with special effects galore, like a dynamic lightning system similar to Silent Hill 3's own, ghosts carrying the essence of a beautiful translucent effect, and richer textures than those found in the aforementioned Primal is putting Ghosthunter in the limelight of technical prowess. Not to mention all the perplexing character models to peer upon in levels like a swamp, a school, and even a prison are setting Ghosthunter up for two top of the line graphical games in the same year from Cambridge.