It's just a regular old day at Volks Lab. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and everybody's just dandy. Oh yeah, there is also the business of a spirit running amok, inhabiting everything in sight and leaving destruction in its wake. It's a good thing that spirit is you. Welcome to Nintendo/N-Space's new first-person-something for the GameCube: Geist. A tale of intrigue, conspiracy, death, and just a little bit of voyeurism.

Early previews of this game left many lost as to what exactly it was. Is it a first-person shooter? Is it an adventure game? What's with the frame rate? These questions now have really good answers. Much like Metroid Prime, Geist is played from the first-person perspective where you shoot things-but don't be too hasty. This is not your run-of-the-mill first-person game. The heart of the game is not in its shooting elements or even fixed to the perspective in which it is played, but in a simple yet deep possession system.

See, within about 30 seconds of the intro, your poor avatar (Raimi to most) expires and returns as a spirit. A friendly ghost he is not. This is a ghost on a mission (with objectives!). Via a brief tutorial at this point, you learn to play the game. Raimi is a spirit, thus he can move around independent of things like fences. Walls still get in the way and so do doors. In ghost-mode, you can 'possess' various objects. Do you see that paint can? You can possess it and make it explode. Joy. Inhabiting living things is a little more difficult, as they apparently have a little more will. These beings need to be in a frightened state in order to be inhabited-that is the bulk of the gameplay. In looking around a given area, you figure out where you need to go. Then, using the objects in that area to scare the pants off unsuspecting people, you inhabit their bodies and use their abilities (and keys) to get you around Volks Corporation.

It sounds simple, right? It is. The game plays great. The movement is a lot tighter than in most first-person shooters, and this makes the game feel a little 'heavy.' This, however, makes it easier to focus on individual objects in order to inhabit or utilize them. You're only going to use a few buttons to do most of your actions, and they're contextual to what state you're in. Spirit Raimi can float with L, while inhabiting a soldier makes that a duck button. The A button carries a lot of weight in this game, with context-sensitive actions ala Zelda. You're also going to do a fair bit of shooting in this game as well. The controls don't lend themselves very well to this, but it rarely becomes a problem because of the large amount of health and the fact that a bullet or two downs most enemies. Don't worry, though-you'll be spending most of your time trying to figure out how to use a TV to make rats afraid.

The presentation of Geist leaves something to be desired. Very little of the game is overtly ugly, but the models have some really jerky animations. Gameplay runs at a smooth frame rate most of the time, but there are some situations where the game will start to chug a bit. The cut scenes themselves do their job of continuing the story, but it's clear most of the budget for Geist went into the gameplay. Menus and text descriptions are fortunately easy to read. There is a catchy tune in the game that may actually be the only music in the entire game, as I can't for the life of me think of any others. Lastly, the voice acting is atrocious. It's not that the actors aren't doing their jobs, but their voices are so often cut short and you can only hear 'Raimi' and 'Boss' so many times at the start of a text conversation before it starts to grate at you. It's a good thing there isn't that much talking.

Geist has a lot going for it in single-player mode, but N-Space even went ahead and implemented a surprisingly fun multiplayer mode. Grab a few friends and play one of the multiplayer modes, which borrow many gameplay concepts from the single-player game. There is a possession death match game where each player inhabits unsuspecting soldiers in an arena and makes them kill each other. You get points for killing people inhabited by the other players. There's a clever capture-the-flag knockoff. Lastly, there is a 'hunt' game, which splits the players into two teams: Hosts and Ghosts. The Hosts have to fight off the Ghosts with special weapons while the Ghosts have to try to possess the Hosts and cause them harm. The latter is especially fun with four players. The somewhat slow controls of the single-player campaign return here, but it's definitely above passable.

So what is Geist? It's an adventure game hiding in the guise of a first-person shooter. You're going to have to think a little bit to really get into this game. It's a delightful experience, and there are some laugh-out-loud moments and some truly twisted puzzles near the middle and end that make you wonder what they're smoking over there at N-Space. Overall, the game controls well, it's fun, and it's original. You can beat it in a rent, but the multiplayer might bring you back for a few rounds.

Sep 30, 2005 | 1 comments
Ben Jacobs