Ghosts promises to be FMV horror, only good

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Imagine Night Trap if it didn't suck.

A cast member of Ghosts looks up apprehensively
(Image credit: Limited Run Games)

The people behind quarantine Zoom-call horror movie Host are working on a new production, and this time it's "a real-time live action game" called Ghosts. You play the producer of a TV show about ghost hunters who sits in a van controlling camera feeds from a haunted house, choosing which footage to broadcast as your intrepid crew explore.

That crew is being played by the cast of Host—Haley Bishop, Radina Drandova, Jemma Moore, Caroline Ward, and Emma Louise Webb—and it's being written and directed by Host's writer and producer Jed Shepherd. Also notable: Creature design by Trevor Henderson, creator of internet-haunting star of multiple games and mods SirenHead, with fabrication being handled by Jim Henson's Creature Shop.

The creature in question is the Long Lady, who is said to look through the windows of houses on a particular street of London in times of tragedy. Apparently if you look directly at her face, you die. She sounds kind of like a cross between Hasshaku-sama (the ghost that inspired Resident Evil's Lady Dimitrescu), and Slender Man.

The real-time element of Ghosts is that it can only be played at 10pm in your local timezone, and if you stop playing that's it—game over, everybody dies. It doesn't sound like a game for people with small bladders or outside commitments, but the test card that appears if you try to play at any other time can apparently be bypassed: "If you can crack the 'test' you will have access to an unlockable pre-watershed version where you can breathe and save your progress".

As well as controlling the cameras you have to track the cast's heart-rate monitors, keep things exciting for the viewers, host a call-in segment, and examine documents and files full of information about what's been going on in the area to figure out what's really going on.

Ghosts is planned for release on February 22, 2022.

Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.