Geist

The Good
One of the more interesting games I have ever played, Geist is a game that should be experienced by everyone, regardless of your taste in genres.

A supernatural action adventure, Geist places you in the shoes of John Raimi. You infiltrate the Volks corporation, get your spirit separated from your body, meet a strange little girl who died nearly 80 years ago, accidently help set loose a demon, change genders (and even species), discover a vast underground santuary home, and beat up old men in wheelchairs. Quite alot of things to do in this 10-15 hour game.

Geist is a hard game to categorize. While at first it might seem to be a shooter...it's not, really. Shooting a gun is merely the combat system of the game. It's difficult to describe. It does not follow a lot of the rules of a typical FPS. You do not go around collecting ammo or grenades, you can't pick up and choose different types of guns, and alot of the functions of typical guns, like sniping and secondary fires, are not present either. However, the multiplayer is a typical (and by Gamecube standards, very excellent) FPS game, and there are a variety of types and bots and weapons to choose from.

Geist borrows elements from a variety of different games. Most of the first person interactivity of the game can be traced back to "Breakdown" on the Xbox. That was one of the first games to physically show your hands doing common movements, like pulling a switch, twisting a screw, picking up food and eating it, etc. Geist is very similar.

Another game, or rather genre of games, that Geist borrows heavily from is the old point and click adventures on the PC. Those games would set the game world up so that you had to do this and that, normally in a certain order, while providing lots of graphical eye candy to look at but not touch. Geist takes a similar approach: while there might be dozens of objects in a given room, only two or three of them are truly interactive and possessible; you essentially have to do what the game designers want you to do. This approach to game design encourages only a little bit of creativy on the gamers part, but allows many attempts at scripted humor and drama.

Sadly, many professional reviewers marked the game down precisely because of that. They didn't seem to understand the game very well, and as a result Geist was butchered by the press. They seemed to believe that if you are able to possess things in a game, you should be able to possess everything in a game. That would be near impossible to program, and frankly would have made the game boring. Not every game can be Ultima VII...

A note on the boss battles: they do not follow a set pattern. In many games you just have to memorize how a boss will respond, and then at what time you need to fire or hit that certain sweet spot. In Geist, you have to figure out each bosses weakness and exploit it, and then hit the weak spot. It definitely puts life into that "3-hit rule" of boss battles that Nintendo is popular for.

This game also has amazing level design. I'd easily put it on par with the amazing Eternal Darkness. Some of the locales are breathtaking and inspiring. The underground home that was built in the 1920's is especially amazing. It's rare for first person games to put so much thought and creative energy into just the environments.

Another thing that makes the levels so great is that they are scaleable. Meaning, you can walk the area as a human, see certain things, and then possess the body of a rat, and see the same things, then notice cracks in the walls which you can run into and around the room to various ledges and cracks. The detail to the level design is simply amazing.

One more thing: I want the soundtrack. Most of the music in the game is amazing, although one or two songs get a little repetitive.

And it's always funny to me when I hear sound effects that have been recycled. In Geist, the door opening is the exact same effect used in Goldeneye. That old familiar "chatch" sound...

The Bad
I have to mention the final boss battle. While I'm all for having a final boss that is a challenge, and this one certainly is...it should be a challenge based on player skill and a small degree of luck, not based on the cheap little "bitch attacks" of the boss. The boss fight is one of those fights were you are shouting at the screen "How did he hurt me?" or "Why am I getting hurt by nothing??" As far as I can tell, in a typical fight, you are hurt by either A- the opponent's attacks, or B- the environment (lava, etc).

Geist introduces something new: an invisible and random "energy field/game pathway" that throws you either into the ceiling or ground unexpectantly and does damage to you for no explainable reason. All of a sudden, you just lose control and are hurt. And then the boss spazs out and hurts you even more.

Even after I figured out how to beat the boss, I probably still wasted a good half an hour just hoping that I might get completely lucky and avoid these damaging "throws" while avoiding the real boss attacks and returning fire. Frustrating it was.

Which brings up a thought- Are there any games out there that have a final boss that is impossible to defeat, because the designers created it to be impossible? As an object lesson or such?

Another subtracting note might be some of the design of the puzzles in the game. In one section, you have to find a bag of medicine for a man lying on a medical table. You know where the bag is (on a shelf) because you saw a flashback of it earlier. However, that shelf could be anywhere. I was wandering the corridors for quite a while just trying to figure out where to go next; turns out I had to run through a fire, taking half of my health away, before finding the room I needed. Then I died, but at least I knew where to go, and that I needed a fire extinguisher.

On a minor comment...part of the game's M rating is listed as "partial nudity." Wouldn't that imply that there is at least some nudity? The only "nudity" in the game is in the infamous locker room shower scene, and the ladies in question are completely covered in soap or towels. Hardly enough to warrant a mention.

The Bottom Line
Geist was blasted by the game journalists when it came out in 2005, but if it had been released as a 3rd or 4th generation Gamecube title, it would have become a must own. While the shooter mechanics are not up to par with a current shooter, the knowledge that the FPS aspect is just one part of the whole package elevates this game to a standard of excellence and creativity that the is definitely not the norm in the game industry.

Geist: a spectral masterpiece deserving a next-gen sequel.

The Good
Let’s face it. Geist got really mediocre reviews from almost everyone. Some of them were pretty brutal. I remember particularly one review in Game Informer Magazine being particularly strict on it.

Given the mediocre reviews of it, I would have never gotten my hands on Geist if it weren’t for my good friend, Randy. Randy had been waiting for this for months, and it just kept getting delayed. It finally came out…and damn he wouldn’t put it down. Well…if it weren’t for him, I would’ve read the magazine, and would have never laid hands on the game. And it just so happens that I found an excellent deal for the game at, of all places, Toys R’ Us. I nabbed the game for a mere $10.

Geist has something that really appeals to me: innovation. It tried pushing new borders with a concept that I am surprised hasn’t been exploited yet. In Geist, you are the ghost. Remember all of the games where you had to walk down that dark corridor, water dripping from the ceiling, scared for your life of the ghost that inhabited the facility? Well now YOU get to finally reverse the sides and you’re that poltergeist that’s making the inhabitants of the compound cower in fear.

Geist is a mixture of puzzle and FPS. The puzzle side of the game is a clever mixture of possessing objects, scaring people, and manipulating the environment to do what you want. The puzzles in the game are absolutely ingenious. They may take you a lot of time, but are all around, lots of fun to do. In order to possess a living thing, you must first scare it, which is a puzzle in itself. You need to pay close attention to your environment to see what you can and cannot use to scare the creature. This makes puzzles interesting, since it requires you to think about what you have the ability to do in your different forms to get to your goal. For example, you will need to use a box of food scare a group of rats. You then need to possess the rats, and carefully avoid a maze of mouse traps set up for you. With the mouse you can enter a small hole next to a locked door. The moue will make the dog bark, which will make the dog keeper come over…and well, you get the idea. Puzzles like this can go on for a long time. The best part is that they’re a lot of fun to do, just seeing what you can do. It is most likely the highlight of this game.

On the action side, the use of dispossession and possession can be a lot of fun during battle. When you dispossess, the world around you slows down, allowing you to view the battlefield, spy on enemies waiting in ambush, or even possess a turret. Hell, you can even possess the rockets the enemies shoot out of their guns! You can dispossess your body for a bit of fun too. Try and watch two guards fly from an explosion in slow motion. The experience is priceless.

The story is incredibly intriguing and will keep you quite interested. Volks Corp., a weapons making company in Southern France, has recently begun bizarre experiments. After your investigation mission goes wrong, you become one of those experiments. The story and motivations behind Volks’ experiments are clever and fascinating. I will say this, that Geist has one of the most original plots for an FPS that I have seen. Like a solid game, the plot unfold as it goes, and pushes the game along nicely, so that the story is refreshed often to keep you wanting to see what happens next. The characters are also well-developed. Almost all of the characters feel well-rounded, with both strengths and flaws. Even the antagonist shows plenty of emotion and sadness. The characters also have a nice feel of vividness about them, which distracts from the sometimes bland and depressing environments. The antagonist easily has to be my favorite character from the game because of his excellent display of emotion, strength, and good dialogue. The overall dark and moody feel mixes well with the sometimes goofy game play and dialogue that is in between the major plot points. However the dark plot and creepy atmosphere do well to make this story suspenseful and intriguing.

The multiplayer succeeds in holding your attention for a while. With capabilities of up to four players, possessing and killing each other is a ball. You can play with 1-4 players, or with up to 7 bots. You can even have 4 players vs. 4 bots in multiplayer! There’s your basic mode where you start as a ghost and can possess humans to attack others, or you can possess items like exploding crates, guns, missiles, and even other players if you have the ability. This mode is good for basic shootouts, but is still a lot of fun. Multiplayer matches often get hectic and frantic, for some great shootouts and lots of laughs. Another mode (I forget the name) is where one team must play as humans, and another as ghosts. The ghosts must possess the humans, and move their bodies to death traps around the area like spike pits, fans, electrical wires, or furnaces. The humans must avoid the ghosts, and when they get trapped must struggle against the ghosts to survive. This mode mixes the game play up a lot and is great because it’s a challenge. Playing as both teams is hard, because the bots are quite hard to beat. The last mode is not all that fun, so I will not mention it anyway. All around it is a blast to play, and by Gamecube’s standards the multiplayer for Geist is if not well-polished, just a lot of fun.

The Bad
By far the worst part of this game is its terrible use of old technology and all around outdated feeling. The graphics look and feel extinct. The lack of polish this game has practically comes through to you out of the TV screen.

For one, the action parts of the game lack any bit of grandeur. To put it simply, the shooting sections come as close to generic as generic can get. At its core, this game is just a big repetition of run-shoot-run-shoot. For one, the lack of enemy AI is apparent throughout most of the game. There is very little strategy involved at all within shootouts. Enemies use the same straight line rush that failed them back in the days of Doom. While a portion of these battles are fun, the majority of them aren’t. Some of them are actually just downright terrible. The novelty of being able to view a battle when you dispossess your body gets old after a while. The typical situation in Geist would be run and shoot, with some bit of possessions in the middle. Boss battles are often repetitive and tiring, and end up exhausting their interest before the battle is half over.

The graphics suffer from the same ailment. The lack of good graphics adds on to the fact that the environments for the game are simply bland and boring. The environments for the game are most often a dull palette of gray for indoors and yellow for outdoors. Almost all of the levels feel dark and uninspiring. In multiplayer the graphics even hamper the gameplay, with fuzzy resolutions making seeing the tiny four player screens quite hard to play with. The combat environments are almost entirely too linear and don’t allow for any room to find alternate paths or even some differentiation.

That brings me to my next point of how terribly low the replay value for the game is. For one, the puzzles for possession are entirely scripted. The problem with the concept of possession and ghosts is that it’s hard to maintain belief that you’re ghost when you can only possess a select amount of objects that the programmers selected for you. After going through the game, you begin to wonder. Why can I possess this can of paint but not this other one that looks exactly like it? If I am a ghost why can’t I just pass through the walls altogether? Besides that, puzzles only have one solution, which takes the fun out of replaying the game. The first time its fun to figure out what objects you need to find to get to the next area. The second time its so boring because you already know how to do it. The low replay value of the game is a definite deciding point when it comes to buying the game.

The Bottom Line
Geist is sort of like subliminal messaging. You really like the finished product, but really aren’t sure why. Geist certainly looks and feels outdated, but it still allows you to have a lot of fun. It has a fun, but not to overly complicated storyline, some good characters, and great atmosphere. The puzzles are fun and will definitely keep you interested. Unfortunately, the linear one player game and the lackluster FPS sections really bring down the replay value. The outdated feel is outrageously apparent in this game.

I think Geist gets extra points for doing something that no other games do. It tried to bring a new concept to the table. I’m not sure if the game did that well, but it opened up the idea to other companies, and I think that’s more worth it. After all, who knows if we see more games coming out like this? The FPS genre is cramped with WWII shooters and there really isn’t enough creativity flowing through it. It’s quite refreshing seeing a game trying to break the mold.

The linearity of the puzzles and the generic shooting sections really limit this game’s replay value. As a single-player game, this is a one-time play through. The multiplayer is a hell of a lot of fun, but it has limited options so it does not justify a high price. I would recommend renting the game. It allows you one play through of the game, and if you’ve got friends to play with then it gives you a great chance to enjoy a bit of the multiplayer. Its no Half Life 2, but is still fun nonetheless and deserves to be played by the gamer who is looking for a bit more than shooting Nazis in his FPS games.

Buyworthy: Anything more than $20 is too much for this game.
Rentworthy Recommended first.