Completion Time: 13h:50m:00s
Rating: 7/10

....................................................................................................

Going Ghost

....................................................................................................

As a rare instance of a first-party Nintendo game from the early-aughts with an M-rating, Geist has piqued my interest for some time now. But it wasn't something I possessed (pun intended) for myself until fairly recently. As stated around when October was starting up, the non-Resident Evil horror games for the GameCube are fairly limited, and so I'll take what I can get. And a game about ghosts, demons, and other dimensions? Well, sign me up.

Now, and only now, has Halloween truly started

However, in addition to this being a puzzle solving game about goblins and ghouls, I'm well aware that there are a ton of first-person shooter style sections, which have had me a bit worried. It's been ages since I played those types of games regularly, so I have no idea how I'll hold up in that regard. I just hope those are kept to a relative minimum.

....................................................................................................

Haunting Hijinks

....................................................................................................

On a routine mission to save his friend agent Bryson from the Volks Corporation, John Raimi gets ambushed, captured, and submitted to the experiments relating to Project Z. This involves separating the soul from the body and then brainwashing the specters to that the can head to a World summit, possess secret service, and assassinate delegates. Also in the middle of all of this, the company's founder, Alexander Volks, is opening a portal to hell for... some reason. That part really seems to be more accidental than anything else, but now alongside ghosts of humans you also have demons entering a rift from another dimension while all this political stuff is going on. It's been quite some time since I played something as complicated as this, that's for sure.

Demons look like the devil, tentacle monsters, or giant mutated snails. There's really no in between.

Now that the story is out of the way as best it can be, as I mentioned there are sort of two components to the gameplay. There are puzzles, and there are FPS sections. Most of the time you float around looking for objects to possess, so that you can scare a living being enough that you can possess them and move about freely. Then you'll encounter various tasks that range from managing power levels for elevator operation to poisoning guards lunches to clear out a room to engaging in a riveting mini-game about... riveting.

An honest days work for a semi-undead such as myself.

And to its credit, the puzzles are where I think this game shines the brightest. The FPS moments in Geist are fine enough in operation, but they can be a little bland with just moving from room to room and mowing down enemy guards. Even still, with the exception of a couple bosses and then only two variations of casual demon, most everyone that you're attacking is just another human. At times this feels more like a Medal of Honor game than what I was expecting. Thankfully, some chapters combine the two so that the very act of fighting off your opponents comes down to solving puzzles. My favorite of these is a fight against on of the commanding officers. You need to possess a nearby valve so that you can release toxic steam, which will frighten all of the guards in the room. Then it's up to you as you hop around from guard to guard, including two ceiling-mounted turrets, and just take out everyone you can in the hopes that the boss of the area doesn't get a chance to destroy all of your potential vessels, leading you to a game over.

With the dank, must, and decay all around us, I doubt this smells too terrible all things considered.

The bosses are well set up too, if a little redundant. There are two demonic entities that you fight, and both get repeated a handful of times to the point where you're a little sick of them. Perhaps my favorite of these are the twin golem fights which I still don't really understand, as they appear to be unrelated to any of the events going on in the game. But these giant statues stomp around trying to crush you, and its up to you to shoot all of their weak spots until they slow down, and only then can you do damage. There are two, however, so good luck slowing down enough to get good hits in. Its bizarre and creative things like this that make Geist a ton of fun to play, even in the areas where it perhaps doesn't hold up as well as it could.

Starting to feel a bit like God of War here. Maybe Geist of War?

....................................................................................................

Completing the Game

....................................................................................................

Unfortunately, completion is sort of where the seams begin to unravel here. There are two primary types of collectible that you can find throughout the game: Ghost Collectibles and Host Collectibles. That is to say, items that you can only grab in ghost form and ones that require you to be possessing a living being. These are simple enough, some are well hidden and others you’ll just sort of run into. The Ghost items increase your spirit meter for ghostly activities, and the Host ones unlock new multiplayer maps and characters for every two you obtain. Following this would be Possessed Hosts and Possessed Objects, which is just a percentage tally, but the game logs it so I’m including it. Again, pretty simple, I missed no hosts on my first go around and only had to go back for 3 objects.

I am a non-energy efficient lightbulb. FEAR ME!

Where things really suck are when you reach the text logs. This was a huge pain in the ass for a couple of reasons (one of which was accidentally self-imposed). So what’s considered a text log? Well, every time you inspect an item, a text box comes up with your thoughts on it. Pretty straight-forward, RPGs have been doing this for years. But there are a TON in the game, and another percentage captures what you’ve read and logs it to the completion menu, so I just had to go out and find all of these. And there are so many, and they aren’t easily recognizable because it’s just, well, the environment, and none of it’s useful. One of the items I was missing was an unassuming coffee mug in Chapter 2, just sitting next to a laptop. Nothing stood out about it, just a blue mug. But I forgot to inspect it. This was an enormous drain of my fun with the game up to this point, but what’s worse is that I was blindly searching chapters for what I was missing. Little did I know, the aforementioned completion screen actually shows you the chapter breakdown for each completion criteria, but you have to highlight particular section (which never really looked like a highlight to me) and then select it, which the game never really tells you. I found this out roughly 10 minutes before I logged my completion of the game, as there was a single thing I was missing before I discovered this "secret".

Before

After

Geist is a lot of fun to play, but a real pain to complete. The game itself can be surprisingly funny at times, and the regular collectibles have some unique and pretty hidden ways to obtain them, such as the aforementioned riveting mini-game. Honestly the only real downside to the game or completion would be those text logs, which seems like just pointless busy work given that 100% in that category doesn't give you anything. But I definitely recommend that folks play this one all the way through at least once, it's definitely interesting and mixes a bunch of different mechanics into a fun experience.

This is another entry in a series where I go through and complete every GameCube game, as it is the largest part of my video game collection. GameCube Games: 9/652