For what it’s worth, Kinetic Games have the August update labled as a “minor update” on their development log but I beg to differ. Phasmophobia’s developers have been sharing sneak peeks at the update since earlier this month and things are looking especially frightening. The former solo developer project picked up a second programmer and a 3D artist earlier this year. With dedicated art support, all the tools you’re used to carrying around are getting a face lift. You can spot a bunch of the lot in this post, but there are closeups of several newly freshened tools, including the extra creepy ghost writing book, the new “Bony” brand digital camera, and a much more worn in basic flashlight. As far as equipment goes though, the highlight has got to be the new video camera, which looks like it might have a night vision mode. Oh yes, I am absolutely ready to scream and die while holding that. Aside from just the equipment overhaul, there are other pretty large changes coming to Phasmo, though their details haven’t been quite as revealed. Another two new ghosts are incoming, hot on the heels of the first two new ghosts added in June. There will also be a new type of evidence, which seems likely related to the super spooky screenshot up top of what appears to be—from my hasty search for ghost hunting tools—a laser grid projector. Kinetic Games have also listed “sprinting adjustments” for the August update. They don’t elaborate, but given that Phasmophobia’s sprint button still pretty much feels like a crawl, I can only imagine that our run speed will be increased a bit. Aside from all those changes coming to the game this month, Phasmo’s development plan has had a bit of an overhaul as well. Since the last time I looked at it, that development Trello board has gotten culled and organised a bit, grouping planned changes into categories like “Horror 2.0” featuring hallucinations and “New Content Drop” for new maps and equipment. I was pretty psyched last year to see how Phasmophobia would expand between last October and this one. After multiple new maps, two new ghosts, and a lot of AI tweaks, I’ve been pretty happy to keep coming back for more spooks over the past year.
