Ghost Cam AR is a horror augmented reality game for iOS (ARKit). Ghosts are hunting you and you need to survive as long as possible. To survive, you need to kill the ghost, which you can do by using your camera flash. Well, not your real camera’s flash, a virtual one, the virtual one in the game. You can only take pictures of the ghosts if they are fully visible. The time of survival indicates your score.
Gameplay
I was waiting to play the game at night, to get to feel the game better. This is not my first horror AR experience, I’ve also played dARk: Subject One. dARk: Subject One was a very short experience, and before I was able to even understand what’s going on, the experience was over. That being said, the creepy atmosphere was convincing.
Ghost Cam AR is just straight on gameplay without any backstory. The game starts immediately after you press the “Start ” button. At the top of the screen, you see your battery meter and a timer. You can die if one of the two things happen: the energy reaches zero or a ghost catches you before you are able to locate it. The good news is that there are energy capsules in your surroundings.
Ghosts will spawn around you at random. You need to continuously rotate and look for them. There will be a static sound and visual effects that alerts the user of a closeby ghost. Now, this is not a game like ghosthuntAR: Survival, in which the ghosts are very much visible and spawn all over the place. This game was designed to create suspension and to be scary, so the gameplay plays at relatively slow pace.
Fun Factor
I really liked the ghosts’ voices, their semi-transparent look, and the visual effects. The visuals and sounds helped deliver suspension and have to admit that I felt quite scared while playing it. I was on an empty street at night, nobody was there to make me feel safe. Although I knew I was playing a video game, those sounds probably triggered some memories from other scary situations or movies that I’ve seen and I start feeling anxious.
All that means that the visual design and sounds were done well. Having said that, the game mentioned the word score in the tutorial, but I haven’t seen any score at the end of the game. There is no global leaderboard either.
Without anything to reward the player for the time he spends playing the game, the game just felt like a very unexciting horror experience and nothing more. So the thing is that as a sheer horror experience it’s quite bad as there is no narrative and other elements to create an emotional bond with anything within this ghostly world. As a game, it felt very incomplete.
This is why I could only enjoy the suspension part where you hear the ghosts’ voices and of course being able to meet them face to face for the first time. Although it was challenging to survive, I felt no need to play it all over again. Of course, I did it just for the review, to make sure I am not missing anything. However, if I was a casual user, I would have uninstalled it right after the first run.
This is not how you deliver a good gameplay experience. I personally don’t understand why if a developer already bother to create a nice game, why not invest a bit more and add more feature for better replay value; a scoreboard is something to start with. Even the opening and the UI felt very much lacking and a background music could have improved the experienced ten-fold. I still recommend playing it with headphones improve the experience.
Overall, it just feels like a good idea that just turned into a forgettable experience. It’s not a good game, but it could have been a good one with a bit more effort.
You can download the game from the App Store here.