YMMV / Phasmophobia

• Breather Boss: The Deogen, widely agreed to be the least threatening ghost in the game. While the fact that you outright cannot hide from it sounds scary on paper, in practice it's very easy to outrun it or simply circle-strafe it around a table or other sufficiently large piece of geometry due to its pitifully slow chase speed when close enough to the player. While it presents a threat if you're in a closed space, as long as you have a smudge stick to run through it if it corners you, you can get past it and get to a safe looping spot with no further issue.
• Breather Level: Downplayed, since Nightmare Mode is going to be difficult and dangerous regardless. It's often Nintendo Hard by design, including determining the type of ghost, since the ghost suppresses one of their three pieces of evidence, meaning that players can only find two of them to narrow the ghost down to a few possible choices, and depending on which combination of evidence you get, it can be very difficult to determine decisively and may require an educated guess. However, as of the holiday update, having a Mimic makes the ghost much easier to identify; since the Ghost Orbs surrounding it are not one of its three "official" evidence types and will thus never be suppressed, if players find orbs and two other pieces of evidence (out of Fingerprints, Freezing Temperatures, and Spirit Box), this immediately reveals the ghost as The Mimic, making it the easiest ghost to determine fairly quickly.
• Common Knowledge:
  • The belief that swearing near the ghost or saying its name will cause it to become more aggressive is only partially true; while it does increase the chance of interactions (throwing objects, opening doors, etc.), it does not increase the chance of an event or a hunt.
  • Despite The Twins' name and ability description, it does not count as two separate ghosts; rather, it is one ghost with a greatly extended range at which it can perform interactions, thus creating the illusion that there are two ghosts in two separate rooms.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Watching your teammate get killed by a ghost is one thing. Taking a photograph of their corpse is another thing entirely, especially when you get paid a paltry $10 for it.
  • The game's payouts are really low for the fact that there is genuine mortal danger and it's frequent at least one person of the ghost hunting team will die. At most you can make somewhere along the lines of 100 dollars for a job dangerous enough to be worth at least 500 per hunt. And the fact that life insurance payout is two digits makes it seem like HQ is a Pointy-Haired Boss paying pennies to people they expect to have a life expectancy of a few days at most.
• Game-Breaker: The thermometer, even if the ghost isn't one of the types that causes below freezing, there's still a sharp enough drop where they're present that regardless of type you can pinpoint its room and even its spawn point within a minute of walking into the map. The Halloween patch dialed this back a bit though, by making the area the temperature drops in much wider so you can get a general idea of where the ghost is, but until you find the freezing point it's wide enough it could still be two or three different rooms. Further Nerf patches were also made to slow down how frequently it updates temperatures, and the location now gets cold enough with the breaker power off^note and Professional difficulty now starts an investigation with power off and rooms at cool temperatures that its extremely difficult to detect a non-freezing temp ghost without turning power back on and giving several minutes for the room to warm up first.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The Spirit Box responses from the ghosts, such as "Adult", "Here" and "Attack", especially the flat synthetic male voice delivery used in early versions of the game.
  • "Ya be."^explanation A meme originating from when Fubuki was playing the game and encountered one of the above voice clips, with the spirit box saying "ATTACK". Fubuki responded with "Yabe" (approximately Japanese for "oh no"), with a Punctuated! For! Emphasis! delivery that caught on like wildfire. This meme is more popular in the Hololive community, but it's seen some play in the Phasmophobia community as well.
• Nightmare Fuel: Has a subpage now.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • The ghosts in the game can be horrifying, but the character models are... strange to say the least. Bodies will contort in odd ways when looking up or down, the players appear to be seeing from the characters' chests, and characters hold objects away from their body in bizarre ways. As a result, a normally scary environment can become hilarious in certain contexts.
  • The ghosts can strike rather slinky poses at times, similar to bikini or lingerie shoots. This is despite the fact that the figures are sometimes male. And ghosts. And covered in blood.
  • Depending on how serious your group is taking the game it can tone down the fear factor a lot, painting your crew of ghost hunters as foul-mouthed, rancorous, irreverent idiots acting borderline Too Dumb to Live in their attempts to persuade the ghost to show evidence.
  • The game uses the same engine and many of the same furniture/object assets as House Flipper. Your mileage may vary on whether this makes Phasmophobia less creepy or House Flipper more creepy. Funnily enough, one of the late-game missions in House Flipper has you dealing with an actual haunted house—though instead of busting out the EMF reader and spirit box, you simply have to rebury the coffin in the backyard.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • The ghosts can be hard to find, but they're never too far away. Sometimes they'll open doors and turn off lights on their own. But if you don't see them do it, you might suddenly be questioning whether it was an actual ghost event or maybe one of your own teammates did it.
  • Patch changelogs don't actually cover all changes made to the game. While changes to gameplay features, UI improvement, and bugfixes are documented, some rather substantive additions to ghost behaviour and appearance have been made without any mention. This gives rise to seemingly credible hoaxes as players speculate on what has been secretly added to the game.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Some players find that Professional difficulty is just too easy. So they decide to challenge themselves by only allowing the use of candles or even foregoing light sources altogether, making the game that much scarier in the process.
  • The Apocalyse Update screams this since it allows you to create a custom game. Only a true masochist would want to start a game with zero sanity, no flashlights, and absurdly-long hunts. On the plus side, making the game harder for yourself increases the amount of money you earn.
• That One Boss: Raiju are uniquely enraged by having electronics on in their presence, drastically increasing their likelihood of hunting and their speed. The main issue comes because of how almost all of the evidence gatherers requires electronics means that it's incredibly easy for hunters to max out its aggression and speed by forgetting to turn off tools they weren't using. Even worse, tools that were still turned on when dropped by players still anger it, which can result in a brutal feedback loop on higher difficulties where a hunter dies, drops all of their turned-on electronics, which sit there continuing to anger the Raiju until it hunts again shortly after. To many players, a Raiju is considered a scarier ghost to deal with than a Demon because of this behavior.
• That One Level:
  • The larger maps qualify, but one of the primary offenders and possibly the most difficult map to navigate is the Asylum, mainly due to the sheer size of it. Featuring two main wings, each large enough on their own to be considered a small sized map, a large central area, and a basement with two smaller wings, it is by far the largest map in the game. Combined with the slow movement speed of characters, getting from one end to the other takes several minutes. On Professional difficulty, with the faster Sanity drain, it's almost a guarantee that you'll run out of sanity if you don't find the ghost room quickly. The only saving grace is that there are plenty of side rooms to hide in when a hunt occurs.
  • Special shoutout also goes to the "Willow Street House", which has no closets or lockers to hide in, meaning the ghost has a higher chance of running into their prey due to the sheer amount of space despite being a small map.
  • The Maple Lodge Campsite is a map that is almost entirely outdoors. While not devoid of hiding places unlike the Willow Street House, and fairly small, the issue comes from the fact that it lacks distinct areas and is very dark with the generator off. It's not unheard of for players to spend over fifteen minutes on this map without even finding the ghost, between the lack of demarcation between the zones other than the cabin, the fact that the ambient temperature outside the lodge will always be low, and the weather effects, which can either prevent you from using candles and smudge sticks in the case of heavy rain, or mask the sounds a ghost makes during high winds.
• That One Sidequest: The optional "take a picture of dirty water" objective hardly ever worked; in order for it to occur, a ghost had to be in a room with a sink like a bathroom or kitchen, and if your ghost spawned in the bedroom, living room, or basement, you couldn't get the objective. The developer actually removed this as a possible optional objective because of how unreliable it was to actually get it; while dirty water is still in-game, all you get for photographing it now is some extra cash.

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