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The Cumbersome Geist

October 14, 2005 By Glenn Turner

I decided to try out Geist a bit before moving onto Silent Hill 1 proper and came away a tad frustrated. Geist poorly mangles a FPS console experience but invigorates it with a 'possession' aspect, where you (as the titular ghost) can inhabit and take over a host. The challenge in Geist is often in trying to figure out how to possess what and who to do it to.

It slightly reminds me of Keiichiro Toyama's Siren with it's possession device as well as it's frustration factor. Whereas with Siren I quickly tired of memorizing patterns, Geist had me wrenching my Wavebird out of sheer frustration. The actual 'first person shooting' component feels clunky, where often I was mashing buttons I thought should elicit a specific effect but either did nothing, or did the opposite of what I wanted to. What's worse is that often jumping in and out of hosts requires a bit more finesse than I was able to squeeze out of the control scheme. For instance, there's a confrontation that requires you to quickly inhabit one host and immediately send yourself towards a target. Unfortunately, upon infiltrating the host you're thrust 180 degrees in the opposite direction. This may be because of the direction that one host was traveling in or it may have been just a knee-jerk 'flip ya about' technique but see, here's the kicker:

You're inhabiting a grenade.

If it's the former where you're looking through the 'eyes' of a grenade, just where are the eyepieces on a piece of weaponry like this? Does a grenade need a pair of contacts as it ages in the armory? Why can't it be looking at it's thrower rather than the potential point of impact? It'd make my life a lot easier.

Like you probably did, I heard about the 'dog food' possession. I don't have a problem with that oddly enough, because for some reason I don't think of food (dog or otherwise) as being mundane objects. Here are just some of the other objects you can possess in Geist:

- garbage cans
- turbines
- crates
- more garbage cans
- explosive crates

What's more amusing is that upon possessing a garbage can, you can suddenly cause all of the refuse it contains to project up and combust in the air. I literally laughed out loud the first time I saw it happen. It took seeing it occur two more times until I actually believed what I was seeing.

It's a great concept - being able to manipulate people and surroundings by becoming the surroundings but the overall execution, even without the clunky shooting, seems to have misfired a bit. Of course, I'm judging this based on about 45 minutes with the title but ... thanks to the dodgy host jumping, I'm turned off enough by it to move along to the next title. There are simply too many other quality games in my queue to excusably burden myself by finishing something this cobbled together.

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