Everyone has that one spot in their house that feels off. An area where they subconsciously hold their breath when they need to be there and do everything to get in and out as fast as possible. As a child, that area in my home was the stairwell from the top landing to the bottom. It was a perfectly okay stairwell until you turned your back on the top landing and had to walk down it with your heart in your throat. Your eyes deadset in front of you lest you see something you really, really shouldn’t.
Why am I talking about those dreaded places where you never feel truly alone? Because Midnight Ghost Hunt is an entire game based on those very places. When I first watched Ghostbusters as a child, I remember how all my friends and I had the aspiration: we would be ghostbusters when we grew up. Even though that never ended up happening for even one of us, playing Midnight Ghost Hunt is a pretty good condolence prize to life dreams unfulfilled.
The premise for Midnight Ghost Hunt is as simple as it gets: You get placed in a location that is crawling with ghosts, and it’s up to you to bust them. Next thing you know, you are the ghost needing to avoid getting busted. Midnight Ghost Hunt consists of fast-paced 4v4 matches where each round, the teams swap, and it’s some of the most fun to be found in the genre.
There is a core unbalance to how powerful the ghost hunters and how weak the ghosts are, a set-up to some of the most hilarious gameplay I’ve experienced in a long, long while. Nothing is quite as satisfying as hiding your ghost form in a roaming toilet and having hunters continually run past you without a second glance. The initial unbalance also doesn’t stay permanently; if you manage not to get caught as the ghost and the clock strikes midnight, everything changes. The midnight ghosts are the same ones that used to haunt my childhood stairwell; they are more powerful, deadlier and out for blood and the hunters? Well, they’re now the ones on the run.
To counterbalance the weakness of the ghosts in the early evening, players can select from multiple abilities and skills to add to their loadout. While in the case of the ghosts, most of these abilities are aimed at confusing and messing with the hunters, the hunter’s loadout is specifically designed for hunting and exterminating ghosts.
Midnight Ghost Hunt is, at its core, a strategy game, and there is a lot of fun to be found in figuring out all the best tactics and approaches. However, unlike other strategy titles, I wasn’t once tempted to head to google to figure things out; instead, I wanted to learn while playing. It wasn’t long before I had already found my favourite hiding places on each map and knew which loadout for both the ghost and the hunter worked best for me.
The magic in Midnight Ghost Hunt lies in the frantic energy and silliness created by the game. Yes, I was playing a competitive 4v4 versus game. However, unlike when I play something like PUBG or CS-GO, the scales never tipped to feel more competitive than fun. I think that’s not only what sets the game aside from others, but it’s also what makes it special.
