Five years after its Early Access release, it might feel like you’ve seen everything Phasmophobia has to offer, but there’s an update in the works that is so significant that when it launches, the game’s creator told Eurogamer, it will feel like you’re playing a new game.
The update is known as Horror 2.0, which is also, confusingly, the same update that will launch the game into version 1.0, at some point next year. It’s been given that name because of what it contains. “We’re basically going to be reworking the entire horror in the game,” Phasmophobia creator Daniel Knight told me, during a longer interview now live on the site, “so everything is going to be changing.”
What that means – reworking the horror – is intentionally vague. “I can’t reveal too much because when we release the update, we’re just going to tell everyone there’s a new update, go and play,” Knight said. “We’re not going to do too many patch notes. We just want people to go in.” The hope is that this moment will feel to players like they’re exploring something for the first time again. “Almost like they’re playing a new game,” he said.
But will it really feel that significant? “That’s the direction we want to go in,” he said. “There’s going to be so much there, not just new things; we’re changing a lot. One of the biggest things we’re doing is a lot of audio rework. There’s a lot of little audio changes we want to do. I can’t reveal too much about it. We want people to, once that update comes out, feel like they’re playing a new game.”
Considerable work has been done to Phasmophobia in the five years it’s been available to play. Two of the most significant updates have been the launch of the console versions at the end of 2024, which brought cross-play, and the Chronicle update that launched at the end of June, which added video and sound recording to the game, among other things.
This Chronicle update in particular is an example of what Kinetic Games is now capable of. When Phasmophobia initially launched, in September 2020, and for 10 months afterwards, it was only one person working on the game: Knight. But now there are 29. The team grew from four people to 24 in 2024, so the Chronicle update was the first real showcase for what they can collectively do. (There are plans to grow to around 40 people in the future, incidentally.)
It’s a workforce that’s enabling Kinetic to systemically go through the game and rework maps and models and systems in the game, as well as add new things, all in anticipation of the big relaunch next year. The next big project is overhauling player character models. The holistic effect of these efforts should be startling for people who played at Early Access launch and return for 1.0. “People who stopped playing early on or something, they would come back at 1.0 and see a completely different game,” Knight said.
But development won’t stop after the 1.0 release (Horror 2.0) occurs. The game will be considered feature complete at this time, so have all of the major systems and pieces in place, but additional content will continue to be added. “We’re still going to carry on after 1.0,” Knight said, “still going to add more maps and content, but just at that point, we’ll be done with all the overhauling and reworking. We’re still going to be working on Phasmophobia for a long time after that.”
