Geist is a long-forgotten GameCube title that tried to do something VERY different with the old shooter formula
Geist is easily one of the strangest games ever published by Nintendo. You think Mario, you think Zelda, you think Pokemon … you don’t necessarily think “weirdo first person shooter where you play a ghost named after the guy who directed The Evil Dead and you can turn into a dog and feed soldiers poison.”
But that’s what makes Geist worth talking about all these years later. In a lot of respects it’s a pretty mediocre game, but you have to give it some credit for trying something fairly unique in a done-to-death video game genre.
But first — the backstory.
You see, the game wasn’t designed in house by Nintendo. The game was actually designed by a company called n-Space, who was probably best known for making licensed games based on stuff like Rugrats and Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen. For whatever reason, they wanted to get really experimental and conjure up this bizarre shooter/adventure/horror game and when they showed a demo to Nintendo … Nintendo actually liked it and decided to partner with them for the game that would eventually be called Geist.
You can kinda see what the developers were going for here. It’s basically a combination of Half-Life and Metroid Prime — two of the most celebrated shooters ever — with a healthy bit of that cult-classic Sega Genesis game The Haunting! Starring PolterGuy thrown into the mix for extra lulz.
The premise of Geist is definitely intriguing. You play a top secret agent guy in France named Raimi (gee, I wonder where that name came from?) who is investigating an evil corporation and through some sort of supernatural hokum you end up having your spirit knocked out of your body … which isn’t that bad of a deal, since you can just possess the body of whoever you want to.
Of course, it’s not that simple. You see, you CAN possess living beings in this game — and you’ll be doing that a lot, obviously — but before you can take over their meat sacks you have to properly scare them out of their wits first. This is where Geist definitely shines brightest; you have to temporarily possess inanimate objects and bring them to life so that you’re intended living target will get nice and spooked and therefore become the perfect host for your miscellaneous purposes.
You can tell the programmers of the game had a lot of fun here. For example, there’s one part of the game where you can possess a bowl of kibble and scare a guard dog, and another where you can make water faucets (appear to) run red with human blood and cause a woman wearing only a towel to run screaming out of the showers. There’s a lot of B-horror movie moments like that scattered throughout the game and they really are the best part of the entire experience. Bro, you can POSSESS lug nuts and roll around on the floor if you want to — you can’t say THAT isn’t novel.
EASILY my favorite part of the game is a sequence where you’re stuck in a cafeteria with a buncha enemy soldier and you can’t leave until they’re all incapacitated and stuff. Well, you don’t have any weapons on you, but you CAN possess the chef, sneak around the corner, grab a can of rat poison and dump it in the beef stew. It’s absolutely fiendish stuff, especially considering it’s technically a game from the same publisher who gave us Animal Crossing and Mario Kart.
There are a lot of cool and inventive things about Geist, but unfortunately it kinda’ squanders its momentum by becoming a very formulaic shooter game in its second half. Anybody who has held a GameCube controller in their hands before can tell you that it’s not ideal for Halo-like shooters and when Geist turns into a shootout, it’s very clunky and frustrating. The enemies get cheaper, the weapons get crappier and the hit detection is very suspect — as in, your enemies are always able to tag you from half a mile away, even though it sometimes doesn’t even register when you shoot them in the face from point blank range.
The game does just about EVERY dirty trick in the book to pad out its run time. You’ve got ridiculously complex puzzles popping up out of nowhere that are so unintuitive you pretty much HAVE to look the solutions up on YouTube, because how else could anybody figure it out. Some of the boss fights are just egregiously, unreasonably long (although the one where you have to fight that giant rolling ball of random machine part and can only defeat it by possessing and subsequently blowing up barrels of dynamite conveniently scattered throughout the stage is pretty cool.) By the time the ghost enemies show up — who have the ability to knock the spirit out of your host — the game stops being fun and turns into an absolute frustrating mess. The final boss fights are just, in particular, is so irritating and confusing that I still don’t know how to hurt the MFer, even after watching three or four tutorials on YouTube. To say that Geist finishes poorly is being FAR too generous.
There’s a lot of reasons to really, really dislike Geist, but the upfront stuff is so fun and unique that it almost balances out the game’s horrendous-to-the-point-of-being-unplayable back end. I’d really like to see this concept revisited and tackled by a dev team that knows what they’re doing — it’s such a great idea for a game that I’m kinda surprised it hasn’t been full-tilt remade by somebody by now.
It’s a flawed game (a VERY flawed one, really) but it has its moments. If nothing else, Geist is at least a tremendous concept for a horror-shooter hybrid … even if its execution is a VERY mixed bag.
