Pacify Haunts Better With Friends

You just signed on with PAH Inc, Paranormal Activity Helpers Incorporated. The pay is good and they promise you will never be in real danger, which is exactly what a company says before sending you into a house where people stopped coming back. A broker wants to sell the place, but the whole town whispers that evil lives inside, so he needs proof it is safe. The job sounds simple: look around, and if anything supernatural is going on, bring evidence back. The house is over a hundred years old, built by a family that ran a funeral parlor, and rumor says they offered clients one last conversation with their dead. One of those rituals went wrong. The owners and a visitor were never seen again, and neither were several people who came to investigate. Some kids swear they heard laughter and saw a little girl in the window.

The girl in the house switches between good and evil, and different circumstances push her over the edge. Once the evil takes over, it chases you and your friends through the narrow corridors of a dark old house, and it gets smarter and faster as the game goes on. Your job is to find a way to pacify it and escape. Notes scattered around hold clues about how. Keys, dolls, wood and matches are the tools of the trade, and where you find them matters. The girl can hear and see you, so staying out of sight and keeping quiet is half the game. One moment you are creeping past a doorway with a doll under your arm; the next, she rounds the corner and the whole plan becomes a sprint.

Pacify is built as separate missions, each one a capture job for a unique paranormal entity. Every mission brings its own environment, its own story, its own gameplay and its own monsters, so each job feels like a fresh contract from PAH Inc. Endings are not fixed either: levels have multiple endings, so how a night ends depends on what you and your group actually manage to do down there. That gives the game a natural rhythm for a horror evening: pick a mission, figure out what the entity wants, argue about the plan, and see which ending you earn. Since each level plays by its own rules, a strategy that carried you through one house will not necessarily save you in the next.

This is a game made for a group. Up to six of you can take a job together, and the proximity voice chat turns every corridor into comedy: your friends only hear you when you are close, and in certain situations or environments the chat applies voice-changing effects, so your panicked instructions may not come out as instructions. In co-op you can genuinely save each other: when the girl catches someone, an interruption from a teammate breaks her hold.