Haunted Heist: the ghosts can mute your microphone and swap your voice with a friend's

I am going to list the ghost team's powers, and I want you to read them slowly.

Night vision. Muting a player's microphone. Swapping two players' voices. Disguises. Invisibility. Voice modulation. And the ability to strike from the shadows before vanishing.

Three of those six powers do not attack your character. They attack your means of communicating.

The premise

Haunted Heist is a round-based asymmetrical party game for three to eight players.

A team of Heisters has to retrieve gems scattered through a procedurally generated mansion and return them to their safe room before time runs out. If they manage it, they win. If the timer expires, or they are wiped out, the mansion claims another crew.

Opposite them, a team of Tricksters haunts the halls and sabotages everything.

It is 8.20 euros, it came out yesterday, and it sits at seventy-two positive reviews out of seventy-three.

Why the Tricksters' powers are so well judged

Because they worked out where the real fear lives in a co-op game.

In the overwhelming majority of multiplayer horror games, your voice chat is a safe zone. The monster can kill you, but it cannot stop you shouting "he's behind you". Your friends are reliable infrastructure sitting on top of the game.

Haunted Heist attacks that infrastructure.

They mute you, and you watch your crew walk into a trap unable to say a word.

They swap your voice with somebody else's, and nobody knows who is talking any more.

They put on disguises, and the silhouette waving at you down the corridor may not be who you think.

That is not horror any more, it is paranoia, and it is infinitely more effective among friends. A monster chasing you becomes routine after three rounds. A friend you can no longer be sure is a friend never does.

And the Heisters are not idle

What stops the game tipping into the arbitrary is that the other side has real constraints to manage.

Heisters carry a handgun, a flashlight, flares and defibrillators. And they have to manage their battery, conserve ammo, and stay close to one another to avoid being picked off.

Read those three constraints together. Your torch is draining, your bullets are counted, and the game asks you to stay grouped.

And staying grouped is exactly what slows you down when you have to search an entire mansion for gems before the timer runs out.

That is the central tension, and it is clean: you cannot be both efficient and safe. Every minute, somebody suggests splitting up, and every time it is a decision.

Proximity chat does the rest. You only hear people nearby, which means splitting up also means losing information.

There are powerups to collect that restore resources, enhance equipment or help you navigate the halls.

The abilities run on cooldowns

A technical detail that matters more than it looks: every Trickster power has a cooldown.

Which means a Trickster cannot harass you continuously. They have to pick the moment. Muting somebody while they cross an empty room achieves nothing; doing it three seconds before they open the right door is devastating.

So the game rewards patience and reading the situation rather than spam, which is exactly what an asymmetrical game needs. The bad ones hand out powers you use the instant they are available. This one hands out powers you save.

The reservations, because there are some

Population. That is the only real risk. A three to eight player game, at eight euros, in Steam's most crowded genre, lives or dies on its ability to fill lobbies. Fifty-two people online as I write is the day after release, and says nothing about next month.

And seventy-three reviews is few. The reception is near unanimous, but on a sample that does not yet allow talk of consensus. I flag it for honesty.

That said, at eight euros, for a game that holds eight people, the arithmetic does itself.

And if you want a reason to try it, take this one: there are very few games where you can steal your best friend's voice to send his team into the wrong room.

It is horrible. Do it.

Got a story about a voice swap that went wrong? That is exactly what we want to read on the InsertCoins Discord.