We Are So Dead: never play with a ouija board, and if you do not believe me, try this one

First piece of advice today, and it is serious: never play with a ouija board. It is dangerous. If you do not believe me, try it in We Are So Dead, and you will come back changed.

Not because an entity will follow you home. Because you will have spent forty minutes trying to spell the word corridor to friends who will read cousin.

The concept, which is excellent

Studio REAL PLAYERS had an idea nobody had tried, and it fits in one sentence: in this two-to-six-player co-op session, one of you starts out already dead.

That player becomes the ghost, and they see everything. The creature hunting the others, the safe spots, the exit, what will kill whom and when. They hold all the useful information.

The only problem is that they cannot speak. They cannot touch anything, they are not heard by the living, and their only voice consists of flickering a few lights and moving the planchette across a ouija board to point at letters, answer yes or no, or laboriously spell things out. All while the living, under pressure, try to read it and half wonder whether it is really them.

There it is. That is the whole beauty of it. The game does not frighten you by hiding information, it makes you suffer by handing it to someone who can barely pass it on.

Why it should work

Because it is a design idea, not a gimmick. Co-op horror games usually rest on shared ignorance: nobody knows, everybody panics. Here the panic comes from asymmetry, and it produces two registers at once, tension for the living and a fairly cruel comedy for the dead.

The rest is well conceived. The demon changes every game, its rules are hidden and different each session, and only the dead discover what they are, when it strikes and where. The house has nine floors to descend, and you must gather the relics the ritual needs, with the living carrying each piece while the ghost steers them around what they cannot see.

A detail that matters: ghosts can hear the living, and each other. The further the session goes, the more dead there are, and therefore the more perfectly informed people are watching the survivors take the wrong turn. You can picture the soundscape.

What will need checking

The game launches on 17 August in Early Access, so there are no reviews yet and we are not scoring it. Good news, it is available in French, which matters a great deal in a game about spelling words.

Two unknowns will decide everything. The first is the board's legibility. The entire mechanic rests on that device, and it must be precise enough for the ghost to genuinely point at something, while staying laborious enough to create tension. Too smooth and the trick disappears. Too imprecise and it is pure frustration.

The second is the demon's replayability. The studio announces hidden rules that change each session, which is exactly right, but if the number of variants is small, regulars will recognise them within three games and the fear will fade.

One last word, and it is a genuine warning: play this with people you like enough to forgive for letting you die because they read YES instead of NO.