This preview was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content.

“So there’s this guy, right, and he kinda gets this wacky experiment done on him that sucks his metaphysical essence out of his cold, dead body. Sounds gross, obviously, but because this guy is nothing but a floating soul with glowy eyes – he can totally possess people and animals. Also, toilet paper rolls.”

That was the meeting at N-Space that set Geist off onto its hectic and adventurous three-year development process. I know because I was there. I was possessing the potted plant on the conference room table.

That’s what Geist, the mostly first-person shooter coming in August for the GameCube, is all about. You start the game as John Raimi, a classic elite soldier who gets captured during an infiltration mission at a bizarre and creepy research facility owned by the corrupt and nefarious Volks Corporation. Once captured, he’s put through an experiment that separates his soul/aura/spirit/essence from his physical body. As a roaming spirit John has the ability to “possess” and control pretty much anything from bunny rabbits to assault cannons. Using this new… power, John needs to escape the facility and perhaps find a way to reunite with his flesh and blood.

Just because you’re pretty much a ghost doesn’t mean you can just float out of the complex. No, you’re bound to some physical restrictions, so when you want to move around you need a physical host to do it for you. This whole aspect adds a dynamic level of puzzle-solving to the game from the start, but still gives you a powerful arsenal to accomplish your tasks. The ideal mode of transit is inside a person you’ve possessed, but before you can actually claim someone’s body you need to weaken his spirit to allow for the possession. This most arduous of tasks is performed by scaring – yes, scaring – your target until he’s so freaked out you can just grab ahold of his body and get moving. To scare people, you do what any ghost would do: make creepy noises and make stuff move around the room.

The game’s engine makes that rather simple, as pretty much any object in the game can be possessed. In one demo we were shown, we had to possess a piece of paper that a guard was carrying and when he started to read it, mess around with the words to freak him out. Little critters like mice and rats can be possessed easily too, both for some puzzle elements and to scare some of the more skittish enemies on the base.

Once you’ve possessed a guard the game becomes a pretty straightforward FPS. Any weapons he has become yours, and if your unwilling host happens to take on a few more bullets than he can stand, he dies and you just float away and look for another life to ruin. That means, by conventional definition, you can’t die in this game (one of the advantages of being technically dead already).

Geist’s interface and control scheme is sharpened down to a real noticeable level of precision. Seemingly complicated tasks like possessing things and manipulating specific environmental elements are made easy by using a context-sensitive control scheme with a very helpful HUD interface that shows what button will do what, much like previous Zelda games and the like. Typically, the A button is reserved for possessing and dispossessing while the B and Y buttons are used for context-sensitive actions used to scare people. The left and right shoulder buttons are used for primary and secondary fire when you happen to have both a body and a gun. The FPS element of the game is quite polished, and feels just like a console shooter should feel.

You can’t exactly just grab a gun and blow your way through the hundreds and hundreds of guards and checkpoints, so you need to use some tact to make it out of the building. Guard dogs can tell when a person is being possessed by you, and there are various security checkpoints where people are scanned for possession as well, so there are parts where you need to be on your best behavior to avoid detection or find a way to subvert the dogs and checkpoints; you could always just throw caution to the wind and try the guns-blazin’ approach. Hey, it’s not your body... you’re just borrowing it.

Geist also includes a two to four-player split screen multiplayer mode, which is less about spirits and possessing things and more about just running around and killing your friends, though some possession elements are carried over for a dash of flavor, like the ability to take over giant turrets and cannons.

Save a few Medal of Honor ports, the GameCube’s first party-heavy library is mostly bare of decent shooters (especially if you don’t consider the Metroid Prime games to be first-person shooters; we don’t) and it’s nice to see a good, innovative, and action-packed game like Geist come around for the withering and oft-overlooked little cousin of the game console world. The preview builds we looked at were a bit early and featured some common hiccups like graphical glitches and framerate slumps, but we’re pretty confident that GameCube owners should definitely give this game a second glance on the store shelves. And if you don’t have a GameCube yet, what are they now, six bucks?