Picture two players sharing one phone. One is the ghost, already dead, hiding a backstory only they know. A Redditor named Hot_History_23 built this two-player horror game entirely inside ChatGPT, and it’s one of the sharper horror-trope experiments I’ve seen in r/PromptEngineering. The other player is the investigator, walking into that story blind.
The game is called The Applewood Incident, and the setup is simple to describe but tricky to pull off. One phone, two roles, two completely different rule sets running on the same screen. It’s Phasmophobia-shaped, point-and-click, built for a couch instead of a headset. No VR rig, no download, just a browser link and a friend willing to play adversarial.
Here’s what’s new: most AI-built games hand both players the same board and the same goal. This one splits the entire experience in half. The ghost gets a hidden death story and a set of haunts to deploy. The investigator gets tools, a blank notepad, and zero context on what any of it means yet. Same app, two different games, one shared outcome.
Now the twist, and it’s the clever part. The investigator’s own tools are the trap. Every scan, every EMF check, every photo taken leaves an emotional trace behind: fear, shame, or regret. The ghost doesn’t hunt randomly. It reads those traces and builds haunts out of them.
So the more thoroughly you investigate, the more ammunition you hand the thing trying to break you. Curiosity gets punished, and that’s rare in a game built around a search mechanic.
Here’s how a round actually plays out:
- 🏚️ Prologue: The ghost walks the house, picks 3 story items, and builds a 3-act death story around them. The investigator defines their character’s Shame, Fear, and Guilt before touching a single tool.
- 👻 Ghost’s turn: Touch the active story item first, then touch other items to muddy the trail. Watch for the investigator’s emotional traces and harvest them for later.
- 🔍 Investigator’s turn: Pick 2 tools per excursion out of the Audio Recorder, UV Light, EMF Probe, and Camera. Each one narrows down the story items, and each one leaves a different trace behind for the ghost to find.
- 💀 Escalation: Once the ghost has enough residue, it can stack a Shame, Fear, and Regret haunt into one Full Haunt. Walk into that room and the game ends immediately.
The investigator also has to log which item ties to which act, in order, using nothing but notes and inference. Nobody hands you the answer, and the notes you take matter as much as the scans you run.
A couple of pro tips if you go try this yourself. If you’re the investigator, don’t run every tool on every excursion. Pick your two carefully, because each one is a trace you’re leaving behind for the thing hunting you. If you’re the ghost, don’t dump all your residue into one haunt right away. Patience is what builds toward the Full Haunt, and that’s the kill shot.
One more: talk through your reasoning out loud as the investigator. Half the fun is watching the ghost player’s face when you get close.
Where this sits next to something like Phasmophobia is worth calling out. Phasmophobia needs a real engine, real assets, a whole dev team behind it. This runs in a browser, built out of a ChatGPT conversation turned into a playable site. The tradeoff is obvious: no 3D scares, no jump-out audio, no atmosphere budget.
What it has instead is tension that comes entirely from rules and trust between two people in the same room. That’s a genuinely different flavor of scary.
The developer flagged this as an early playtest, so expect rough edges here and there. A couple of early commenters compared the asymmetric roles to old dungeon-master-style board games, which tracks well. One person plans the maze, the other has to survive it blind, and neither one can see the other’s screen. That’s the whole trick: the tension comes from what you can’t see, not from what the game shows you.
There’s an in-game tutorial that walks new players through both roles before the first prologue starts. You don’t need to memorize the rules above to jump in. Grab someone who’s free for twenty minutes and one working phone.
If you build prompt-driven tools for fun, this is worth a look as a design reference. Two rule sets share one state, and the tools themselves generate the danger. That’s a sharper piece of design than most “AI made a game” posts manage. And it came from a single ChatGPT thread, not a game engine. Go grab a friend, pass the phone, and see who breaks first. 👻
The Applewood Incident: A two player pass-the-phone ghosthunting game made in ChatGPT – I’d love to know what you think!
by u/Hot_History_23 in PromptEngineering