Snap’s first AR game is a spooky ‘found phone’ mystery

Snap has launched its first in-Snapchat augmented reality game, a spooky “found phone” title called Ghost Phone. In the game, you’ll work to solve the mystery of what happened to the previous owner of a smartphone, and you’ll quickly learn that things are just a little bit... ghastly.

The core of the game is using the camera on your actual smartphone to find AR ghosts that appear in your nearby surroundings. You’ll complete different types of activities to find and capture the ghosts — for one, I had to track three floating energy balls around my office to make a ghost appear. As you capture more ghosts, you’ll unlock additional things you can check out the “phone,” such as new text messages and more apps.

Ghost Phone is Snap’s take on AR games, a genre that has had some trouble finding a hit as successful as Niantic’s Pokémon Go. While I don’t think Ghost Phone is going to reach that level of critical mass, the short amount of time I’ve spent with it so far was more fun than I expected, and I enjoyed it more than other AR games I’ve tried.

If you want to check out Ghost Phone for yourself, you can jump to it from this link or by searching for it in the Lens Explorer. Snap has a few other games available as well, including Bitmoji Party, Bitmoji Tennis, and Bitmoji Paint.