Kinetic Games has issued a formal apology to the Phasmophobia community following the disastrous rollout of its long-awaited Player Character Update, which launched on May 5, 2026 and immediately triggered a wave of negative feedback, bug reports, and review bombing on Steam. In a blog post published on May 11, the developer acknowledged it had “missed the mark” and “didn’t deliver on our promises” — and has since deployed one major patch and two hotfixes in an attempt to claw back player goodwill ahead of its high-profile Alan Wake crossover event.
The situation is a significant embarrassment for Kinetic Games, which had been building toward the Player Character Update for a long time. It was one of the most anticipated updates in the game’s five-year history, promising a complete overhaul to character models, animations, and cosmetics. Instead, it landed in a state that players described as unfinished, buggy, and in some cases visually worse than what it replaced. The Steam review score for May dropped to roughly 25% positive in the aftermath of the update — a brutal signal from a community that had otherwise remained largely loyal to the game throughout its early access run.
What the Player Character Update Was Supposed to Do
The Player Character Update represented one of the most substantial overhauls Phasmophobia has received since it first launched in early access in 2020. The core promise was a full rebuild of character models and animations, giving players more expressive and detailed ghost hunters to play as, along with an expanded cosmetics system that would let players customize their characters with unique skins and outfit options.
One of the more specifically anticipated aspects of the update was the rework of Phasmophobia’s infamous “bendy back” animations — the awkward, physics-defying body contortions that had become a long-running joke and frustration within the community. These odd movements had plagued the game for years and were one of the most commonly cited visual issues players wanted addressed. The Player Character Update was supposed to fix all of that with a proper animation overhaul built to a higher standard than what the game had shipped with.
What Actually Happened at Launch
The update shipped in a state that fell well short of those expectations on multiple fronts. Players immediately began reporting a long list of issues across the game’s visuals, animations, and core functionality.
On the visual side, the new character animations that were supposed to replace the awkward “bendy backs” introduced their own set of problems — body movement that players compared, somewhat darkly humorously, to scenes from The Exorcist. Animations weren’t working properly in various situations, and there were widespread reports of hands and objects being misaligned — a pretty significant problem in a game built around first-person ghost-hunting where you’re constantly holding equipment and interacting with the environment. Head orientation and body movement during gameplay were also flagged as broken.
Beyond the visual issues, the update introduced gameplay-breaking bugs as well. Doors weren’t moving correctly in environments. Ghost behavior was acting erratically. Dropped items were disappearing when a player died. Voice chat stopped working properly, which is particularly damaging in a co-op horror game where communication is core to the experience. Various pieces of ghost-hunting equipment behaved unexpectedly, and some single-use items weren’t functioning as intended.
The cosmetics system — one of the main selling points of the update — also drew significant criticism. The character customization options available at launch were fewer than players had been led to expect, and many of the more desirable cosmetics were locked behind prestige requirements that demand reaching level 100 and then prestiging — a serious time investment, especially for casual players. For a community that had been promised a meaningful cosmetic overhaul, the reality felt thin and grindy.
One particularly pointed community reaction came in the form of a viral clip shared on social media, with one player posting in-game footage of the new animations captioned simply: “Who thought this looked well enough to publish.”
The Review Bomb and Community Backlash
The community’s response was swift and measurable. According to SteamDB data, Phasmophobia’s May review breakdown showed roughly 600 positive reviews against nearly 2,000 negative ones — a ratio of approximately 25% positive for the month. The game’s overall recent review score on Steam took a significant hit, and the #Phasmophobia hashtag on social media was flooded with complaints, bug clips, and player frustration throughout the days following the update’s launch.
Some players in the community also pointed out a broader pattern — that Phasmophobia has a history of releasing updates in rough states followed by rapid hotfixes. The concern isn’t just about this specific update but about whether the development process has the quality control mechanisms in place to prevent this from happening repeatedly, especially as the game pushes toward its Version 1.0 release.
Kinetic Games’ Apology and Response
To Kinetic Games’ credit, the response was relatively fast. On May 11, the studio posted a formal apology addressed to the community and simultaneously released a substantial patch to address the most serious issues. The official statement pulled no punches:
“We want to start today by apologising for our Player Character Update that launched last week. It’s clear we missed the mark on this, and didn’t deliver on our promises to you. Your feedback and your reviews were justified. Our team has grown significantly over the last year, and with that comes a higher standard that, in this case, we failed to meet.”
The studio also added a longer-term commitment to transparency:
“We’ve begun to put plans in place to share more of our development processes with you on the way to 1.0, allowing you greater visibility into the work we’re doing and what you can expect from future updates for Phasmophobia.”
Alongside the apology, Kinetic released Patch v0.17.1.0 and two subsequent hotfixes that together addressed most of the major reported issues. The patch brought fixes for head orientation and body movement, resolved problems with doors, ghosts, and equipment behavior, fixed dropped items disappearing on death, and restored proper voice chat functionality. A number of visual and model fixes for characters viewed from outside perspectives were also included.
What Issues Still Remain
Even after the patch and hotfixes, Kinetic has acknowledged that some issues are still present. Known remaining problems include bugs with certain equipment animations, visual glitches tied to specific in-game interactions — such as the Angel Lamp causing visual glitches when used alongside an EMF Reader — and a Tier 1 Spirit Box becoming invisible on the Oh Deer Diner map when using the CCTV. Some of these remaining issues overlap with the game’s new Alan Wake crossover event, which launched alongside the patch.
The Alan Wake Crossover: What It Is
In a bittersweet piece of timing, the Player Character Update drama unfolded right as Phasmophobia prepared to launch one of its most exciting crossover events to date. The Phasmophobia x Alan Wake collaboration — officially called Phasmophobia by Alan Wake — is a limited-time event that recreates locations from Alan Wake 2 inside Phasmophobia’s ghost-hunting framework.
The event features new character skins, community challenges, and locations pulled from Alan’s second outing, with the event reportedly written by Remedy’s Sam Lake himself — giving it a genuine narrative connection to the Alan Wake universe rather than being a purely cosmetic crossover. It’s a significant collaboration for a game that has largely built its community through its own identity rather than licensed partnerships, and under normal circumstances it would have been the headline story of the week for Phasmophobia fans. Instead, it launched in the shadow of a patch apology — though the fixes appear to have stabilized the game enough for players to actually engage with the event content.
What Comes Next for Phasmophobia
Kinetic Games has been working toward a Version 1.0 release for Phasmophobia in 2026, which would mark the official end of the game’s long early access period. A Nintendo Switch 2 release is also in the pipeline. The Player Character Update situation hasn’t derailed either of those plans, but it has added pressure on the studio to demonstrate that its quality control processes can match the higher expectations that come with a growing team and an increasingly large player base.
The community’s appetite for Phasmophobia isn’t gone — the game has retained a loyal following for five years through its early access period, and the core ghost-hunting co-op loop remains genuinely entertaining. But the combination of an underwhelming cosmetics system, broken animations, and gameplay-disrupting bugs has left a mark that will take sustained, reliable updates to fully repair. Kinetic’s commitment to greater development transparency ahead of 1.0 is a step in the right direction. Whether that promise is kept, and whether the next major update ships in better shape, will determine how quickly that trust is rebuilt.
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