First announced at Nintendo's pre-E3 press conference back in 2003, Geist is a first-person adventure game that's scheduled to arrive on North American store shelves next week. So how does developer n-Space feel now that its game is finally finished? We spoke with Ted Newman, the game's producer; Erick Dyke, president of n-Space; and Dan O'Leary, Geist project manager, to find out just that.

GameSpot: First off, could one of you give us a brief overview of Geist in case some of our readers aren't very familiar with the game?

Meet Dan, Ted, and Erick from n-Space.

Ted Newman: Geist is basically a first-person adventure game where the player…early on in the game the player is essentially killed and their body is…their spirit is separated from their body and they play the rest of the game as a ghost, and they learn through the guidance of another ghost character named Gigi, who's a little girl who died in the same complex that the player is in. They learn that they can possess humans, animals, and objects, which they can use to traverse the Volks facility, which is where the player is killed at, and also very early on in the game you learn that your body is still alive, so that becomes a driving force to both find out what the Volks Corporation is up to and to recover your body if possible.

GS: Could you give us some specific examples of objects and creatures that players will be able to possess, and also what they'll be able to do while they're possessing those objects?

TN: Oh sure. For object possession, that was an idea game from Miyamoto-san, who had seen the game all throughout its development and he basically asked his team--he would bring it up several times in fact--I wonder what it would be like to possess a crate or to possess a plant, and for a while there his team didn't quite know what he meant or…

Erick Dyke: They thought he was joking.

TN: They actually…yeah, they thought he was joking, but then it became very clear that a big focus of the game was going to be on possession, and we decided to work on object possession. So some of the objects you possess are things like…some seem relatively safe like a pressure valve for some steam pipes, but in a case like that, if you rapidly press the A button you'll drive the steam pressure up and cause the pipes to burst, and if you time it right you'll scare a character in the area. Others are a little on the unusual side--the dog food is the one we hear about a lot, and some are more along the lines of something you'd find in an action game, like we have gun cameras throughout the levels where the player can possess the camera and then they use these twin Gatling guns to gun down enemies.

Different characters and objects will afford you different abilities when you possess them.

And as far as animals go, in the game you possess dogs, you possess rats, you possess rabbits, a bat, and with each of those we try to give them some unique navigation mechanics, like obviously the bat can fly, the rat is able to get into very small spaces that the dog can't get into, for example, and we also try to simulate their vision. So we did research on how a dog is actually supposed to see, like they're basically color blind but they can see certain colors, and they're nearsighted, so things in the distance are somewhat blurry. So we try to make each host, whether it was a human, an animal, or an object, feel unique.

GS: What kind of puzzles and stuff have you been able to create using all of those unusual mechanics? What's a typical puzzle in Geist?

TN: A typical puzzle would be either a scare, where you have a character in an area and a lot of times the character will be isolated, which makes them a better target to scare, and it's a matter of figuring out what objects in the room you can interact with and then how they might affect the character. So some of the puzzles are about herding the character into an area where it's easier to scare them. Other puzzles are either using hosts to gain access to areas that your average host wouldn't be able to get to, like either a locked door that requires a certain security clearance, or in the case of a dog, that can jump and climb over things, you know, like squeezing into an air vent that's located high up near some of these shelves or something. So that's a little bit of an idea of some of the puzzles in the game.