Scissor Phantom / Ghost strategy and tips

[Aërendoodle]

I don't even remember how many tries this ghost took me, but I finally beat her today. If you're having trouble like I definitely did, do read on.

The Scissor Phantom battle has two phases that can be distinguished.

Strategy - phase 1:
As soon as the battle starts, the ghost will somewhat slowly come towards you and try to attack you with her scissors. Try taking a photo of her as she is doing this for a relatively easy first hit. As soon as she gets hit, she will vanish for a few seconds.
After this, the ghost will pop up from any of the walls and charge towards you. In order to see her coming, keep rotating the camera and running back and forth near the middle of the room. Try to stay away from the walls.
As soon as you spot the ghost attacking you, start walking away from her backwards and pull up your camera to take a photo of her as you do so. This should be relatively doable as she's not too fast during this battle phase.
It should take about 3-5 photos to trigger the second phase of the fight.

Strategy - phase 2:
After taking her picture several times, the ghost will become angry and use faster, fiercer attacks. She will still work roughly like in phase 1 (vanishing after you take her photo, coming from the walls), but this time she's a lot quicker, so you'll have to make sure you leave some distance in between Linda and her to avoid getting hurt.
The ghost's attacks during this phase of the fight consist of several slashing motions in a row using the scissors. She will charge towards you when she starts up this attack combo, but if you move to the side these can be dodged. You might have to leave camera mode to be quick enough for a dodge.
Keeping in mind to dodge the ghost's attacks on time, you should be able to snap a photo of her before her attack (if you're far enough) or directly after dodging it.

General tips:
- Make sure you power up Linda's camera before facing the boss. This should make the fight a bit shorter and thus easier.
In case you don't know how to do this...
You need 3 objects. These can be found in the following locations:
- Keris: In town, behind the fast food restaurant. It's hidden in the grass.
- Jenglot: Inside the school, on top of a classroom desk on the upper building floor.
- Ring: Inside the school, on a shelf inside the narrow storage room/doorway.
From what I understand, all three objects are needed before the power-up activates. I'm not entirely sure if it removes some of the delay between taking photos in a row, but I believe it does. (If it does, that is a tremendous help with this boss, as her second battle phase is a lot harder due to her sped up movement.)
- If you don't have a save file earlier in the game, but want to backtrack, you might have to restart the entire game to be able to do some things before facing the Scissor Phantom.
Since the game uses an auto-save system, you'll have to start over for now. But if you want to cheat the saving system a little bit in order to make sure you don't have to restart the entire game again, you can find the save files in this location: \Steam\SteamApps\common\DreadOut\cloud\[numeric folder name]
(Where your Steam folder is located depends on your OS - you might have to use a search function to find it.)
After reaching key points in the game, you can copy the save files to a different folder to ensure you can easily go back to earlier stages of the game to find missed content.
- (I'm not 100% sure how well this one works, but I did this just before I beat the ghost, like someone on Steam recommended.) Open your Windows Task Manager (or equivalent on other OS-es), look for de Details/Processes tab and look for DreadOut.exe. Right-click on it, select Set Priority and pick High. Realtime is not a good idea from what I know, so don't pick that one! (Actual menu option names may differ as my OS is not set to English.)

I hope this will help anyone who is still having trouble!

P.s. I personally refer to the ghost as a woman, since she is transgender from what I understand about her.

[I've been traumatized O__O]

Thanks for the guide! God knows that thing is hard to beat. Copying the save file is a good thing to do (I really recommend it to all players) because your save can get messed up in various ways.
I hope you're okay if I add something to this guide :)

For those playing on lower tier machines, you may experience graphical lags when moving camera view around - a bad news as the boss can kill you during that time. Try not to move your view too much. Fortunately this game allows the player to keep the same view even when Linda is facing the opposite direction (like making Linda turn around and move towards the camera while maintaining view). It's a good idea to keep as much of the room in your view as possible. Try centering your view at the door where you enter the room and move your cam view slightly to the left and right during the battle. Move Linda up and down along the room (or left and right depending on how you look at it) and try to not get cornered on the walls as stated in the guide above. You may come across a tips that turning off the light ('F' toggle) makes him easier to see. This is true but I would not recommend it because you will suffer from not being able to see the rest of the room (and could possibly get stuck on the walls)

Side note: The scissor ghost is a man. He was a paranoid man went insane who lost his child to a kuntilanak. From the lore in ghostpedia the Kuntilanak are vengeful towards "man and his family" therefore he dresses as a woman (idk about the high pitched voice, he prolly has high pitch voice to begin with) and the scissor is said to ward off kuntilanak (also from ghostpedia) it's sad that he targets the wrong person. He would've totally destroyed the kuntilanak in the Night Town scene.

[lillesadist]

I did it on my 2nd try today, it was ALOT easier now that my camera was upgraded.

[Aërendoodle]

Originally posted by lillesadist:

I did it on my 2nd try today, it was ALOT easier now that my camera was upgraded.

Congrats, I hope the guide was helpful! :3

[Hikouma]

Or the easier way:

>Plug in headphones.
>Run around the room in circles, listen for ghost.
>Take picture of ghost when it appears.
>Rinse and repeat until dead.

This boss is so stupidly easy. I have absolutely no idea why everyone has such a hard time with it.

[birdie]

Originally posted by Falex:

Or the easier way:

>Plug in headphones.
>Run around the room in circles, listen for ghost.
>Take picture of ghost when it appears.
>Rinse and repeat until dead.

This boss is so stupidly easy. I have absolutely no idea why everyone has such a hard time with it.

For me the second phase is a pain. I can run to the other side of the room and still not have enough space to damage her cause she's right on top of you.

[Rimfrost]

I can't fathom the notion that this boss is even remotely hard. But then again, watching people play DreadOut on YouTube has made me realize that there are several inconsistencies with my game compared to others.
There are a lot of audio and textures seemingly missing. Like the whispers when you're dead and running toward the light, the panting sound Linda does when she's fatigued, the red bodies in the entry hall of the school, etc. I had to randomly flail my phone around and was lucky to snap that shot which indicates where that key with the cat keychain is hidden.

These things makes me sad.

[Stigma]

I actually ragequitted this game due to the scissor ghost, or maybe it was the constant updates, or maybe I found a couple of other games that were cool....

Anyway. How about a compromise?

My suggestion:

Don't have him appear from random places each time. Have him emerge from the exact same spots each and every time.

Too simple?

In addition to that, speed him up!

Yes, you heard me. Easier with clear cut patterns, harder if you simultanesly speed him up. And obviously more old school lol

That way, everybody wins.

Just a suggestion ;)

[Aërendoodle]

I'm not that fond of the idea of speeding up this ghost, as she's already hard to dodge, even if you know which direction she'd be coming from.

Instead, I think this fight would be a lot easier in a room that's a bit bigger. It would give the player a bit more time to find out where the ghost is coming from and thus makes it easier to dodge her. Right now you have to constantly spin around in an effort to find her and it's very annoying and tricky.
This solution would also mean you wouldn't have to get the artifacts to power up your camera to make the fight shorter or to fiddle with task manager tricks in an attempt to make the fight easier, which I both had to resort to.

I realize that remodelling the room the Scissor Phantom appears is easier said than done, but seeing how there are many people who find this fight so difficult that it makes them frustrated to the point of wanting to quit the game, I'd say it would be worth it.

I've actually beaten the full game and I can safely say that the Scissor Phantom is the fight that gave me the most trouble by far, though I did find most of the Act 1 ghosts harder to figure out than the Act 2 ones.

[archita]

a good solution is a sort of "push away" hit picture by camera, in this way you can have enough time to hit ghost more times like Fatal Frame.

[Aërendoodle]

Originally posted by archita:

a good solution is a sort of "push away" hit picture by camera, in this way you can have enough time to hit ghost more times like Fatal Frame.

This would also help, though I still think the room should be bigger, even if it's slightly.