Deogen

Activity

• If you ask a question through the Spirit Box within 1 m of the Deogen, each question has a 33% chance of getting a unique response: constant, heavy, bull-like breathing instead of a regular response.
• It interacts with doors a little more than most ghosts: a 30% chance instead of the standard 25%.

Hunt

• Hunt sanity threshold: 40% (the standard is 50%).
• It always knows where you are. During a hunt it has line of sight with every player on the map, so it doesn’t need to search. When the hunt starts it goes for the nearest player by straight-line distance, follows them for 10 s, and then picks the nearest player again every 5 to 10 s.
• Incense stuns it for a moment and, once the effect wears off, forces it to pick a target again.
• Its speed depends on the distance (along its path) to its target, not on whether it can see you. The formula is 0.15 m/s × 2^(distance − 1): it runs at 3 m/s (maximum) beyond 5.32 m and drops to 0.4 m/s (minimum) under 2.42 m.
• While blinded by Incense, its speed is 0.4 m/s if the difficulty’s Ghost speed is 50%, 75% or 100%, and 1.6 m/s if it’s 125% or 150%.
• It flickers differently: during a hunt it’s visible for longer than other ghosts, between 53.1% and 56.5% of the time (the norm is 30.7% to 33.2%).
• If you’re within 1.1 m, it kills you instantly like any other ghost. But at 1.5 m it needs you to spend 2 s at that distance to kill you, instead of 1 s.

Evidence

On difficulties with only 1 or 2 evidence types (like Nightmare), the Deogen always keeps Spirit Box as one of its evidence types, because of its unique response.

Hunt strategy

• If you haven’t ruled it out, hide somewhere you can leave before it corners you, or keep Incense on hand.
• When it’s close to you it becomes the slowest ghost in the game. As long as you don’t trap yourself somewhere with no way out, surviving it is easy: if you keep moving it can’t catch you, because it’s much slower than your normal walking speed, and it’s easy to loop. On large maps like Sunny Meadows or Brownstone High School, you can just walk around the map and “take it on a tour,” avoiding dead ends.
• If you stun it with Incense, it keeps the speed it had at that moment (almost always its minimum), so it only moves a short way off before chasing again.
• In multiplayer, keep server lag in mind: if you misjudge where it really is and move away too late, it can kill you. Don’t loop it too closely, especially on a bad connection. Since it switches targets every few seconds (not in real time), avoid standing behind another player: unlike the Banshee, the Deogen does kill anyone who gets in its way.

How to identify it

• From a hunt. If it rushes toward the nearest player and slows down sharply as it gets close, it’s a Deogen. Other ghosts can move just as fast (a “young” Thaye, a Revenant that has detected someone, or a Deildegast with few objects moved), but they don’t slow down like that. Mixing them up can get you killed.
• Without a hunt. Follow the ghost and listen for the heavy breathing on the Spirit Box. It’s more tedious, especially in large rooms. The easiest way is a Tier III Motion Sensor: its radius is only slightly larger than the distance at which you can hear the breathing, so if you use the Spirit Box on top of the sensor right when it triggers, you’ll probably get the Deogen’s response.

Other tips

• It’s one of the easiest ghosts to photograph: it stays visible longer and, since it’s so easy to loop, you have plenty of time. Keep your Photo Camera handy.
• If you have to step away from the keyboard mid-contract, leave the investigation area. Hiding doesn’t work against the Deogen: it will find you and kill you when it hunts.

Trivia

• It’s based on “De Ogen” (“The Eyes”), from a supposed Flemish book, De Kinderen van Het Bezeten Bos (“The Children of the Haunted Forest”), about a yellow-eyed fog that haunts the Sonian Forest in Belgium. There’s no proof that the book exists or that it comes from an older legend.
• Since it always sees you, almost no “safe spot” that relies on staying out of sight works against it. It can even kill you through walls that are thin enough.
• It can’t be the ghost selected for the contract if the host is below Prestige 0 Level 30, because its hunt is so different that it would confuse new players. The lead developer confirmed it in November 2024. The Mimic can still imitate it before that level.

Change history

Version	Change
0.6.2.0	Added the Deogen.
0.6.2.1	Clarified its weakness description in the journal.
0.9.0	No longer has an increased chance to interact with the D.O.T.S Projector or the Ghost Writing Book.