Practicallly all other WoD games have setting steep in history. Not so with the Geist. You play a person that touched death and was brought back, more likely pushed back, by a Geist, which now cohabits your body. Before death you could see things, see the shadows of the dead, not you are death incarnate. The Geist is now part of you, a ghost so old that it had to change it's anchors to the world, and so has become something more conceptual rather that human. And your purpose in life? To keep the balance, much like the werewolf Uratha, you see it as your duty to more the ghost of the dead on from this world to the Underworld, and from there onto what lies beyond the Great Below.
I did get a chance to play Orpheus and have read Wraith and of course read about the Abyssal Exalted. All these are games about death. IN Orpheus you are ghosts, or people capable of ghostly like powers, working in the living world, trying to remove dangerous ghosts and spectors from our world. In Wraith it is about living in the shadow of the world, trying to stay connected to the living and also fighting against your darker half. In Exalted the Abyssal Exalted are those twisted by a near death experience and now possessed with the dark essence of a dead hero from an age long ago, and now you are tasked to bring the dead to the living and tear the world down while living in the Underworld.
So Geist has a lot of similarities to all these and thus far I have gathered that because of their rarity in the setting, the Geists have a fractured society, smaller than say the Changelings or the Mages. The Geists are also capable of using obscure pop science in their rituals, weird occult trash culture, all things are pieces that can be used for their arts. Some have said this is rather strange, that the Geists have no sense of history or culture. But I tend to think they are a bit like the Hollow Ones of old Mage, using what they find that works, discarding the old, like carrion they sift through society looking for the bits and pieces that will unlock lost powers.
SO far I have got to the character creation section and can see that these characters are excellent to play as but also excellent antagonists for Vampires, Prometheans, Mages, simply because these three can easily be involved with the dead (being undead, made of the dead, or simply being terrible wizards that can tear the walls of reality down).
Any way more here
http://www.white-wolf.com/geist/index.php?line=intro
http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14483.phtml
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