Phantom Abyss Preview

It goes without saying that Devolver Digital has had a pretty good deal of success with Fall Guys. The unique “survival of the fittest'' gameplay style was something very new and it captured the hearts of millions when the indie publisher unleashed it on the world. Their upcoming release, Team WIBY’s debut title Phantom Abyss, has a lot of that same ethos, but played out in a very different way.

The basic premise is quite simple: get to the end of a dungeon without dying and pick up the idol. It’s somewhere between Temple Run, Pitfall, and the aforementioned Fall Guys. The dungeons are procedurally generated however and once a player has completed a dungeon, that particular configuration is removed from the game, never to be seen again. You can only have one attempt at any particular dungeon too, so you can’t practice the layout until you master it, you just have to learn how to dodge the various traps and enemies that you face. Very much like Mediatonic’s multiplayer smash-hit, this is a game that is easy to pick up, but deceptively difficult to master. 

From the description, you would be forgiven for thinking this is a single-player only affair. In fact, it’s what the developer refers to as an “asynchronous multiplayer game”. The multiplayer element comes in the form of the titular phantoms. These are essentially ghosts of the players who have already died in the level, showing you what mistakes they made and giving an idea of what not to do.

When I first loaded up Phantom Abyss, I was greeted with a message about the Early-Access title’s latest update. It proudly proclaimed: “Today, we’re delivering another update designed to make your exploration runs cooler and more challenging.” They really weren’t lying, as this certainly is an incredibly tricky game to get into, especially after nearly a year of Early Access already under its belt. 

You will likely find yourself dying a lot until you get the hang of everything and learn the layouts of the various sections that make up the dungeons. Whilst each is unique, they are a combination of lots of sections placed together in many cases, so you will see repetition in elements of each dungeon after a while and start to learn the best route through those elements. I actually found it was quite a while before the phantoms were helpful, and in fact while I was learning the game, they were more of a hindrance, encouraging me to rush through to keep up with them, and causing me to make careless mistakes in the process. You get a trail that stays behind for a little while showing the route they took, but after a short time, this disappears, so if you are too far behind then you don’t benefit from the phantoms any more. Thankfully, the dungeons are split into four levels, and the phantoms reset at the start of each level so if you lose them on one level, you can get them back for the start of the next. 

Controls are relatively simple, with just a run, jump, and duck function provided for character movement, along with a whip you can use to grapple onto platforms or stop traps from moving in some cases. There is a cooldown on the whip however so you need to be careful with how you use it as climbing too high will result in you taking fall damage unless you can time a crouch at just the right second to get your character to roll on landing. As you progress, you can earn extra whips that give you bonuses, but most of these are lost if you die in a dungeon, meaning that you have to decide if you want to risk the extra power they bring.

The graphics are a bit samey at the moment, with reasonable texture resolution but not that much variety in design or colour scheme. As this is an early access title, it’s likely this will change over time, as the developer seems to be focusing on getting the gameplay as tight as possible at this stage. Same can be said for the sound design which is currently functional but minimalist. There is some nice atmospheric music that helps build tension though which was a nice touch. 

Once you get past the rather challenging difficulty curve, Phantom Abyss is a very solid game with a unique set of mechanics. At this point in time there is only so much to see and do, so I found it was a “short bursts” kind of game for me, but it’s certainly one that I’ve come back to a number of times, even after rage-quitting earlier the same day on a fair few occasions. It’s available on Steam Early Access now, with a full release date not yet determined.