Phantom Abyss Review

Back in late 2021, I previewed Phantom Abyss, and I found it to be good fun in small doses but very challenging. Now that Team WIBY’s debut title has left Early Access and reached full release status, how does it compare to the game that I played over two years ago? And more to the point: have I got any better at it? First of all, no, I haven’t gotten any better. That’s probably not why you’re here, though, is it? You want to know if the game itself has gotten better. Let’s take a look at that now. 

For the benefit of the uninitiated, Phantom Abyss is an asymmetric multiplayer game that sees you traversing dungeons alongside the titular phantoms of previous players. These shadows of the past can also help out by doing things like opening doors, as well as hinder by getting to chests before you can get the sweet currency within. The mechanics are generally pretty simple — consisting mainly of jumping, ducking, dodging traps or enemies, and smashing open pots with a whip — but in order to get the most out of this roguelike, you’ll need to master those elementary controls. 

The core gameplay hasn’t changed much since Early Access, with Team WIBY clearly deciding not to mess with a winning formula. I noted that a lot of the visuals were quite samey when I played the game as a preview, and that’s not really changed much either. They work well enough, but it’s not super “pretty”, which made the occasional frame rate drops that I experienced all the more unexpected. 

It's certainly a nice looking game, but not amazing.

Optimisation isn’t fantastic, it has to be said. You’ll probably have noticed that this review is coming a few days after the full release. That’s because I never actually managed to play the preview build we were sent. On two separate machines and two different Steam accounts, I was greeted with an empty black screen, followed by the game silently closing. No amount of tweaking, deleting save files, reinstalling, etc., helped to fix this, sadly. When the full release came, updating to that seemed to fix it to a point, but after an hour or so of playing, the game would freeze up, and I needed to end it from the Task Manager. By the third time of having this happen, I was back to the black screen/close behaviour on my main computer and had to switch to the second in order to complete this review. I still had to put up with regular crashes, sadly, and when I could play the game, it struggled to perform well on what is a mid-range setup by today’s standards (for reference it’s an i7 10750H0 with a GTX 2070). 

There are four basic stages, with levels being procedurally generated tweaks of a specific theme in most cases. Once a particular version of a level has been completed, it is removed from the game, never to be played again. This means that, occasionally, you will come across completely fresh levels that you’re the first person to try. This is always a bit unnerving, as you know that others will be looking at your run to learn from and see where to jump, where to dodge, and, often, where to avoid as they see you meet your untimely doom. The levels in which you are the watcher give you the option to learn from others in return; it’s a really clever mechanic that I still think makes Phantom Abyss quite original.

By watching the Phantoms, I was able to see where others failed. And then fail in the same place myself, usually.

The sound design has had a great bit of polish since the early days, and it fits with the game really well. It all swells at the right moments to heighten tension and drops down to ethereal ambience when it’s the right time to build that tension in the first place. And there’s a great deal of that tension too, as this is a very tricky game to play. There are a lot of split-second moves required for some of the levels, so I fell to my doom quite a bit. It usually felt like it was something that I could overcome with a bit of practice, though, which is the mark of a good roguelike for me.

Despite the frustration of difficulty and technical issues, I did find myself enjoying Phantom Abyss. Just like when I previewed it, though, I found that it got a bit repetitive after a while; there’s only so much you can do with limited building blocks, and as such, the stages aren’t always hugely original. There’s one more stage type in the final build than there was in Early Access, but with a total of four, it still feels like there could be more, and I was left feeling that there wasn’t as much of a difference between the early builds and release version as I had expected there would be. 

When all is said and done, I would struggle to recommend Phantom Abyss. With such a long time spent in Steam’s Early Access programme, I’d expect to see something that’s more slick than this. A limited amount of content and technical issues certainly weren’t what I would expect to see after this time. There’s a gem under here, but it’s nowhere near as polished as it ought to be; perhaps it would have been better to leave these tombs unraided for just a bit longer.