Phantom Abyss is a run for your lives, Indiana Jones meets Pitfall game where speed and thrills trump careful movement. It’s the antithesis of something like Meet Your Maker, where each step may result in instant death, while in the case of Devolver Digital’s new release, going fast is almost as appealing as learning the layouts of the procedurally generated temples, even if this may sound somewhat incongruous. It’s also a multiplayer game with roguelike elements where you don’t play with others, but with their ghosts in asynchronous runs that encourage you to use them as ethereal guinea pigs for your success.
Temple Run
After more than two years in Early Access, Phantom Abyss is getting its official release on January 25, adding a few game modes into the mix. You can run straight into Adventure mode to experience what can be seen as the main campaign of the game, test your skills in the challenging and randomly-generated Abyss Mode, or go for the Daily Mode in case you want to try a new trial each day and boast your name on the leaderboards.
Phantom Abyss has a very focused and streamlined approach to its core loop. Players raid temples and try to reach the exit, picking up gold coins and a relic on their path. You may see a few ghosts of other players, ghostly figures of past adventurers who have succumbed to the pitfalls of these dark and treacherous ruins. Clever players will start their runs by taking a careful approach, watching one or more of these ghosts closely, as they go on about their exploration and lead the way, pausing before every deadly trap and successfully reaching the other floors, getting closer to the coveted relic.
But that’s in theory, because these ghosts are the recorded runs of players who are now trapped inside a dungeon, forever famed as failures with their names highlighted for better mocking, a fate that you are likely to suffer as well, many, many times. That’s the beauty of the asynchronous multiplayer system in Phantom Abyss, as you play alongside others that just happen to not be there anymore. Use their failures for your success, stopping short of committing the same mistake that got them killed in the first place, or someone, somewhere, might end up laughing back at you. A code allows you to share dungeons with friends, putting them through the same hazardous layouts to see who gets to be the best temple raider.
Phantom Abyss caters for different types of gameplay, depending on how you wish to tackle each challenge. You can thread carefully, watching the ghosts and peeking around every corner, or running and jumping like you’re playing a Sonic the Hedgehog game. Naturally, when you are spotted by a guardian that will relentlessly chase you, there’s not really much time to stop and think, so it’s all down to the spur of the moment.
Whipping It
Exploration is fairly forgiving, with physics that give you some room to breathe and margin for error, especially while using the whip, one of several you can unlock and select. However, the hitbox size of some traps is hard to calculate, with a certain feeling that we didn’t really touch it but there was damage anyway. The whip can be used to take out some enemy contraptions, but mostly it serves as a tool for navigation, to reach places in front and above you with ease. It doesn’t always work well, and playing with a controller requires a little bit of fiddling to select that sweet spot, but it’s a fun and useful gadget. With permanent upgrades for whip length and speed, it gets even more appealing to use.
Whips are different in shape and functionality, with unique perks tied to each one. You may enjoy a few of them more than others, with double jump ability or being immune to fall damage being propositions that are hard to ignore. Dying makes the player lose its equipped whip, leaving it at the grasp of other players who are going into the same dungeon.
Each run comes with default requirements, forcing you to use this or that whip, for example, and throws a couple of challenges your way. If you’re feeling confident, you can always add a few more challenges to increase the rewards, but the task difficulty will be rampant and the odds of you turning into one more ethereal figure are higher.
Some of the guardians that chase you right from the very first levels come with a pending sense of doom. However, there’s an odd relativity to their difficulty, perhaps unintentional, as the Eye of Agony that shoots the heat ray is easy to avoid, but the Masked Defiler is another case entirely, spitting four poisonous gas bombs at very short intervals, with the range of the gas being on the unforgiving and frustrating side – in other words, it’s not always easy to see if you are getting into the damage zone or not.
There were some occasions where a weird bug reared its ugly head upon dying, with a softlock on a dialogue halting progress as the player returns to the hub, forcing me to exit it.
Raid Fatigue
Phantom Abyss remains fun for a while, a challenging adventure that is as much multiplayer as playing TrackMania with its characteristic ghost cars is, an acknowledged choice that nonetheless makes the game infinitely more interesting than if it were a fully solo-driven experience. But at a certain point, after several runs, it finally hits you – temple running is quite repetitive, the overall functionality of the traps isn’t that diverse, and the excitement is vanishing. That’s the actual curse of the game, a core loop that needs you to realize that short sessions are the best way to go about it. Play it if you like old-school trials and to challenge yourself, but don’t expect to find the holy grail of parkour gaming here.
Score: 7/10
Pros:
- Fast and frenzied parkour gameplay Indiana Jones style
- The ghosts are a good element to have
- Randomized layouts shake up the challenges
Cons:
- Gameplay becomes repetitive after a short while
- A few balance issues and bugs
Phantom Abyss review code was provided by the publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.