PHANTOM ABYSS
Tomb-raiding has never been this fun (or treacherous)
This is a whip-smart platformer about escaping an underground prison, your key to freedom lying in the hands of a god who demands relics. To get your mitts on these items, you’ll need to traverse four floors of a procedurally-generated temple filled with horrible death traps.
Falling rocks, giant swinging hammers, hidden spikes, moving stone floors, bottomless chasms—all the classic booby traps are here and ready to take you out. Thankfully, you’ll be joined by the ghosts of up to 20 other players who have all previously died in the temple you’re attempting to complete.
This ghost system is what makes Phantom Abyss unique. Watching how previous players approach each trap lets you see which route works best, and which will leave you splattered in a bloody mess. Seeing ghosts get obliterated by increasingly lethal traps is tense, but it’s also exciting to learn from their footwork. If you die, you leave your own phantom in that same temple—it’s nice to know that all the times I’ve been sliced, diced, crushed, bludgeoned, and impaled will help someone else get that little bit further in the game.
As you complete each floor, things begin to get more frenzied. Each run not only has traps, but a guardian who is pretty pissed off that you’re scuttling around their temple. Sidestepping timed spikes is easy enough, but not when you have a giant eyeball-firing lasers at you.
TEMPLE RUN
Phantom Abyss gives you three lives per run, giving you room for error, but there’s something about wanting to elegantly breeze through a deadly room that makes you into a risk-taker. Sure, I could stop and wait for the incredibly large hammer to swing out of the way, but I could also slide along the floor underneath it. It’s risky, but wouldn’t it look cool as hell?
The pleasingly fluid controls get you into that cocky, daredevil mindset. Dodging and diving through the world’s most lethal obstacle course has its own thrills, but the addition of a whip takes the action to another level, literally. It essentially acts like a grappling hook, letting you climb up high ledges, leap over big gaps, get out of sticky situations. The number of times I’ve fallen into a chasm only to grab a ledge with my whip and hoist myself back up is too many to count. It’s incredibly easy to use and gives your character a sense of agility. The result is movement that flows perfectly, helping to mitigate the frustration of failure.
There are several whips to choose from before you embark on your treacherous trip, each one with a fancy ability attached to it. One might give you the ability to double jump or another may grant you two extra heart containers. They certainly help you navigate chambers, but if you die down there, your whip is lost too. That is, until a player completes the temple, then everyone gets their lost loot back. If you’re skilled enough to survive each floor and grab the relic at the end, that dungeon is sealed off forever.
The Phantom Abyss Steam page says that the game will be in Early Access for at least a year, and Team WIBY will be working on adding new features throughout that time. I’m looking forward to these updates, as some of the temple layouts are getting a little repetitive. But there’s just enough variety to keep it from getting tedious, and having the whip always makes each run more interesting. Phantom Abyss is the whip-based parkour platformer we’ve all been waiting years for— Bethesda had better be taking notes for its upcoming Indiana Jones game, that’s for sure.
AS YOU COMPLETE EACH FLOOR, THINGS BEGIN TO GET MORE FRENZIED