Phantom Abyss

Review

Whipping up a good time here isn't hard...

February 1st, 2024 by Dan Lenois

reviewed on PC

Phantom Abyss is basically what you get when you combine City of Brass and Temple Run into one fluid, singular experience. If you're looking to effectively roleplay as Indiana Jones, with your handy-dandy whip to flung yourself through the air from one platform to the other, dodging through, over, or around countless obstacles in pursuit of a shiny gold treasure awaiting you on its podium at the far end of the dungeon, Phantom Abyss is the game for you.

Rewarding skill without punishing failure...

Phantom Abyss clearly establishes itself as the perfect go-to parkour game for both casual and hardcore parkour players alike. Instead of slowly dragging the player through a single slow-paced tutorial level and then immediately hitting the gas with a jarring transition to the actual levels, the developers hit the ground running from the very first level. Players will be presented with on-screen hotkey tips to ensure they know the basic controls, but otherwise said tutorial functions almost identically to future levels. Failure is not designed here to be punishing, but rather, education.

Throughout their playthrough, the player will see the ghostly figures of other players around them and observe how said players interacted with the environment to overcome the many platforming obstacles and hazards that would otherwise get in your way. Between these ghosts and other contextual visual clues in the maps themselves, the player will always have all the information they need to find the quickest and most efficient path forward.

Rewards that aren't rewarding...

The individual levels are all designed as quick pick-up-and-play experiences which can be completed within merely a few minutes. That said, given the reasonably-steady difficulty throughout, plus the whole treasure-hunting theme built into the game's core DNA, it's more than a bit disappointing how unrewarding the experience is, particularly beyond the first playthrough.

While you can unlock new whips, each whip having its own passive perk, and you can earn permanent character upgrades that boost things like health, dash cooldowns and range, etc., you don't really have any incentive to replay and improve your completion time or performance. The rewards you receive frankly don't feel connected enough to the level itself.

Aesthetics are key

While a vivid artistic visual design can definitely be appealing, depending on the game itself, there are areas where the visual presentation doesn't particularly work to the game's advantage. Textures and models can often appear too soft-edged, making things often look blurry and indistinct. There isn't enough visual variety in terms of said models and textures. Levels will often reuse the same dozen or so assets, which can make many of the levels feel unnecessarily same-y.

Overall:

Whether you're a newcomer to parkour games, an intermediate, or a longtime expert, Phantom Abyss is more than well-worth a go. The combined low skill floor to entry, vs the far higher skill ceiling one can hope to reach over time, in combination with the replayable nature of each level, gives Phantom Abyss a lot of potential longevity moving forward.

Here's hoping the developers continue to flesh out the core experience via new levels and quality-of-life improvements in the months following this transition from Early Access to full release.

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9.0

fun score

Pros

Fun replayable parkour mechanics, unorthodox but creative multiplayer component

Cons

Lackluster rewards for progression