Phantom Abyss

Every roguelike promises that death teaches you something. Phantom Abyss makes that promise literal. When a player falls into a spike pit, the ghost is recorded, and the next person who enters that temple watches the fall. That is the pitch, and it is a good one — good enough that Devolver Digital, a publisher with a sharp nose for weird hooks, picked it up from a small Brisbane studio and carried it through Early Access to a 1.0 release in January 2024.

Team WIBY is not a household name, and Phantom Abyss is essentially their one shot. It shows in both directions. The core movement — sprint, slide, jump, whip-swing — has the hand-tuned feel of a team that obsessed over a single system until it sang. Everything wrapped around that system — progression, narrative, menus, long-term structure — has the feel of a team that ran out of runway before it ran out of ideas.

Market positioning is awkward, and that matters for anyone deciding whether to spend the money. Phantom Abyss sits between three genres that don’t usually talk to each other: the first-person platformer (Mirror’s Edge, Ghostrunner), the roguelike run structure (Hades, Dead Cells), and the asynchronous-social mechanic borrowed from Dark Souls’ bloodstains and pushed to its logical extreme. None of those audiences gets a full meal here. Ghostrunner players will find the levels too loose and forgiving. Roguelike players will find the meta-progression thin. Souls players will find the ghost mechanic clever but shallow past the opening runs.

What you get instead is something rarer: a movement toy of unusual quality, with a social layer that makes the opening hours feel like a communal discovery. The 1.0 restructure into Adventure, Classic, and Daily modes was an honest attempt to give that toy a house to live in. It half-works. The hook lands immediately; the structure wears thin over time.

• Whip-driven parkour: The whip is a grappling hook that attaches to almost any surface, with a swing physics model that rewards momentum preservation and punishes hesitation. Chained with slides and wall-jumps, it produces the most fluid first-person traversal since Mirror’s Edge Catalyst — and it is more forgiving than that game without being mushy.
• Asynchronous phantom multiplayer: Every player who died in a temple replays their final run alongside the next visitor as a translucent ghost. A crowd of phantoms at once shows which floor tiles trigger darts, which route past the chasing guardian works, and where the loot is. Their remains drop keys. It’s a Dark Souls bloodstain that runs at full speed and shows the whole mistake, not just the aftermath.
• Whips as builds: A roster of unlockable whips, each pairing a blessing (longer reach, a starting heart, faster movement) with a curse (louder guardians, fewer keys, no double-jump). This is the closest thing the game has to a build system, and it’s a smart one: the trade-offs are legible and change how a temple is routed.
• Three modes post-1.0: Adventure Mode with hand-tuned story temples and boss encounters against the temple guardians; Classic Mode, the original Early Access loop with shareable temple codes; and a Daily Mode with a global leaderboard.
• Mid-run divine blessings: Altars between floors sell temporary powers — double jump, damage protection, a longer whip — for the keys collected. They expire with the run. They’re the tension dial: spend now or bank the keys for the next altar.

The Movement Is the Product

Start with what works, because it works very well. Phantom Abyss has a movement model built so that the player never stops to think. Sprint has a cadence, slide has a duration, and the whip’s attach-and-release timing turns every gap into a rhythm problem. The intended flow is a single unbroken line: swing over a rotating blade trap, release at the apex, slide under a dart wall, whip to a ledge. Add a guardian — a massive stone deity that stalks each temple — grinding through the room behind, and the line has to hold under pressure.

This is where the game’s design earns its keep. The whip has real physics: the swing arc depends on entry velocity and attach angle, so a sloppy approach doesn’t just slow the player, it sends them into a wall. The learning curve is steep in the right way. It’s not about memorizing inputs; it’s about learning how momentum behaves. That is the hardest thing to get right in a first-person platformer, and Team WIBY nailed it.

The guardians are the second-best idea. They’re not a health bar. They’re a pace enforcer. The chaser guardian in particular — a hulking pursuer that simply follows through the temple and kills on contact — transforms trap-solving from a puzzle into a sprint. There are only a few seconds to read the room and commit. That time pressure is where the phantoms pay off.

The Phantoms: Clever, Then Comfortable

The ghost system deserves its reputation. Watching a dozen previous players stream through a chamber, half of them dying at the same swinging log, tells you more about a room than any tutorial could. In the first several hours, this is genuinely thrilling. It feels like part of an expedition. Somebody’s ghost finds a hidden ledge, and following it to loot the keys feels like grave robbing and studying at once.

The problem is that the information is asymmetric in the wrong direction. Phantoms show where people died, which is the easy half of the puzzle. Once the trap vocabulary is learned — and there are only so many traps — nobody needs to watch a death at a dart wall to know it’s a dart wall. Before long, the phantoms become ambient decoration. Occasionally useful for spotting a shortcut, mostly noise. The mechanic teaches until the game is learned, then it has nothing left to say. That’s a design ceiling, not a bug, but it’s a low ceiling for a defining feature.

The Temple Runs Out of Rooms

Here is the review’s core criticism, and it’s not a small one. The procedural generator has a limited vocabulary of room templates, and players will see all of them faster than a roguelike can afford. Dead Cells hides its seams with biome variety and enemy composition. Hades hides them with narrative and build interaction. Phantom Abyss hides them with nothing. Once the templates repeat, every “new” temple reads as a reshuffled deck of chambers already solved. The sense of exploration collapses into route optimization, and the whip is the only thing keeping the game alive.

The whips help, and they’re the smartest piece of meta-design in the package. A whip that removes the double-jump but doubles key income changes the risk calculus in every room. A whip that makes guardians faster in exchange for longer reach turns cautious players into speedrunners. The blessing-and-curse structure is legible, meaningful, and cheap to iterate on. It’s the one place where the “roguelike” label is fully earned.

The 1.0 Restructure: Necessary, Not Sufficient

Early Access Phantom Abyss had an audacious rule: every temple existed once, for everyone, and when any player retrieved the relic it was gone forever. A run was a race against thousands of strangers. It was a beautiful idea that most players never experienced properly, because the odds of being the one to clear a temple were slim, and the structure gave newcomers nothing to hold onto.

The 1.0 split into Adventure, Classic, and Daily modes is the studio admitting that. Adventure Mode is the onboarding: hand-tuned temples with a light story, boss encounters against the guardians, and a clear unlock path. It’s competent. The guardian bosses are the most memorable set-pieces in the game, and finishing Adventure gives a sense of an ending that Early Access never offered. It’s also short, and the story layer is thin enough to forget before the credits finish.

Classic Mode preserves the old loop, minus the “gone forever” cruelty, and adds shareable codes so a specific temple can be sent to a friend. That’s the right call for a game whose social layer is entirely asynchronous. Daily Mode is a leaderboard, and leaderboards are only as alive as the community feeding them.

The UI is clunky. Menus for whip selection, blessing management, and mode selection feel like they were built once and never revisited. Information needed in the moment — what curse the current whip is inflicting, how many keys are banked — is buried a click deeper than it should be. For a game about not stopping, the stopping parts are surprisingly clumsy.

The art direction is confident and cheap in equal measure. Temples are chunky, low-poly stonework with saturated lighting — think a stylized Indiana Jones set with a Devolver poster-paint palette. It reads instantly, which is exactly what a game running at parkour speed needs. The high-contrast art keeps ledges legible at speed. Guardians are the visual highlight: enormous, stone-faced idols with a sense of mass that makes their pursuit intimidating.

The trade-off is sameness. Because the generator reuses templates and the palette shifts only modestly between depths, temples blur together visually as well as mechanically. Adventure Mode’s hand-tuned areas show what a bit more environmental authorship could have done for the whole game.

The engine is built around the two things that matter here: input latency and frame pacing. That focus is the right one for a game where a dropped frame during a whip release means a spike pit. Rendering a crowd of phantoms is a modest load for modern hardware, and floor transitions are built to be quick so the run’s momentum survives them.

Steam is the home platform. Mouse-and-keyboard suits the whip’s aim-and-attach loop, which rewards precision; snapping to a ceiling anchor mid-jump while sliding is the kind of input a mouse handles best. The movement keys map cleanly to the sprint-slide-jump rhythm without awkward chord inputs.

Controller support is implemented, with generous attach assist to soften stick aiming. It’s playable, but a stick is a compromise on longer swings that need a precise release angle, and the same trade-off applies on Steam Deck. Phantom Abyss is a Steam release; the ghost system depends on a persistent backend, and the movement depends on steady frame pacing, which shapes where it can live.

Phantom Abyss is a great mechanic looking for a great game. The whip is a real achievement, the kind of system other developers study, and the phantom mechanic is a smart reuse of Dark Souls’ asynchronous DNA. For its first stretch, it’s one of the most exhilarating things in first person. Then the generator repeats itself, the ghosts fall silent, and the temple turns out to be smaller than it looked.

That makes it hard to recommend for most people. At $19.99, the movement is a fair deal for a while, and Adventure Mode gives newcomers a clean on-ramp that Early Access never offered. But go in knowing what this is: a brilliant sprint, not a marathon. Team WIBY built something that deserves a sequel with far more room templates and a progression system to match. This version is a proof of concept — a good one, and an incomplete one.