Phantom Abyss

Every roguelike promises that death teaches you something. Phantom Abyss makes that promise literal. When you fall into a spike pit, your ghost is recorded, and the next person who enters that temple watches you fall into it. That is the pitch, and it is a good one — good enough that Devolver Digital, a publisher with a sharper nose for weird hooks than anyone else in the business, picked it up from a small Brisbane studio and shepherded it through nearly three years of 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 first dozen runs.

What you get instead is something rarer: a movement toy of unusual quality, with a social layer that makes the first several 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 reception tells the story — Very Positive on Steam at 81%, a lukewarm 72 on Metacritic, and a vocal cohort of Early Access veterans who preferred the original, harsher design. Players love it in the moment. Critics, who have to play to the bottom, saw the bottom.

• 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 your temple replays their final run alongside you as a translucent ghost. Up to twenty phantoms at once show you 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 you the whole mistake, not just the aftermath.
• Whips as builds: Roughly two dozen 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 you route a temple.
• 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 you collect. 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 where you never stop and think. Sprint has a cadence, slide has a duration, and the whip’s attach-and-release timing turns every gap into a rhythm problem. Within an hour, you’ll be swinging over a rotating blade trap, releasing at the apex, sliding under a dart wall, and whipping to a ledge in a single unbroken line. Within five, you’ll be doing it while a guardian — a massive stone deity that stalks each temple — grinds toward you through the room behind you.

This is where the game earns its 2023 Australian Game Developer Awards technical design win. The whip has real physics: your swing arc depends on your entry velocity and attach angle, so a sloppy approach doesn’t just slow you, it sends you 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 you through the temple and kills you if it catches you — transforms trap-solving from a puzzle into a sprint. You have maybe eight 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. You feel like part of an expedition. Somebody’s ghost finds a hidden ledge you’d never have tried; you follow them, loot their keys, and feel like a grave robber who’s also a student.

The problem is that the information is asymmetric in the wrong direction. Phantoms show you where people died, which is the easy half of the puzzle. Once you’ve learned the trap vocabulary — and there are only so many traps — you no longer need to watch anyone die at a dart wall to know it’s a dart wall. By hour ten, the phantoms have become ambient decoration. Occasionally useful for spotting a shortcut, mostly just noise. The mechanic teaches you until you’ve learned the game, 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 you 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. After a couple of dozen runs, every “new” temple reads as a reshuffled deck of chambers you’ve already solved. The sense of exploration collapses into route optimization, and the whip is the only thing keeping you there.

The whips help, and they’re the smartest piece of meta-design in the package. A whip that removes your double-jump but doubles your key income changes your 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. Your run was a race against thousands of strangers you’d never meet. 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 you the sense of an ending that Early Access never offered. It’s also short — a handful of hours if you’re competent — and the story layer is thin enough that you’ll forget it before the credits finish.

Classic Mode preserves the old loop, minus the “gone forever” cruelty, and adds shareable codes so you can send a specific temple 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. Right now it’s alive enough.

The UI was clunky at launch and remains so. Menus for whip selection, blessing management, and mode selection feel like they were built once and never revisited. Information you want in the moment — what curse is your current whip inflicting, how many keys do you have 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. You’ll never misjudge a ledge because of a texture. Guardians are the visual highlight: enormous, stone-faced idols with a sense of mass that makes their pursuit genuinely 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.

Performance is excellent. The engine has clearly been tuned for the one thing that matters here: input latency and frame pacing. On a mid-range PC it holds high framerates without hitching, which is non-negotiable for a game where a dropped frame during a whip release means a spike pit. Phantom rendering — up to twenty ghosts at once — has no visible cost. Load times between floors are short enough that the run’s momentum survives them.

Steam is the definitive home, and mouse-and-keyboard is the definitive input. The whip’s aim-and-attach loop rewards the precision of a mouse; snapping to a ceiling anchor mid-jump while sliding is far more consistent than with a thumbstick. Keyboard players will also appreciate that the movement keys map cleanly to the sprint-slide-jump rhythm without any awkward chord inputs.

Controller support is fully implemented and works on Steam Deck, where the game runs well at the handheld’s native resolution and remains legible at seven inches thanks to that high-contrast art. Whip aiming on a stick is the compromise: the game adds generous attach assist, and it’s playable, but you’ll feel the difference on longer swings that need a precise release angle. It’s a good Deck game, not a great one.

There is no iOS, Android, or Nintendo Switch version, and don’t expect one; the ghost system depends on a persistent backend and the movement depends on framerate stability. The only other option is Xbox Series X/S, where it launched with 1.0.

Phantom Abyss is a great mechanic looking for a great game. The whip is a genuine achievement, the kind of system that gets studied by other developers, and the phantom mechanic is the smartest reuse of Dark Souls’ asynchronous DNA I’ve seen. For the first ten to fifteen hours, it’s one of the most exhilarating things you can play in first person. Then the generator repeats itself, the ghosts fall silent, and you realize the temple was smaller than it looked.

That’s still a recommendation. At its standard price, fifteen hours of movement this good is a fair deal, 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 three times the room templates and a progression system to match. This version is the proof of concept — a very good one.