Phantom Abyss Preview

It goes without saying that Devolver Digital has had a pretty good deal of success with Fall Guys. The unique “survival of the fittest'' gameplay style was something very new and it captured the hearts of millions when the indie publisher unleashed it on the world. Their upcoming release, Team WIBY’s debut title Phantom Abyss, has a lot of that same ethos, but played out in a very different way.

- Gary Sheppard

Publisher: Devolver Digital

Developer: Team WIBY

Genre: Action Release Date: Out Now (Steam Early Access)

Platform: PC

The basic premise is quite simple: get to the end of a dungeon without dying and pick up the idol. It’s somewhere between Temple Run, Pitfall, and the aforementioned Fall Guys. The dungeons are procedurally generated however and once a player has completed a dungeon, that particular configuration is removed from the game, never to be seen again. You can only have one attempt at any particular dungeon too, so you can’t practice the layout until you master it, you just have to learn how to dodge the various traps and enemies that you face. Very much like Mediatonic’s multiplayer smash-hit, this is a game that is easy to pick up, but deceptively difficult to master.

From the description, you would be forgiven for thinking this is a single-player only affair. In fact, it’s what the developer refers to as an “asynchronous multiplayer game”. The multiplayer element comes in the form of the titular phantoms. These are essentially ghosts of the players who have already died in the level, showing you what mistakes they made and giving an idea of what not to do.