Phantasmal (Video Game)
Ted Hentschke
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Developed by Eyemobi ltd.
Available on PC through Steam
Suitable for ages 15+
It’s a rare opportunity to be able to witness every stage of a game’s development. From very early on, Phantasmal has been available through Early Access. There’s no real standard for when it’s proper to make your debut into Steam’s “work-in-progress” department, and titles run the gamut between barely functioning proof of concept demos and public final product bug testing. Phantasmal’s first iteration wasn’t quite “alpha .1” of a zombie/crafting/survival game that would never see the light of day, but it was definitively a rough draft.
It’s been roughly a year since I reached out to game developer Joe Chang and requested a copy. Since then I’ve been waiting patiently, checking out build after build, waiting for the game to reach a polished enough state to warrant full preview treatment. Versions came and went, features were added, and slowly the game molded and shaped from a series of disjointed hallways into… something. When I saw Phantasmal pop up on my Steam Store page, I was kind of shocked. It hadn’t been more than a couple months since I last checked, and the game was nowhere near done.
I’m simultaneously impressed and stunned by the recent changes. There was a time where I couldn’t see a glimmer on the horizon of how this would all come together, and despite the changes it never evolved into a solid vision for me. From the introduction of the merchant to the fixing up of the UI, everything just felt like a placeholder for some future iteration. Even in this final version, all of the pieces feel unformed, like a sculpture whose clay was shaped into crude form without definition.
This is the item shop menu. On the one hand, it’s an unreadable, non-descriptive mess. On the other hand, this is a pretty accurate description of a Chinese food menu.
It’s moments like this that are the worst for me. It should be easy for me to tear into a bad game, but I feel for Joe. He’s a small, indie developer, and he’s actually taking a chance on making something new. This isn’t a cynical cash-in or some half-assed attempt to court the YouTube scarecam audience. He had a unique idea, worked hard at it for well over a year, and had the stones to actually follow through. It’s a sad state where an indie dev needs to be commended for actually finishing their game, but that’s where we’re at.
So where did it all go wrong? A little bit of everywhere, unfortunately. Mechanically, the game seems simple enough. You play as Some Dude, who’s searching for Some Lady that has gone missing inside of the infamous Kowloon Walled City. As a previously real place, the location is incredibly interesting, promising a potentially endless labyrinth of bizarre, disjointed hallways with a logic all their own.
It’s all told through comic book panel cutscenes like this. Despite the poor resolution and awkward voice acting, it gets the job done.
You soon find that the inhabitants of the city are anything but harmless, with those not already turned into demons in the grips of a terrifying drug fugue. Humanity quickly descends into chaos as you descend to the lower levels. Oh shit, so it’s like The Raid? Eh… no.
The biggest strike against the game is that it in no way feels like a real world. The jutting, semi-randomized halls and rooms are jarringly repetitive and tenuously connected. I frequently would enter an elevator that led to a single hallway and another elevator, or find a collapsed awning from a nonexistent shack. I can accept random explosive barrels everywhere, but at no point was I convinced that this was an actual place. Too many hallways without enough destinations.
Ah yes, the famous Kowloon Bin-Fire Street Fair. Right where I wanted to be.
The game attempts to go for a dramatic contrast between light and dark. The fundamental mechanics are built around this, with light both healing your sanity and making you visible to the monsters. As scary as the dark can be, you’re sometimes safer there.
Sounds cool, right? Well, unfortunately, the game doesn’t have the graphical polish to handle the system. The difference between “light” and “dark” is entirely mechanical, with well lit bonfires not providing the benefit of a single flickering lightbulb. For a game building itself around light vs dark, it’s incredibly artificial. Why do monsters drain my sanity when looked at with a flashlight, but illuminating them with a flare is just fine? If the system is meant to reflect different levels of light affecting what you see, it just doesn’t convey that in practice.
Speaking of visuals, good Christ, stop putting so much dust in my eyes. I get that you are trying to make it all decrepit, but holy shit, is it obtrusive. There’s a huge difference between atmospheric ambiance and bomb fallout levels of can’t see shit. Also, I’ve been in a room lit by a single bonfire in the center, and the effect isn’t “immediately dark 3 feet away.”
Seriously, black lung is gonna kill me way before the unspeakable horrors do.
The game is also shallow for how complex it wants to be. For all of the secrets, exploration, and resource management, it basically always boils down to you, your pistol, and a wooden plank. There are other guns and melee weapons to find, but these ubiquitous starting items will be the backbone of every run. You will whack, whack, whack, shoot a few times, die, and restart again. You can upgrade your base stats such as health, stealth, and pistol ammo, so temporary upgrades like shotguns are an incredibly fleeting reward.
How is one supposed to react when a muttering Chinese man surrounded by flies starts following you? I’m legitimately asking. I spent about an hour trying to figure out what this dude’s deal was.
What this all means is that your first several dozen hours of gameplay will be comprised of scouring every corner of the maps for coins, spending far too much time looking at the jagged edges and repetitive textures, and getting tired of it before you even get to the more interesting enemies. It demands that you explore the minutia but doesn’t make doing so interesting. Once you upgrade and can afford to skip the more trivial shit, the game is much more fun. It just takes far too long to get there.
There are a bunch of tertiary elements I could analyze, including the “sleeper” that awakens to instantly kill you if you make too much noise. Unfortunately, the core game isn’t solid enough to make these extra features worth analyzing. It’s visually cluttered, mechanically boring, and narratively far too slow to pull you along. I appreciate what it’s trying to do, and with some polish a good game might still come out of this. But as it stands, I can’t recommend it.
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Categorized:Horror Gaming Reviews
