I’m a sucker for a decent horror game, especially ones that combine an intriguing setting with interesting mechanics and an immersive atmosphere. Throw in a bit of Lovecraft and I’m pretty much sold. Inevitably then, I was drawn to Phantasmal: City of Darkness when I saw it left Steam early access last month.
Developed by indie studio Eyemobi, Phantasmal is a first-person survival horror set within the infamous Kowloon Walled City during the final days of the enforced eviction in 1993 (after which it was completely demolished by the Hong Kong government). You’re a private eye in search of your aunt who mysteriously disappeared after becoming increasingly obsessed with a strange cult centering around “The One Who Sleeps”. Now you find yourself trapped deep within the bowels of this largely-deserted enclave trying to find answers and looking for a way out.
Not an easy task. It’s prohibitively dark, you have very limited resources, and the labyrinthine alleys are crawling with deranged junkies and increasingly disturbing creatures. As firearms and ammo are rare, you’ll need to make use of crudely-fashioned weapons such as wooden planks and metal pipes to defend yourself. But these break over time and with low health and tough foes, your best bet is sticking to shadows, using your flashlight sparingly, and avoiding combat where possible.
However, prolonged exposure to the dark or eyeballing monsters for too long will gradually erode your sanity, whereas over-reliance on running (or shooting) will cause a ruckus that summons a terrifying entity known as The Sleeper. On top of this, there are no saves, progress is lost on death, and the five levels are entirely procedurally generated – hence the marketing of Phantasmal as a rougelike.
It’s a great premise, but unfortunately not one that Phantasmal manages to live up to. In the brilliant Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a title this game borrows from heavily, you feel helpless because you can’t fight back – your only choice when faced with an enemy is to run or hide. In contrast, the sense of disempowerment in Phantasmal derives solely from the ropey mechanics and all the bloody bugs.
The stealth element boils down to sitting in the shadows and waiting for enemies to pass while your sanity depletes. Fine, except there’s no guarantee they’ll move on or won’t see you anyway. Plus, the evil blighters have a rather annoying tendency to get stuck in doors, block off narrow passageways indefinitely, and even walk straight through objects and walls. You can attempt to create distractions by throwing flares and firecrackers, but these are far more likely to backfire on you or achieve absolutely nothing.
And it’s hard to sneak around when the movement is so clumsy and unresponsive. Thanks to the awful collision detection and object physics, you seem to get stuck on practically every prop within the heavily cluttered locations, including the elevators and stairs, making a right old racket in the process.Though you needn’t worry too much about the sanity aspect. It’s more visual annoyance than serious hindrance, devoid of the far more interesting and crippling effects seen in Amnesia and Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.
Part of the problem is that procedural generation doesn’t lend itself particularly well to a stealth scenario, not without more intelligent rules to guide map creation and NPC placement, or at least providing the player with better tools/abilities to deal with difficult situations. Classic stealth games such as Thief, Hitman, and Splinter Cell work so well because each level is immaculately designed, AI behaviour is carefully planned, and multiple feasible routes are plotted and thoroughly tested.
As a consequence, you’ll find yourself resorting to violence far more than the game intends. The problem is combat is also a chore and predominantly involves repeatedly bashing things over the head with a wooden 2×4. The hit detection is woeful and you regularly miss targets at point blank range – it’s near impossible to hit the fast moving spider creatures that clamber all over the walls and ceilings. Plus, melee weapons break after just a few uses, a feature more tiresome than immersive, the guns feel weak despite their scarcity, and attacking a single enemy (even while sneaking) seems to summon every creature within a five-mile radius.
Presentation wise, Phantasmal doesn’t fare much better. It does feature some nice lighting effects and the environments are appropriately gloomy and oppressive, but the textures look muddy, the models are clunky, and the character animations are rather awkward and unconvincing, certainly more comical than fear inducing. The post-processing effects do go some way to alleviating this and help to promote a more tense atmosphere, though the vignette/eye effect looks horrible and can’t be disabled without turning off everything else.
There’s also an amusing variety of immersion-breaking visual glitches such as floating objects and flying ragdolls, while the gamma desperately needs sorting out – some areas are pitch black, yet others completely washed out. A bit of performance optimisation wouldn’t go amiss either as the game suffers from frequent frame-rate spikes even at lower settings (my PC well exceeds the recommended specifications).
It’s also wildly inconsistent in terms of the sound design. The background ambience is, for the most part, well done and suitably nightmarish. Demonic whisperings, arcane chanting, industrial white noise, watery squelching, etc., all make for a tense and unnerving experience. That said, it’s so unrelenting and overdone, lacking the nuance and skillful variation of horror classics like Silent Hill, that you quickly become desensitised and it loses its ability to maintain the suspenseful terror. Generally, most of the gameplay-related sounds are fairly atrocious. The interaction and collision sounds are rather jarring, the weapons are flat and lifeless, and the screams and death groans of the monsters are laughably bad. And don’t get me started on the hopelessly miscast and wooden voice acting of the player protagonist, something you must endure during the loading of each level.
But perhaps Phantasmal’s biggest crime is the total and utter waste of the setting. Once thought to be the most densely populated place on Earth, the largely ungoverned Kowloon Walled City had a fantastically rich history and unique maze-like aesthetic of cramped alleyways and vertically-stacked structures, featuring all manner of ramshackle shops, makeshift apartments, and tiny roof-top dwellings. Little of this has made it into the game. Instead, what we’re treated to is long sequences of bland and relatively featureless corridors and stairwells littered with countless trash bags and glass bottles, with the occasional sign in Cantonese to remind us where we are.
When these do eventually branch into rooms and more open spaces, it’s always the same handful of areas with near identical layouts. Clearly, the procedural generator has a very limited pool of assets to work with. Worse still, you often pass through exactly the same place several times in immediate succession, such as consecutive mah-jong parlours or lifts, which logically makes no sense.
There’s certainly not enough variation to warrant multiple playthroughs, not that I’ve succeeded in completing Phantasmal because it keeps crashing on the fifth level. And you’ll find no incentive from the narrative. The storyline is unengaging and wholly unimportant to the gameplay, largely amounting to a hastily-assembled graphic novel intro and the odd clipping found here and there. Also, the Cthulu mythos is tenuous at best – some vague murmurings about a mysterious cult and a few badly-rendered tentacled monsters.
Ironically, there is a progression system of sorts that involves collecting coins. Though I can’t imagine too many people wanting to play this enough to be able to afford any of the more significant stat upgrades.
In the end, there’s very little to recommend. Despite a year-long early access period, Phantasmal is a bug-ridden mess suffering from an array of poor design decisions and half-baked ideas. To be fair to Eyemobi, they have continued to support the game post-release and future updates are in the pipeline, though it would take nothing short of a complete reworking to transform Phantasmal into something more fun and engaging. It also begs the question, why publish something that is plainly unfinished? Shame, because lurking somewhere deep below its murky surface is the potential for great a game.
Developer: Eyemobi Ltd.
Publisher: Eyemobi Ltd.
Platform: PC
Release Date: 14th April 2016