Phantoms is a first person horror game where you must escape from the horrors haunting a train by fixing the doors leading to the exit. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Phantoms Review Overview
What is Phantoms?
A recent tragedy has forced your friend into worshiping an unknown God. Sure enough, strange things start happening around his town, leading to a string of mysterious disappearances. Concerned for his safety, you embark on a train ride to check up on him, only to get dragged into the supernatural that has taken hold of the area.
Phantoms features:
⚫︎ PS1-era graphics
⚫︎ Linear difficulty curve
⚫︎ Two endings to unlock
⚫︎ Randomized stages
⚫︎ Unlockable custom stage
 Steam |
$7.99 |
Phantoms Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Appropriately Creepy Ambience Easy to Understand Gameplay |
Deaths Are A Luck Issue Severely Limited Inventory |
Phantoms Overall Score - 72/100
Phantoms offers a decent horror experience that utilizes its strong ambiance to enhance its PS1 era graphics. While the gameplay can use some work to take player death away from bad luck, the overall result is still enjoyable, if a bit short.
Phantoms Story - 6/10
While Phantoms does have a story per se, your first playthrough will very likely involve you spending too much time dying to even remember its details. The dialogue you get from interacting with the objects around you doesn't help much either, even if it adds a decent amount of miscellaneous worldbuilding. In the first place, the game doesn’t even encourage you to explore due to the time limit you have on every "safe" space and the roaming baddie.
Phantoms Gameplay - 6/10
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Phantoms’ gameplay. It’s easy to understand and execute, with only a few buttons to pay attention to. However, the erratic patrolling pattern of the roaming conductor (which is your enemy, by the way), extremely limited inventory slots, and seemingly random hostile corpses can and will make some runs end in an extremely frustrating manner.
Phantoms Visuals - 9/10
Phantoms really nails the PS1-era retro look, complete with the filters synonymous to great analog horrors. Its lack of fine detail is enhanced by its general ambiance, forcing you to fill in the blank with your imagination. At the same time, it doesn’t look congested at all, allowing you to focus on your objectives properly.
Phantoms Audio - 8/10
Not only does the game have a good set of tunes and sound effects to set the mood, it also has voice acting! Though it’s not omnipresent, it’s used just enough to make the game even creepier. Its only real issue stems from the lack of prominent sound effects for footsteps, which would greatly enhance the horror even further, and the general prevalence of noise.
Phantoms Value for Money - 7/10
Phantoms has a decent price point at $7.99 for a horror game with good replayability. While short, it does have two endings you can unlock, as well as a secret and custom level for you to play with post-game.
Phantoms Review: Frustration Is The Real Horror
Phantoms is a game about visiting your friend by riding a train. But your friend isn’t like your everyday bestie who would message you about something completely random at 3AM in the morning while you’re in the middle of deep sleep. This one has gone through some terrible tragedy and has resorted to worshiping some unknown God to cope.
After your friend has gone off the deep end, mysterious disappearances have started to occur around the town he lives in. Concerned, you, the protagonist, board a train in order to check up on him.
Surely nothing bad will happen, right?
To nobody’s surprise, the train you’re on starts to manifest horrific realities that overlap with your own. Imagery includes bloodied barbed wires, pitch-black woods, a giant eye following your movements, flayed corpses, and… a train conductor? Without any means to fight these apparitions, all you can do is to escape from the train.
Phantoms’ gameplay centers entirely on this premise. Levels start with a corridor coach initially devoid of any baddies or mangled corpses. The game even plays a rather eerie, but strangely calming music and presents a number of regular NPCs to interact with. However, once you reach one end of the corridor, you are immediately transported to a world parallel to yours. This marks the beginning of Phantoms’ main gameplay loop.
In order to escape from the coach, you must repair the unit that controls the doors. Doing so requires a handful of materials scattered across the compartments. Unfortunately, you can’t just relaxedly saunter into each compartment without a care in the world. Since this is a horror game, there should be something there to threaten your safety.
Enter the train conductor. He is a strange, human-like (for now) entity that roams the corridor. If he catches you, it’s an instant game over. Maybe it’s because you’re actually a stowaway and he kicks you out of a moving train? Anyway, he serves as the main threat to your attempts to be an electrician.
There are also other threats, of course, such as the invisible entity stalking you throughout the game. Some of the supposedly dead bodies in each compartment can even kill you. However, they are much more difficult to die from, so the conductor remains as your biggest health hazard.
Its gameplay is easy enough, right? Just collect items and bring them to the electrical unit to repair it. All the while, you’ll have to avoid the conductor’s hitbox and pretend that he’s simply blind because he won’t react even if you’re walking directly in front of him. However, the game does have ways to make the experience a bit more challenging—and they ain’t pretty.
Considering that the corridor is linear, any normal game would allow you to just sneak up behind the conductor and occasionally enter a compartment if they feel like the former is about to switch directions. However, Phantoms isn’t any "normal" game. Here, the train conductor can teleport. Sometimes, he’ll appear at a distant part of the train. But he can also do so directly behind you in a very "nothing personnel, kid" moment and kill you instantly (I assume he does so with a fedora and a katana).
This creates quite a bind for the game since, more often than not, your deaths will feel like it was due to RNG rather than a lack of skill. This is even more frustrating if it happens near the end of a level, as Phantoms don’t use checkpoints. That means a game over screen is equal to a complete level reset.
And trust me: if it happens multiple times in a row, you’ll soon forget that this is a horror game.
Fortunately, Phantoms’ ambiance is enough to carry it somewhat. Its nostalgic graphics combined with the found footage horror filter creates a visually disturbing atmosphere when paired with all the imagery. In addition, it has great sound design, complete with eerie voice acting to really sell the mood.
Overall, Phantoms is a decent horror game with good potential. If it could get rid of its more luck-based elements, then I’m sure that it could be even better.
Pros of Phantoms
| Things Phantoms Got Right |
|---|
|
Appropriately Creepy Ambience Easy to Understand Gameplay |
Appropriately Creepy Ambience
The game combines the nostalgic and detail-lacking graphics of the PS1 era, the analog horror filter and theme, and its eerie music and visuals to full effect. As a result, its lack of graphical fidelity works in its favor. It coerces you to conjure your own version of the game’s frightening world in your head. There, the rusted barbed wires can be even bloodier, the conductor can be even more intimidating, and the mangled corpses can be more detailed.
Easy to Understand Gameplay
Phantoms’ controls are bound to the following keys: WASD for movement, E to interact, C to crouch, and… well, that’s it. Oh, I guess you also use your mouse to look around. But, really, that’s it. The entire game revolves around those few buttons. Understandably, it’s incredibly easy to get the hang of, even when the enemies themselves mess with you.
All you have to do is to look for your objectives, opening doors and avoiding anything that moves along the way.
Cons of Phantoms
| Things That Phantoms Can Improve |
|---|
|
Deaths Are A Luck Issue Severely Limited Inventory |
Deaths Are A Luck Issue
As someone who suffers from severe skill issues in the games that I play, I am proud to have found a game where us unskilled folk can properly blame RNG for our deaths instead. Unfortunately, in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a compliment to the game.
There are a handful of things that can do you in throughout the game and almost all of them can do so instantly. The primary culprit is the roaming conductor, who I assume does so because maybe you’re a stowaway. The others, as far as I’ve encountered, include an unseen force that only comes into play if you stay in one area for too long, and the occasional corpse inside the "safe" rooms that may suddenly give you the debuff called "being dead."
Its main issue lies in the way the conductor patrols the corridor. Considering that it’s also the biggest threat, that matter is much more apparent than it would otherwise be if it was a problem with anything else. Long story short, the conductor has a penchant for teleporting to completely unpredictable locations, leading to situations where you’ll experience a "nothing personnel, kid" moment and die from the conductor attacking you from behind even after you saw him walk past you.
Other than that, the unassuming corpses that could lead to a game over are also random, easily leading to death screens that don’t feel fair at all.
Severely Limited Inventory
The only way to explain the protagonist’s utter lack of inventory space would be that he is an amputee with no pockets. Otherwise, I can’t think of a reason why you are only allowed one item on you at all times when you don’t even have a gun to hold on your right.
Jokes aside, the limited inventory space means you’ll have to make multiple round trips to collect all your objectives. This provides more opportunities for RNG to screw you over, especially with the randomly-teleporting conductor. Plus, the fact that you spawn at the very beginning of the stage every time you die just makes it even more frustrating.
Is Phantoms Worth It?
It's a good buy
While the feeling of getting a game over due to dumb luck can be frustrating, they are at least avoidable for the most part. Hence, you can totally enjoy Phantoms’ eerie levels without having to shake your fist angrily at the random number generator for half of your playthrough. It’s a good horror title among its peers at the sub-$10 price point, and has enough replayability to make up for the early game frustrations.
| Platform | Price |
|---|---|
| Steam |
$7.99 |
Phantoms FAQ
Are the stages in Phantoms procedurally-generated?
No, but the placement of the items and the general experience for each level is randomized each time.
Are there any unlockables in Phantoms?
There’s a secret level where the game’s difficulty is tweaked to the maximum, as well as a custom level you can unlock after you clear the game once.
Game8 Reviews
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Phantoms Product Information
 |
|
| Title | PHANTOMS |
|---|---|
| Release Date | December 8, 2023 |
| Developer | Solitude Software |
| Publisher | TheGamePublisher |
| Supported Platforms | PC |
| Genre | Horror |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | Not Rated |
| Official Website | Phantoms Website |
