There’s this old story about a guy that found his father’s ghost in a racing game. He and his dad used to play an Xbox game called RalliSport Challenge together when he was little. After his father passed away, his grief kept him away from the game for a decade. When he finally booted it back up, he discovered his dad’s “ghost” in a time trial. When he told this story in a Youtube comment on a video about spirituality in games, he described the way he started playing the game a lot, racing against his dad over and over again until he got good enough that he was able to beat him. When he finally made it to the finish line first, he stomped on the brakes and waited until his dad’s ghost could catch up so that it wouldn’t get deleted.
I’ve been thinking about that story a lot this weekend while I played Phantom Abyss, a new first-person platformer from Team WIBY and Devolver Digital. Like RalliSport Challenge (or any racing game really) you’ll encounter the ghosts of other players as you run through procedurally generated deathtrap dungeons on a quest to find the rare relics hidden within. The levels in Phantom Abyss aren’t races, however, though it can definitely start to feel that way as you run, slide, and swing your way through each course. Rather, each level is meant to be played and completed exactly one time. If you make it to the end, that level is permanently removed from the game forever. The ghosts you see are all the players that tried and failed to finish the level. Each one of them will run right alongside you until the moment they die. If you manage to make it all the way till the end of a level, you’ll have made it there all alone.
It’s a mechanic borrowed from the Souls games and it serves much the same purpose. By letting the ghosts run ahead of you, you can follow their paths and use them to avoid traps. They can’t leave you messages like they do in Souls games, thankfully, but they can lead you to hidden treasure throughout the dungeon and show you where the sneakiest traps lie waiting. If you see a player’s ghost fall into a pit, there’s a better chance that you yourself will be able to avoid the same fate.
But they have additional utility that the ghosts in Souls games don’t. Since every level can only be completed once, the number of ghosts you see can give you a clue about the challenge you're up against. If you start a run with a dozen ghosts, you’ll know right away that it’s a particularly hard dungeon that has claimed the lives of 12 players before you. You should take your time here, watch where they made mistakes, and try to avoid making the same ones.
The ghosts can also provide bonuses. Depending on the type of whip you bring with you (your tool for swinging around) you’ll be able to interact with the ghosts in different ways. One of my favorite whips allows you to heal if you’re close to other ghosts. This dramatically changes my playstyle when I use it since I feel more confident to run ahead of the pack. I don’t mind leaping headfirst into traps and taking some damage because I can just wait for the other ghosts to catch up and heal when they get to me — assuming they do eventually get to me.
There’s one other big difference between Dark Souls’ ghost and the ghosts in Phantom Abyss. While Souls ghosts are a random selection of other players, typically those who are playing the game at the same time as you, the ghosts in Phantom Abyss represent every single person that ever played that particular level before. The ghosts only exist until the level is beaten, then they and the level itself are deleted forever.
The ghosts are useful because they help you avoid danger, but they’re also meant to help incentivize players to complete the dungeon. When you finish a level that has defeated 12 other players, it can feel really good to know that you’re the only one that will ever cross the finish line. The intention is clearly to make you feel like you’re better than everyone else, and when you take the relic back to your base, you can look at it from time to time and be reminded of the dungeon you conquered — the one that’s yours and no one else's.
But I can’t help but feel some amount of grief for the ghosts that get deleted. It may sound ridiculous, but dungeon running in Phantom Abyss is a group effort, and annihilating the memories of the players that helped me get there feels kind of bad. I have the most fun when I’m running alongside a big group of other players, dodging spikes and jumping over pits together. If I make it far enough into a dungeon, I eventually find myself running all alone, and frankly, feeling pretty lonely. If I make it all the way to the end, I almost always hesitate for a moment while I think about the ghosts that helped me get here, trying to immortalize them in my memories as I pick up the relic and banish them to the void.
I had a really fun run last night that started with about seven other players. I lagged behind a little bit and let them lead me to some hidden treasure chests that I definitely would have missed. The whole group made it to the final leg of the dungeon but ended up falling prey to a series of particularly dangerous chambers. When I made it to the end, I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. I thought about the Rallisport Challenge guy, and even though I don’t have the same connection to the other runners as he did with his dad, I still felt like it wasn’t right to delete them. I know it sounds absurd, but I thought about my ghost running with the pack in someone else's game, and it brought me more joy to think about that memory living on than it did to just add another relic to my collection, so I jumped into a pit and ended my run.
Eventually, another player is going to run that dungeon and see me reach the relic, turn around, and jump in the pit. Maybe they’ll understand why I did it, and do the same. Maybe everyone who finds this level will sacrifice themselves right at the end so that all of our memories can live on, running the same dungeon together over and over forever. Imagine if the dungeon grew to a hundred players, all of them making it right to the end and then jumping in the pit together, each player making a sacrifice so that everyone can keep living forever. That would be a cooler legacy to me than my entire trophy room of golden relics.