Only one person in the world can beat a Phantom Abyss dungeon

We got our first glimpse at Phantom Abyss a few weeks ago, but were given a longer look today during the Summer Game Fest. And the longer you look, the cooler it sounds.

In Phantom Abyss, players run, jump, and swing with a whip through a procedurally generated temple filled with deadly traps in hopes of finding and stealing a precious relic. It's an asynchronous multiplayer game, so you're not all in there together—instead, you see the other players as phantoms, the ghosts of people who have entered the tomb before you. Follow a phantom if you think they'll lead you safely around the traps, but keep in mind they all most likely perished, so any ghost you shadow could be leading you to your doom. 

And if you die in a temple, you're done. You'll never get another chance to complete that temple ever again.

It sounds a bit like a Spelunky daily challenge, where everyone is given the same procedurally generated map and has one life to complete it. The difference here is, there will only be a single player who ever does. Unlike Spelunky, where everyone theoretically has the ability to finish a daily challenge, in Phantom Abyss, when someone finally grabs the relic, the tomb is immediately sealed off forever. That one player will be the only player who ever finished that temple successfully. It's a leaderboard of one.

Along with traps, there's a temple guardian, and the deeper you go into the dungeon, the madder it gets. Survive long enough and you won't just have to worry about traps but a pissed-off monster chasing you. You'll also come across new kinds of whips to use, and find coins to spend on "powerful blessings." I have no idea what those entail, but I think you're gonna need all the help you can get. Phantom Abyss enters Steam Early Access this month.

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

Read more
The protagonist of Haste dashes with alacrity in a vivid piece of artwork for Haste: Broken Worlds.
Haste: Broken Worlds finally lets me live out my childhood fantasy of running really fast and then slamming into a rock at Mach 1 and breaking all my bones
A cartoon nun looks shocked and scared, bathed in green light.
The new game from the Blasphemous devs is like if Commandos was a metroidvania set in a Spanish monastery, and also the Green Beret kept losing his mind
White Knuckle trailer still
Ascend through 'ten thousand meters of concrete and decay' in this horrifying 'first-person roguelite speed-climbing game'
Three hyper light breaker characters running toward camera viewed from below.
Hyper Light Breaker has great combat, impeccable vibes, and its ambitious randomized open worlds actually work⁠—the real test is if it goes the distance in early access
A man with ragged hair and beard faces upward to the sky. His eyes are missing and the sockets are dripping blood.
Forbidden Solitaire is an upcoming horror game about a cursed CD-ROM from the spookily distant year of 1995
DoubleWe demo
DoubleWe blends Guess Who with Hitman, and its demo is one of the best I've played in ages
Latest in Action
A long bendy arm stealing money from people in a subway car
'You're a very long arm. You steal things. It's a comedy game,' explains developer of comedy game where you steal things with a very long arm
The First Berserker: Khazan review - Blade Phantom
How to claim The First Berserker: Khazan pre-order bonus and deluxe edition DLC
gta 6 trailer
Publishers 'don't want to be anywhere near' Grand Theft Auto 6 when it launches: 'It's proving to be very stressful'
An image of a Helldiver from Helldivers 2 shooting at a red dragon from Dungeons & Dragons.
'Ok, so dragon builds are a thing now': galaxy-brained Helldivers 2 player incinerates a bile titan with a hover pack and a flamethrower
Assassin's Creed Shadows promo image
Ubisoft scores a legendary ratio against Elon Musk on his own platform—which hopefully marks a final end to all the Assassin's Creed Shadows' culture war nonsense
Assassin's Creed Shadows immersive mode - Naoe holding a tanto in her hand as two guards fall to the ground behind her.
Assassin's Creed Shadows' first hotfix addresses stability issues and a photo mode crash
Latest in News
An Enshrouded player in a recreation of Erebor from The Lord of the Rings
Kings under the Mountain! 33 Enshrouded players spent 10,000 hours to recreate this iconic location from The Lord of the Rings
A mech awakens.
Mecha Break developer is considering unlocking all mechs following open beta feedback
Lara Croft Unified Art
Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics lays off 17 employees 'to better align our current business needs and the studio's future success'
A long bendy arm stealing money from people in a subway car
'You're a very long arm. You steal things. It's a comedy game,' explains developer of comedy game where you steal things with a very long arm
The heroes are attacked by monsters
Pillars of Eternity is getting turn-based combat to mark its 10th anniversary, and that means PC Gamer editors will soon be arguing about combat mechanics again
Image of Ronaldo from Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves trailer
It doesn't really make sense that soccer star Ronaldo is now a Fatal Fury character, but if you follow the money you can see how it happened