A game about survival where you run toward the ghosts

Developer Team WIBY

Publisher Devolver Digital

Format PC

Origin Australia

Release TBA

GALLERY

VIDEO

Ben Marrinan was confident he’d hit upon a good idea when he came up with the concept behind Phantom Abyss in 2018. The success of its early access incarnation, then, cannot have been too great a shock. Yet watching players has proved a fascinating insight into human behaviour for Marrinan and his fellow developers at Brisbane-based Team WIBY. Tasked with hunting down a relic inside a procedurally generated temple, you’re usually accompanied by the phantoms of the explorers who went before you, and who died trying to retrieve the prize. Yet the instinct of most people when faced with these spirits sprinting off into the distance – despite knowing they all failed – is to run immediately after them.

“We weren’t 100 per cent sure exactly how people would behave, and how it would affect how they play,” Marrinan says. But it’s clear they didn’t expect this. It seems obvious when he explains it. “Like, you don’t have to beat them to where they’re going because they’re going to die, right?” And yet we’d be lying if we didn’t admit to following the pack. It’s an information cascade rather than herd mentality, and after a while you do learn to break out of that loop. “But when, like, the tenth person comes along and they’re seeing nine people just sprint away, they’re like, ‘Well, I guess I’m sprinting now.’ When that isn’t what you have to do at all!” By contrast, when players enter a temple and they’re told they’re the first to explore it, their natural inclination is to slow down. Again, we can fully vouch for that.