PHANTOM ABYSS

A game about survival where you run toward the ghosts

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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