Phantom Overload

About the game

Phantom Overload puts you on foot, in the first person, in a world that is built fresh every time you start. You carry a gun with a handful of shots, and the phantoms that wander the world are looking for you as much as you are looking for them. The lighting is low and warm, the shapes are simple and the silence is broken by footsteps, so spotting a dark figure between the streetlights is half of the game.

The world can be a city, a darkness, a desert or a forest, and each one is generated from a random seed, so a street you walked down once will not come back. There are three game modes. The standard mode is the full hunt, with the phantoms spawning more and more often. The simple mode is a lighter version of it. The walking mode has no danger at all, and is just a quiet way to explore the places the game generates. The menu shows how many phantoms you have killed and how long you survived when a run ends.

It is free software, written and drawn by one developer, and a good example of how much atmosphere a few flat shapes and a good light can give.

Playing it here

Click Play and wait for the page to load (the game is about 40 MB, downloaded only when you press the button). Pick Quickplay for a random world, or Custom game to choose the world, mode and seed. Click inside the game so the browser captures your mouse. The game runs in your browser with the Godot engine in its single-threaded mode and makes no requests outside this site. A keyboard and a mouse are needed.

This is a web version of the game, and a few things were taken out: the online multiplayer (it needs a direct network connection and does not run in a browser) and the Quit button (a web page cannot close itself). The game warns on the menu that it may look worse than on the desktop, because the browser uses a simpler renderer. A computer with a real graphics card is recommended.

Controls

Tips

Listen first. Footsteps are loud in the quiet, so stop and listen before you cross open ground.

Use the light. Phantoms are easy to see under a lamp and hard to see outside it, so shoot when they step into the light.

Count your shots. The diamonds on the left of the screen are your ammunition, and you have only a few of them.

Try the walking mode. It is the best way to learn how a world is laid out before you play a real hunt.

FAQ

Can I play with friends? Not in this web version. The desktop game has an experimental online mode, which was left out here.

Does it save my progress? There is no campaign to save. Your settings are kept in your browser.

Is it free to share? Yes. It is free software under the GNU GPL v3 or later, and the few files with other licences are listed below.

Credits and licence

Phantom Overload is by Linus Vanas (Huitsi) and is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 or later. A few files are third-party works under CC0 and under the OpenGameArt Attribution 3.0 licence (OGA-BY 3.0), such as the footstep sounds, by owlishmedia, rubberduck, zer0sol and others named in the file headers. The game runs on Godot Engine 4.7.2, under the MIT licence, with the Godopt options library by the same author.

The licence texts and the complete source of this exact build, with the changes we made, are linked from this page.