Jump Links
- Don’t Rush Ahead
- Master Your Whip
- Don’t Forget To Roll And Slide
- Gold Is Vital
- Find Alternate Routes
Your first few times running through the ruins and dungeons of Phantom Abyss can be overwhelming. Not only do you have all those traps, pitfalls, and other grisly ways of dying to deal with, you’re also joined by potentially hundreds of phantoms all showing you the various ways it can go wrong.
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Armed with nothing but a trusty whip and a few beginner tips, you can quickly start to pick up relics and avoid becoming yet another Phantom, doomed to haunt the ruins for all eternity.
Don’t Rush Ahead
Though they can be distracting, Phantoms (the ghosts of players who came before you) are one of the most useful tools in staying alive. They can show you which way to go, alert you to hidden passages, temporarily disable traps with their whips, and even make obstacles completely fade out by dying to them, making that trap intangible and unable to hurt you. In rooms that require a key to open the door, you could even just sit and wait for a Phantom to do it for you.
In Phantom Abyss, you don’t need to be first to the finish. You have more than enough time to hang back and watch how everyone else failed, and it might give you enough information to successfully pull off what they could not.
There are only two times you want to make sure you’re first: if a Phantom opens a chest, the coins will not automatically fly to you as they would if you’d opened it yourself, which can be awkward at times. You also need to make sure you’re near the front by the end of the final level, as there are only a limited number of relics to claim.
Master Your Whip
The whip is an incredible piece of kit. At first it seems like it’d only be good for climbing up ledges, but there’s so much depth to the whip that learning all its quirks could be the difference between a slow or even fruitless run and one where you succeed.
It does it all. It lets you climb up high ledges, sure, but it also stuns certain traps like blow-dart statues and rotating blades, it opens chests from a distance, and can help you pull yourself back up from a fatal fall. Though there are numerous types of whip available with all manner of strengths and weaknesses, the classic, default whip is usually all you need to get through to the relic.
One thing many players don’t realise with the whip is that its range is often a lot longer than you think. As long as you got that green lock-on cursor onto a surface at the start of your fall, you could fall a significant distance and then pull yourself back up, which is perfect for collecting Phantom essence. Its reach also stretches just beyond the lock-on distance when you’re on solid ground, letting you climb into areas you otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
The whip even lets you hop through air current traps without being blown away. This is especially good for those annoying traps that blow you up into spikes on the ceiling – just a flick of the whip and you’re throw, puncture-free.
Don’t Forget To Roll And Slide
With so much leaping, climbing, and grappling going in, it can be easy to forget that ducking down and getting close to the ground is also a very useful strategy. Always make frequent use of rolling, crouching, and sliding.
Rolling’s main purpose is to break your fall and negate all fall damage. It doesn’t matter how high you’ve fallen from, as long as you nail that roll at the end you’ll avoid taking any hits and sparing your precious hearts. Some maps have lengthy drops that you’d normally have to carefully climb down that can be skipped by just throwing yourself off the ledge and doing a roll at the end.
Sliding and crouching don’t prevent damage like rolls, but they can be used to avoid traps. Many obstacles, like the exploding statue heads and the spinning blades are just high enough to be ducked under, allowing you to maintain your momentum. Sliding down slopes is also notably faster than running, for those tight races to the relic at the end.
Gold Is Vital
It can be tempting to charge on ahead, as it almost feels like the Phantoms push you on. But it’s almost always better to take a breather and look for gold and keys before pressing on.
Gold is used to buy blessings from the statues at the beginning and end of every level. These can range from the somewhat useful, like having the temple guardian ignore you for a level, to the absolute game-changing like double the amount of whip shots or regaining health.
Gold can not only be found in chests you come across on the main path, but also tucked away in some devilishly well-hidden nooks and crannies. They can often be hidden in rooms above the main track, or even nestled away behind you. This is another reason to keep an eye on the Phantoms, as their collective knowledge can guide you towards these hidden rewards and save you the task of hunting for them yourself.
Find Alternate Routes
It isn’t just pockets of rewards that can be hidden – sometimes there are routes through the levels that seem less intuitive or even more dangerous, but can be incredibly advantageous to use.
For example, some rooms can be almost entirely skipped by with a gutsy jump, while in others there may be ways to skip large stretches of traps by jumping and whipping around the side of them. Once again, watch what the Phantoms are doing, as they can highlight shortcuts you might have otherwise missed.
That being said, don’t be afraid to experiment for yourself, either. Once you’ve got a good grip on the whip and traversal, you’ll often see paths from levels you hadn’t noticed before – maybe up and over the ornate stone pillars that you thought were just there for decoration. There’s no point in contending with obstacles you don’t need to, and with a bit of experience you can skip a surprising amount of the level in just a few moves.
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