Previous Next

Strange things are happening - unexplainable and creepy occurrences. So when I picked up my copy of Tynesoft's latest game Phantom, shivers ran down my spine.

You are a professor of astro-physics who happens to be interested in psychic phenomena and built a portable nuclear acclerator, presumably in his garage. Now this reactor makes a large hole in spooky phantoms.

So, with reactor in hand, you are well prepared for the horrors that face you, or are you?

On loading I was greeted by the control panel featuring score, reactor level, heart rate (in beats per minute) and an electrocardiograph (ECG), which resides on the bottom right of the screen.

Now it appears that you only have one life and the BPM indicator increases every time a ghost comes into contact with you - once this reaches 100, your old ticker will give out.

You arrive at Ye Olde Inn, and are met with a plan view that looks more like a maze.

Scurrying around are ghosts, who as soon as they see you, begin to converge - Easy, I hear you say, out with the nuclear accelerator and poof, the spooks begin to vanish in clouds of ectoplasm. This is a pretty neat weapon as it wipes out several spooks in one blast.

But there is one problem - you only have a limited supply of isotope in your reactor and if you empty it, you are in deep trouble. New ones are scattered about the inn but as discretion is the better part of valour, you can dodge the spooks instead.

You have to battle your way round four screen levels of the inn, collecting keys and other items on your way.

You eventually battle with a large and very nasty ghost. At this point I realised that my heart rate did not go down in the move from one level to the next. Indeed, it only settled when I completed the Inn and moved on to the Dungeon where a completely different set of nasties decided to have me for breakfast.

With 64 different rooms and the mansion and castle to exorcise there is plenty to keep you on your toes - especially as the difficulty and quality of mazes increase.

The graphics used throughout are first-rate coupled with a wonderful background tune. Character animation is superb both for spooks and your player character.

My only quibble is that the spooks can get you without you being able to shoot them. This is not a major problem because if you are good enough you simply sidestep them.

Instead of rampaging around the screen hacking and slashing your enemy, with Phantom you must use tactics to negotiate each screen. This evasive angle adds a very addictive quality to the game.

Phantom is original and well worth buying for the sheer pleasure of playing it. So when it comes to the final conflict and you have rumbles in your attic or creepies in the cellar then... who yer gonna call? Tynesoft.