Phantaruk

A fantastic short horror game based in space.
It's moody and a joy to explore.

I found one or two game mechanics rather annoying, but overall it was a pleasure to play.

Phantaruk has some interesting ideas and a significant atmosphere that is reminiscent of Doom 3, an aesthetic which I wholly adore. It also had the potential to be a thematically deep experience but that promise ends at a wearisome gameplay mechanic and is ultimately irrelevant to the story. The creature AI is seriously broken and destroys most of the enjoyment; it wanders in erratic patterns, doesn't conform to the stealth system, has ridiculous sound queues and teleports to the player once an area is cleared, a lazily artificial method of maintaining the threat that results in a cheap death or unnecessary pursuit.

In a splenetic twist of irony, Phantaruk is another valueless form in a genre of clones.

5/10

honestly its kinda boring, but i would have played it if it wasn`t for the toxin mechanic... that killed it for me.

The game is good- well, I say it's good, it suffers from a few issues, being a bit less optimised than it probably should be- no matter, as well as that, some parts of the game are incredibly vague, and will leave you stuck playing the game until you finally find what they're talking about. Despite it being a horror game- I've found myself enjoying it more by messing around than anything. It has its moments- but at the same time, it kind of lacks what it is meant to be doing. Overall, from what I've done- you can get a decent sci-fi horror game, just expect it to get boring at times.

I find this game entertaining. It has nice graphics and the level design is very well done. The atmosphere is what you would expect a space ship to be in this Situation (dark and scary). I wish the anti-toxin shots lasted longer or just do away with them altogether, they detract from the game play for me. I like to explore, but you have to keep up a steady pace to look for the anti-toxin to stay alive. Other than that i'm enjoying the game so far. I recommend the game and at $ 4.99 it's a steal.

One of these games that an average would be on point. Since I have to chose between Yay or Nay, I'll go with Nay.
The game is cheap and can be entertaining for what it is. The graphics are acceptable, the story is super generic (the ship where everything went to hell), but there are a few things that become really annoying after a while.
The toxin / vaccine mechanic doesn't make sense here. It's a horror game, it's already tense. Give me time to explore everything at my own pace, don't make me have to run around to have to find vaccines.
The main monster is really annoying. He's everywhere, he always sees you, and when he does, you can rarely escape.
And there are so many codes and doors, and locks..
Has it flaws, but I guess it can be entertaining for fans of the genre.

Honestly, I wouldn't recommend this.
I don't do a lot of reviews, but this one stuck out to me enough to do so. As my playtime states, under an hour in and I had to turn it off.
Pros:
-The voice acting is decent from what I heard, clean audio and good inflection like the actor actually cared about the character.
-The environment looks good for what it's supposed to be: dark and foreboding.

Cons:
-Movement is too slow. Walking normally feels stunted and slow, the sprint takes a second to "warm up" before you actually get some decent speed, and crouching is a slog.
-The toxin meter. This thing fills up fast (1% every .75 seconds) so finding antidotes is a must and you use them a LOT.
-The visual effects are atrocious. The screen starts to flash a pale green at the edge when your infection level gets to about 85%, while this isn't a terrible effect, the blinding white zoom and blur effect when you use the antidote is. Additionally, when you see a monster and are close enough, the screen starts to blur, which is mildly painful to look at.
-The monster: kind of generic space zombie, shambling with glowing bits on it. My biggest issue is that the range these things can see you is inconsistent at best. Sitting in total darkness and you can't hide from them apparently, but can pass by them in bright lights if you're far enough away.
-Pacing. While I like the audio log system, being locked in position and having to listen to it while not being able to do anything kills the whole experience. Stopping gameplay to dump exposition isn't a good way to keep up the atmosphere, especially in a horror title.
-The UI is a mess. The inventory/notes system uses a generic "sci-fi" font but is difficult to read because it's small and things blend together, trying to see how many antidotes you have left is a pain because the number is obscured by the frame of the icon. Conversely, the health/toxin meters are nice and large and some of the data pads are almost too big.

I did note some minor technical issues like framerate skips and lags but those aren't complete deal breakers for me. Overall, This title needs some work to come up to what I would call "playable". I wouldn't say this game is terrible, but it's not one I would consider playing again.

What in the garbage did I just play. There is nothing there. You have a darkly lit spaceship, a massive amount of pointless corridors to go down, and one monster that sees you through walls, and runs faster than you and kills you. Your light source dies after two minutes. No story, No plot, nothing.. Even the most basic meat and potatoes of a game is not there. Utter garbage

Bad game,horrible optimization.
It is slow and boring, the monster is the worst he walks like a slug ,your patience is really on the line here,and because you are sick time after time you have to take medicine, but because it is rare to find it ,and many times you will get lost not knowing what to do or where to go, and when medicine is no more you are good as dead.
The quest message if of no help almost , there is no map ,no pointer where to go ,and what to press or to push ... Its just like turn off generator !!?! Where ,how ,with what ... No mater ...
When you have NO medicine you screen goes yellow and have a horrible effect on your eyes really ,you see nothing then,too bad.
The game had promise and atmosphere, but bad gameplay and optimizations killed it.

I rate the PC survival-horror game Phantaruk 2.5/5. In general, this is a good idea done badly.

Honestly, I didn’t have the patience to finish playing this game. Though it has some okay graphics, good sound, good horror music, good voice acting, adequate controls and is a fun idea (a horror game on a spaceship seems like an intrinsically good idea to me and it worked well in System Shock 2), Phantaruk quickly becomes a frustrating experience mired in a slew of bad game design choices. It becomes even worse when you see how the mediocre (at best) gameplay experience has been coupled with a clichéd and boring plot which gives you no choice regarding (from what I saw on Youtube) how totally unsatisfying the ending will be. With no difficulty levels or major gameplay options Phantaruk also has no replay value whatsoever.

Phantaruk is a survival horror game which takes place on a strange medical/research spaceship which has very few of its lights turned on. Your initial objective is to try to escape the ship. Once you discover what your late-game objective is, the entire plot falls apart and the game starts to feel just as arbitrary, silly and frustrating as the gameplay itself.

Though guns are mentioned in the game’s dialogue, you will be oddly unable to find a single one. The game also won’t let you pick up any heavy objects wield as weapons. This means you will need to avoid and hide from enemies for the entire course of the game. To make matters worse, once a certain, frequently reappearing enemy spots you, it becomes almost impossible to escape as your character is unable to run very fast or very far without quickly running out of breath. Whenever I played this game I found myself wishing I was playing Doom 3 (or even System Shock 2) instead. I mean, in Phantaruk, your character can’t even pick up a wrench and use it as a weapon to at least stave off the enemies? Apparently not, because that might cause his blood pressure to rise too much and we wouldn’t want that. Your character in Phantaruk is a delicate daisy.

Worse still, you are continuously encouraged to keep moving and find more medical hypodermic needles to use before weird toxins in your blood stream kill you, unless you keep on injecting yourself every 5 minutes or so. This situation pretty much encourages you to throw caution to the wind and keep moving regardless of the dangers which may lurk beyond your immediate location. This all means that when you play Phantaruk you’ll probably get killed, A LOT, at least if you try hard to be stealthy like I did. You might get killed so often that being killed by a big bio-mechanic monstrosity begins to lose its drama and merely becomes a repetitive irritant. This ongoing situation causes this survival horror game to lose most of its sense of tension and the game starts to feel more like an irritating, repetitive puzzle game, one in which it is unreasonably dark and hard to see. On top of all this you inexplicably have a harder time seeing if you are close to the main monster. That’s right; the screen gets intentionally blurry whenever you are close to the main monster. It’s an intrinsically stupid game mechanic that not only doesn’t make very much sense but can also interfere with not getting killed, again and again.

So basically:

+/-Great sound, great, mostly ambient horror music, at least adequate controls, good automatic saving checkpoints, an honestly creepy atmosphere in many places, at least until the effect wears off and it gets boring/repetitive. Why is a medical ship so damn dark, even if it is an emergency situation?

+/-Pretty good graphics but there are several minor graphical glitches (the distance becomes blurry when you look at your arm mounted computer screen for example). I had not realized the Unity engine was capable of having such nice 3d graphics. In places it is comparable to the graphics of Doom 3. It seems odd that the lighting is so poor. At least the poor lighting in Doom 3 made some sense, since Demons from HELL were invading and changing things. There’s not enough of a reason for the lighting in this game to be poor. If you remember, the lighting in System Shock 2 wasn’t always poor (and that was on board a space ship too). Some minor graphical stuttering/slow down for no apparent reason seems to occur randomly but it is not extremely noticeable.

-Irritating gameplay in general. Once the main monster spots you it seems to be almost impossible to hide from it. The plot would have you think there is maybe only one main monster but it feels as though there must be many of them because it often appears in areas beyond where you are after you have just escaped from it. This means the monster’s location is unpredictable which adds tension but also adds frustration.

-Cannot fight, cannot run well, cannot fend off the enemies in any way. Screen becomes blurry for no good reason whenever you are near the most dangerous enemy type (because your blood pressure is too high? Honestly, that sounds really stupid).

-Frustrating game mechanics may cause the main character to die repeatedly causing the game to lose its sense of tension and possibly causing the player to lose their fear of dying. This saps the game of most of its tension.

-The need to keep injecting your character with hypos to stave off your character’s blood toxins forces you to hurry more than you otherwise may want to, thus encouraging risky behavior/tactics and may cause some players to try to rush through this already fairly short game and thus die even more often.

SPOILER HERE:
-Clichéd anti-technology/anti-intellectual plot in which you are forced to make the inane and stupid decision of destroying all evidence of a corrupt company’s wrongdoings even though all their mad scientists have already escaped anyhow. Oh, and the ending is totally unsatisfying. You die in the end by setting yourself (and the entire ship) on fire. Hooray for you. Congrats. Great feel-good ending isn’t it?

-Apparently no alternate endings hence and no difficulty levels or major gameplay options results in no replay value for a relatively short game.

-Gameplay gets even worse in one section where you must navigate darkened, smoke-choked corridors (with a bright screen in your face taking up some of your view) with the main, screen-blurring monster nearby so, during that segment, you can see even less than you usually can. Very frustrating segment.

If you want the brief opinion, here it is: if you are looking for the space horror, you can buy "Phantaruk" without any doubts (and don't forget to check "Syndrome" as well).

You are a single person on the space ship, haunted by unknown evil... You will need to make your way throug the maze-like sectors, hiding from the mercyless hunter and fighting agains virus, striking you from within...

The game is relatively short and it is not as polished as "Alien: Isolation", for example, but it can be thrilling and enjoyable.

Good things:
- i do like the level design;
- stealth mechanic isn't flawless, but it works for me (little spoiler: sound doesn't trigger enemy attention... well, almost);
- voiceover is surprisingly good, i would say, perfect for this game;
- enemies are truly terrifying;
- idea about "lethal conditions" for your alter ego is very good and it is encorporated well;
- story is good in total;
- convenient checkpoint system.

Now something i did not like:
- story, while being interesting, is presented badly;
- final is over-rapid and it leaves player unsatisfied;
- task log is crap: you are doing things without any idea, why. It comes especially sharp during the final part (player definitely needs more explanations);
- graphic engine is a bit laggy;
- Spoiler alert red (don't read this, if you haven't finished the game): Phantaruk is teleported to some parts of the level instead of pursuing you linearly. This damages the stealth mechanic, but even worse, it feels with that teleportation, that Phantaruks are many, which is against the storyline. I believe actually, that there are more than one on some levels (for example, when you're lurking through the storage rooms, you can just run from one Phantaruk to another, maybe, it is possible to force them to meet each other :)

Well, regardless of some flaws, "Phantaruk" is a good space horror. Some ideas are just brilliant (like usage of pulse or that smoky labyrinth), the experience will give you some nice shivering, the story and the voiceover are worth of your time.

P:S: отличная игрушка, не уступает "Syndrome". Играть жутко, выглядит и звучит приятно, в комплекте неплохая история, хотя торопливо законченная. И, кстати, есть русский язык со вполне приличным переводом.

In terms of gameplay and presentation, Phantaruk is basically Amnesia: the Dark Descent on a spaceship. The game is a first release from a small Polish development team, using the Unity engine. The game takes about 3 hours or so to finish; there are no weapons, and the main gameplay is sneaking around and avoiding the enemy as it wanders around the level searching for you.

Overall I'd say the production values are "professional Indie" quality. Not full studio quality, but not an asset flip cooked up by one Eastern European dude in his bedroom either. Keys are fully rebindable, and you can invert the mouse axis. The game also has controller support and an FOV slider. There are voice acted audio logs, but you won't encounter any NPCs other than the enemies.

Levels are similar in size to the levels in Amnesia: the Dark Descent. There are usually multiple routes, air vents, etc. The game is a fairly linear progression from one level of the ship to the next, though a few levels involve going back through previously traveled sections of the ship. There is some level variation (med bays, offices, etc.) but for the most part it's pretty standard "sci-fi spaceship corridors".

The game has a fairly simple inventory system in which you collect flashlight batteries and antidote syringes, as well as text logs that give story tidbits. Objects that you can pick up glow blue, which helps you spot them.

The most notable game mechanic is the infection system. Your infection level is constantly going up, and you die after it reaches 100% (which only takes a few minutes). Injecting an antidote syringe brings the infection down to 0%, but it starts going back up again immediately. This system puts you on a time limit and forces you to keep moving, as you'll only find more antidote syringes by progressing to new areas (fortunately reading text logs pauses the time limit). Flashlight batteries are much less important, as areas in the game are generally reasonably well lit.

The game uses your character's pulse as the health system; your pulse goes up when you sprint, stare at the main monster, or take damage, and slowly goes back down to normal when none of those things are happening. Generally you die in 2 or 3 hits from enemies.

The game has two enemies; the main monster, Phantaruk, as well as a bunch of human clones. The clones are mindless clones bred as guinea pigs for medical experiments; they appear in two levels of the game, and have very weak senses (they have a very short sight range and take a while to spot you) as well as slow, wandering movements (though they can run and attack if they do see you). Phantaruk is a mutant creature that serves as the main enemy in the game; he behaves pretty much like the monsters in Amnesia or Soma, and the screen even goes blurry when you stare at him, just lilke in those games.

The game "cheats" somewhat in that it automatically teleports Phantaruk near you when you enter a new series of rooms. So, you'll leave it behind in the rooms behind you, only to find it wandering around in the series of rooms ahead. This can be kind of jarring, since unlike the xenomorph from Alien, Phantaruk moves like a human and doesn't use air vents or anything like that, so it doesn't make any sense that he always manages to keep appearing ahead of you.
Overall it's a decent 3 hour space horror game, of professional indie quality and not a 1-man bedroom programmed student project. The "time limit" game mechanic is a little annoying, especially if you're a completionist who wants to explore around for all items or text logs.

The one caveat about this game is that games like Alien: Isolation and Soma have already done essentially the same thing, with a much higher budget and more polish. This might not be a problem if you're a fan of the genre and want a new experience in a similar style, but if you're just trying out the genre and want the best possible experience in it, you might want to check out one of the bigger-budget titles.

Impressive level design, good old school sci-fi feeling. Didn't really care if the monster was scary or not, because the atmosphere was already immersive enough. There are very bland horror games here on steam with tons of copy-pasted empty rooms, this is not one of them. Developers really put some effort into making an immersive locations. Sound is also good.

Overall, if you are craving for sci-fi horror, it really fills the gap.

Survival horror aspiring to be like Alien Isolation or SOMA. To be honest: it is much better. I don't know how this game is not that popular. Ingame content is so very decent: sounds, texts, tons of readable-interactive items, realistic structers... i explore everything on my way and it really makes me go deeper and deeper in this game. Far of unknown is a constant feeling. Really unique setting and an awesome unexpectable plot.

Memories came back after launching this game. Very nostalgic tittle, reminding me of old horror games. Of course I am nat talking about graphics - it is modern and very nice. As a fan of horrors, I am playing a lot, but this one needs to be commented and highlighted. This is where Adventure Horrors should aim right now!

Do not even launch it if you are chicken. Only for people with nerves of steel! This game was like 6 hour marathon of terror. I played games like Dead Space normally. I don't know what this games has, but it's like whole new level of horror. I will not forget this game for a long time. That is a horror I am certain I will not forget for a long time.

Many interesting ideas are implemented here. The plot is presented by audio files that you gathering during the adventure - this is just making you feel more alone and scared. I like flashlight in this game - here you have battery system, so it is another thing to wory about. In this type of game it is poistive thing :) Toxins level system is also interesting - never found anything like it in other games. Level of toxins is connected with your fear - it maybe sounds wired, but works nice in the game. I am not a horror fan, but I have found this game very engaging! So I think I can reccomend it for everyone.

Good stealth horror game! Not AAA class as Soma or Alien Isolation, but anyway interesting. Can't say something bad about this game, because it even has rebindable controls (rare thing in indie games)! Maybe it someway short but maybe this is for good - game not became boring. Only one aspect i can really critisize - hand computer text fonts are too small and blurred into almost unreadable condtion (but you need to read them in order to find door codes). Also about reading - your time in game is depends on your sickness level - so i absolutely have no time to read all those story texts in order to save my time and antidotes. And therefore i miss a half of the game backstory. Why they did this mistake - i don't know, but if you want to read all texts - prepare to spend all of your antidotes and die:) Also game not supports my native resolution of 1920x1200, but this is bearable. Anyway - i recommend this game for sure - it is scary, atmospheric and balanced. It was nice experience!

Story: A fat drug addicted man trapped on a space ship and must escape before the mutant creatures kill you! Sneaking around and solving problems like locked doors.

My time to beat: under 6 hours.
Control: keyboard and mouse
Story: a little bland
Bugs: none that I encountered
Motionsickness: about a 7 out of 10. A lot of running around corridors tends to make me feel queazy.

This game wasn't totally great, but it wasn't bad either. The game AI was sort of annoying. At times the mob would see you when really it shouldn't have.

What I really hated were 2 things: 1. The character you play is so out of shape, you can sprint for about 5 seconds before he becomes exhausted; 2. The character is addicted to a drug (which doesn't really have much of an explaination in the story) and you have to take a hit every few minutes just to stay sane and keep your vision from getting all wacky. Hence, you are basically a fat space man with a drug problem and it is annoying. as. fuck.

The game itself is a cheers to Alien Isolation. Similar, but not nearly as good as Alien Isolation. Still it is a good game. Not horrible, but not the best either.

Do I recommend it? Yeah, I think so. But since it is a short game with a somewhat boring ending, be sure to get it on sale.

First time ever am i requesting a refund.
As a transhumanism zealot i've been extremely excited about this game from the description. I did my best to look for the bright sides in the first hour of gameplay. But all of my patience eventually boiled off.
1). It's nowhere near scary. Our main enemy appears to be dumb, deaf and nearly blind. You can just follow in his footsteps all the way (since he is always conviniently placed on your path wherever you need to go). There might be other things made to scare us down the road, but i didn't play long enough to discover them.
2). Exploration is strictly prohibited. Every now and then you need to inject the antidote, which can only be found on your main route. You just don't have enough time to stray from it.
3). You can screw up a save by getting to the checkpoint with only seconds of your life remaining, which means having to restart the entire game. That's the worst mistake a game designer can possibly make.
4). Tons of useless visual effects. They are simply out of place.
5). Hitches. At any rig, at any settings (altough that seems being gradually fixed).
That being said, i'm wishing best luck to the author. You can surely do better, and i sincerely hope you will, one day.