The Haunted Hoard: Fantom Feast (PC)

Fantom Feast applies a ghostly skin to the somewhat common eat-and-grow game concept. Starting off as a tiny spirit, the player aims to grow in size by consuming objects that are smaller than it, progressing to the next level once Fantom has reached a certain size. However, if the ghost makes contact with something bigger than it, it will die, requiring the player to restart the game from the beginning in an effort to earn a new high score. Since this particular game archetype has been translated into Fantom Feast with few alterations, what small changes it does make to the central design will be what makes or breaks it, and it seems like most of Fantom Feast’s minor shakeups aren’t for the better.

 

The first small issue players are likely to notice has to do with the shape of Fantom. The tiny ghost the player controls isn’t a normal shape, most of his body being somewhat round but tapering off into his ghostly tail. The antlers on his head mainly seem to be there to sprout a new flower to mark how many levels you’ve completed, but the main body is the player’s frame of reference for what size enemies they can eat, and having this shape makes it a bit hard to read your exact size. All the objects you can consume are circular, and while they come in plenty of sizes so you never have to risk eating one close in size to you, this ambiguity does lead to an unfortunate situation. Since one hit on a bigger enemy will kill you, you can’t really go for the risky gains of eating something almost the same size as you, and especially when you’re starting off small, you spend quite a bit of time just waiting for something much smaller and obviously safe to float across. The need to survive means there’s more time spent floating in place waiting, and since enemies aren’t really aggressive, this leads to uneventful downtime. The game does later introduce an enemy type who will create lasers across the screen with a partner if neither one is eaten to at least force some movement out of the player while providing incentive to eat these enemies, but otherwise most of what flies across the screen are purple blobs of variable speed you can easily move around.

There are two power-ups in the game meant to make you want to eat certain enemies, and one of them is definitely worth the effort to grab. The shield allows Fantom to take an extra hit before dying and can be refreshed after it’s lost by scarfing up another shield enemy, and having the shield does allow for a bit more risk taking if you so desire. The odd thing about the shield power-up though is how generous the game is with it. After it starts appearing in stages, it’s a pretty consistent feature, appearing a few seconds after you lose it so that you don’t really have to have moments where you’re too worried for your long term safety. The shield enemy is also very small so it’s almost always a guaranteed eat, only the slight drift of your ghost’s movements potentially making you miss it. The slight drift is easy to account for, but the other power-up in the game is a mix of control and speed, that being a green bar you can fill up when you consume enemies with a green aura. When Fantom turns green, you now have full control over a faster version of him, but save for situations with fast smaller enemies or big ones crossing the screen at the same time, the use cases for this ability seem limited, especially since you’ll likely be pretty big yourself by the time it activates and thus avoiding hazards like lasers will be based more on position than speed.

 

At first, Fantom Feast doesn’t really have anything pushing too hard against the player. Even before shield-giving enemies enter the enemy pool, you don’t have too much to worry about. All the action is constrained to the screen’s view area with no need to really linger near the dangerous edges, and your foes always move in a pretty clear path based on how they first drifted in. There are no enemies that chase or change their movement patterns, with only really the fireflies later in the game even moving in a way that is different from a straight line. The laser creating pairs can’t be forgotten, but they appear on the sides of the screen with an audio cue and rarely lock up much of the screen real estate. Fantom Feast grows dull on a first playthrough just because it takes so long to get going and it is too generous with shields, the slow waiting game for small enemies to eat lacking any exciting angles such as aggressive foes or the need to hunt down your prey. Instead, it later begins to mix in a few mild gimmicks seemingly based on the seasons.

Blustery autumn winds will push Fantom around when they arrive, but mildly drifting to compensate isn’t too difficult. Spring’s rains are a bit more troublesome, the screen effect leading to a bit of visual smearing but the true trouble coming from yellow rain drops that shrink your ghost when they make contact, something that might have to be taken on the chin when you’re huge. Winter is the most dangerous with its snow storm though, the previously predictable objects you were meant to eat now bouncing around in weird flight paths. The game tries to label these weather effects as worlds, but they only really alter a level and then swap out to a different gimmick, returning to previous ones without any sense these are cohesive worlds since they all take place in the same night sky. The last “world” does deviate from the seasonal weather theme though, for it takes place in complete darkness, only a small light around your character and the glowing firefly enemies to guide your way. A small light dot will appear to show where enemies are, but the size of it won’t tell you the size of the object, meaning you have to approach to check. Eating fireflies will increase your light radius though, and of the gimmicks on offer, this seems like the biggest shakeup to how you play, one only really hampered by the general problems with dark levels in games leading to slower and more cautious play, this already being a game struggling with too much slow and cautious play.

 

Besides these small shake-ups, Fantom Feast doesn’t have anything else going on. The cute face of the main ghost is nice, and he’ll stick his tongue out hungrily when near an enemy, even if it’s one he can’t eat despite having a distressed look for ones he obviously can’t eat. The enemies also have a few silly faces like the kissy face and the gruff one with a scar, but there are only four or five different expressions across all enemy types. The persistent plain background does it no favors though, and on top of the game not really tinkering with the regular play enough to keep things exciting, it all feels very similar even when you enter the so-called worlds, the dark world the only one where the gimmick is even in constant effect during that level.

THE VERDICT: Fantom Feast really shows the importance of proper difficulty balancing. The eat-and-grow formula at the center has very little pushback, the slow and predictable enemies making the growth process dull even before the game gets too generous with its shield power up to further erode the risk of failure. Fantom Feast encourages safe and boring movement without rewarding dangerous play, with the few gimmicks that do get added along the way only really requiring small adjustments to your approach that slow things down even more. If the regular play was just a bit harder it could be exciting, but Fantom Feast is far too careful and thus lacks the challenge needed to make its replay-focused design worth diving back into.

 

And so, I give Fantom Feast for PC…

A BAD rating. The sad truth of Fantom Feast is that most of its elements aren’t really bad on their own. The odd shape of Fantom could be easily ignored if the slow linear level progression didn’t make going for risky eats early on too dangerous, and the shield power does mean you can afford to take them later on, but the reliability of the shield power-up appearing then softens an already far too easy level of difficulty. You are stuck either being too cautious or having little punishment for being careless. The enemies, even when the laser spewing ones appear, are just too passive and easily avoided, making gimmicks like the wind that could work fail since they don’t impact things enough to account for your bland foes. Fantom Feast is a collection of ideas that don’t sound like they would be bad when put together, but the game misuses them all by not pushing them to really endanger the player. With no real incentive to break away from patiently waiting to eat what you can even when a dangerous gimmick is active, there’s just nothing compelling the player to want to continue, let alone shoot for a high score that requires moving through the even easier early levels first to get there.

 

There are plenty of enjoyable yet easy games out there, but it’s important with such a low difficulty level that the player is asked to engage with the game even if the challenges are small or easily figured out. Fantom Feast asks the player to do something fairly easy and provides the means to do it, but the design of the game encourages remaining still and watching enemies pass by if you can’t eat them and doesn’t have any pressure on the player significant enough to break away from this method of boring play. If anything, design decisions press the player into this cautious approach. Fantom Feast could easily be redeemed if there was something encouraging active involvement, but this eat-and-grow game is too easy and slow.