About
Dare you enter the Phantom Halls?!
Then let's play the only squad-based survival comedy-horror adventure! Explore a haunted mansion and prepare to face the undead terrors that stalk the phantom halls. Team up to survive the night, using whatever you can find, but remember - you can’t kill what you can’t see, so be sure to bring a flashlight…
With action-packed, procedurally generated gameplay and a 3D papercraft visual motif, Phantom Halls has received praise from players and the press alike since it was released on Steam Early Access in March 2017. Now, exactly one year later, we’re here on Kickstarter to ask for your help in making it even better for wide release!
"A stylish squad-based shooter that combines Worms with Spelunky" - PC Gamer
"A big spooky origami nightmare... there's lots here to be excited about" - Rock, Paper, Shotgun
"There's a nice pace to Phantom Halls, with bursts of combat interspersed with gleeful looting" - Eurogamer
Our journey so far...
We released the first version of Phantom Halls on 13 March 2017. A purely single-player experience - in which players could control up to three characters at once as they rescued them from the phantom halls - it featured just a small handful of quests and our basic game loop. We wanted to get something out there to players as early as possible: we saw Early Access as a way to get genuine, meaningful feedback from the community and you guys delivered at every step with emails, community posts, and stacks of hand written feedback forms from EGX & Rezzed shows, thank you!
Over the past 12 months our fantastic community has been sending us all sorts of ideas as we iterate on the game, from requests for particular characters, creatures, scenarios, and inventory items – to very specific but often inspiring visions for the game as they’d like to see it. Working with the community we now have dozens of upgradable characters, each boasting unique attributes and abilities, all with multiple starter quests; we have entirely new mini-map and inventory systems; and we’ve even built out a Co-Op multiplayer experience - the single most requested feature from our fans to date!
We’ve also released a bunch of themed content updates too - including our mega licensed Evil Dead 2 expansion, Evil Dead 2 x Phantom Halls - and the game has received fantastic coverage from PC Gamer, Bloody Disgusting, EuroGamer, Cliqist and more!
Our future plans for Phantom Halls:
We're looking to release the full v1 version of Phantom Halls in time for Halloween this year, and we want you to help shape what that will be. We’re always eager to hear our community’s thoughts and ideas and to integrate the best ones into the game where we can - but here’s an idea of what we’re working towards for V1:
- Hack your way through overgrown gardens, wade across swampy sewers, dive into flooded basements and jump from steampunk elevators. Scrolling levels, outdoor levels, platforming elements, and a variety of pitfalls and deadly drops will ensure varied gameplay that keeps throwing curveballs.
- Winding corridors and vast hallways lead to a bizarre assortment of rooms, follow a ghostly melody to the music lounge, face diabolical creations in the laboratory, gear up in the armoury, and try not to end up on the menu in the banquet hall!
- Unique passive skills and abilities for 12 playable characters, over a dozen enemy types and a myriad of mini-bosses to face before you reach the master of the house for the ultimate showdown.
- Infinite replay value with procedurally generated mansions, each with a unique evil presence to discover and defeat. Name generation for mansions, manors, halls, and masters and mistresses to ensure a record of your escapes, triumphs, and defeats.
- Customisable weapons, traps, potions, and other combinable items to enrich the looting experience and allow personalisation of your play style. Survivors of each mansion can continue on to the next conquest with all the gear they’ve amassed.
- Evil Dead 2 Content Pack! We've started putting together an officially licensed Evil Dead 2 pack, featuring Ash as a fully playable character and a ton of quests based on the film lore - including unique locations like the infamous cabin and the cursed forest. There's plenty of Deadites to dispatch of course, and in future we hope to bring more licensed content from our favourite horror franchises into the paper-craft world of Phantom Halls. Everyone whose reward tier includes a copy of the game will also receive all of the Evil Dead 2 content as a bonus. In future this will be broken out as a DLC package.
We’re on target for a Halloween 2018 v1.0 retail release, and we have the time and resources to make that happen!
Sooo...wait a minute, why are you on Kickstarter?
Phantom Halls will hit v1.0 later this year on Steam for PC gamers and we’re comfortable committing to that. So why, you ask, do we need your help? What’s your money going towards? The fact is, we’re not going to put together some fancy graphs and pie charts and what-have-you, illustrating exactly how much money we’re putting into designing each individual weapon or coding a particular enemy’s behaviour, because the reality is game development doesn’t work like that. You can spend one day dropping in a new quest, or one week, or one month... it's easy to tout features and content in terms of quantity, but what really matters is the time that goes into making every character, item, weapon, and location feel fresh and unique, creating scenarios and objectives that feel varied and exciting. One vital thing that’s often discounted from publicly available game budgets is the all-important funding that goes into adding that little bit extra - the polish, the attention to detail, the spark that turns a good game into a great one.
We want Phantom Halls to be a great game that makes the most of it's unique attributes. We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve managed to achieve as a part-time, self-funded team, beavering away on the game during evenings and weekends. But we also know what it could be with that extra focus, additional resources, and with a few months of really hard work on those subtle elements - the attention to detail that makes a game shine.
With the additional funding from Kickstarter once physical rewards and fees are accounted for, the team can afford to really go to town on Phantom Halls, going over the game with a fine tooth comb and working flat-out to make every single component as brilliant as it possibly can be before Oct 2018. From balancing mechanics, to a more polished art, effects, and animation pass, to optimisation, to ensuring every word of the game’s script is purposeful - your pledges will help us to hit v1.0 of Phantom Halls safe in the knowledge that the game is perfected in our eyes and reflects the cumulative vision of the community. In a world where so many games are rushed to market, we'd like to think that’s a rare and admirable thing - hopefully you’ll agree!
Rewards (finally!)
If you're as excited about Phantom Halls as we are then you might want to know a bit more about the rewards we're offering for your support and look out for the three launch special tiers, each limited to 33 backers only, offering some bonus rewards for our first 99 happy haunts!
Stretch Goals
First of all, we would be absolutely over the moon to hit the target we’re aiming for. But if you lovely folks decide to pledge even more, then we’d like to take Phantom Halls to new platforms - in particular the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, as we already have full controller support with bespoke button maps for these platforms, but there’s a lot of optimization and translation to be done for this, as we’d want to include language localization for our top 10 territories. For each additional £25,000 we make on top of the original target, we’ll commit to converting and launching the game to one of the major console platforms - and we’ll consult with you, our backers, over which order we should approach them in. And if, by some remarkable stroke of luck, we make even more money than we need for all the ports we want to do… we might see Phantom Halls on PS4, XBoxOne, Switch, PC/Mac, and then there’s always expanding the Phantom universe with new licensed characters and horror icons. If things get really nuts, there's a design document here titled ‘Phantom Planet’, so watch this space…
Risks and challenges
Good news, everyone! Our team has shipped dozens of games between us across multiple platforms and publishers. There is an in-development build of Phantom Halls available for fans of the Early Access platform, and we're hugely grateful for the support we've received there to date. As a self-publishing indie team with limited resources, reaching out to the wider community means we can make this game bigger and better for our retail release: we'll be adding more narrative content, developing new features, expanding on our multiplayer, polishing presentation of UI/menus, and maybe even looking towards stretch goals for console ports with language localisation! Whatever happens we're confident that we can deliver an even more exciting and immersive gaming experience for you over the coming months.
That said, you’ll have to place some trust in us. We’re firm believers in iterative game development, and in working closely with the community to plan, develop and polish ideas as we go. This means we aren’t giving you a detailed breakdown of how we’ll spend every penny you pledge - because game development doesn’t work like that, and we don’t want to be disingenuous when you’re being so generous! So those who pledge should know that they’re putting some faith in us to get things right.
Everyone will get their rewards including a fully playable copy of Phantom Halls with or without DRM (depending on your reward tier) early in October 2018, as we're committed to making Phantom Halls part of Halloween fun for our backers. With regards to Kickstarter pricing discounts, the full retail release of Phantom Halls will be £19.99 at launch, Evil Dead 2 DLC will retail for £4.99, and the Soundtrack DLC will also retail for £4.99 - but all three of these items are included in tiers from £10 and above on Kickstarter, representing a massive 65% saving for backers and early adopters vs retail pricing later in the year.
Even though we’re a small indie studio, our team members have worked in the games industry for years, so we like to think we know the realities of development - and have sufficient plans in place to make things go smoothly throughout production!
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