The Phantom Fellows

I had high opes for Phantom Fellows as a fan of The Darkside Detective. The first few chapters felt slow or not as fun as its predecessor - but as the story continued, I found the comedy and depth of the game to mirror what I expected. I cannot wait for the subsequent games. The build up at the end was worth the hours of gameplay.

This was one of my games of the years in 2024, and I'm not just saying that cause the dev is a friend of mine! It's truly a labour of love which doesn't leave any pixel unturned, in other words you can interact with everything you can find to your hearts content! Or you can follow along with the exploits of the fellows with some of the greatest names in adventure gaming, Oliver Cobblestone and Englebert Picklebender! To get the most of the game though it's best not to rush through it, but to take the time and appreciate all the attention to detail and banter between the fellows, and maybe even get the grand total of all 100 achievements!?

A delightful game. I was made aware of it through One Short Eye's video on it, My wife and I played it together as we do many games like this, we do the voice acting ourselves. It was genuinely laugh out loud funny and just a very fun experience. Some of the puzzles stumped us, but thankfully nothing too moon logicy. Really loved the relationship between Oliver and Englebert. Felt very sincere, even when they were being sarcastic. Really hope this gets a follow up. We want to see what happens next. Great job man. You clearly put your whole heart into this.

I really wanted to like this, since I love the Darkside Detective games. Phantom Fellows is not for my taste, though. I am not saying the game is terrible and encourage any reader to weigh positive and negative reviews before making the choice to buy this game. With that out of the way, this is my take: I found the text really annoying, like it is trying too hard to be funny. There are good jokes, but most of them are just forced and/or reeeeeeally long-winded. This could be tolerated, if not for the fact that in the middle of many of those overly elaborate, drawn-out dialogue there is, sometimes, information that is useful for solving the puzzles. So the player must pay close attention to all that nonsense to fish out the obscured information. Oh god. Comparatively, not every Darkside Detective joke makes me laugh either, but at least they are harmless one-liners.

I think you'll be able to tell from the screenshots if you'll like this game - if you like this kind of game, you'll like this game. Sure the interface is a bit clunky times, but that's honestly not unusual for the format - after you get used to it, it becomes super easy, barely an inconvenience. I quite liked how the game was a bit open-world-y, and didn't really notice moving around between different places was worth doing until a bit late in the game. Fantastic soundtrack and the pixel art of Colorado landscapes really blew my hair back.

this shameless "the darkside detective" rip-off has two things going for it: nice and shiny pixel art graphics and good music, the two things both games have in common, save the very concept of course. other than that, nothing is even close to being at par with TDD. the puzzle design is pretty weak and the UI is most impractical and annoying. while you can change your walking speed in options, it's never fast enough as you have to cover long distances over and over again and you can't teleport away to the next screen either. no respect for players' time. much worse though, is the fact that the dev seems to have a really bad case of mouth/keyboard diarrhea and you have to go through endless attempts at lame, senseless, unfunny jokes and back and forth banter between characters. sense of humor is subjective, but the actually funny & attempt at funny ratio was like 1/100 for me. there is often a 1-5 second pause after each one of them too and that adds to your irritation and waste of time. after a point i started skipping the dialogs at the risk of missing info that might help with the progression of the game. i have played hundreds of p'nc adventures and except one other time, i don't remember to ever have done that. it was that unbearable. PS: at the end of this ordeal you don't even get to see a proper ending. you just have to wait for the sequel to come out and go through it too. yeahh..NO!!

Je n'ai pas réussi à accrocher à ce jeu. L'idée est pourtant bonne, et le principe détective+fantôme est assez éprouvé, mais ça ne marche pas. Le jeu est vraiment trop poussif et verbeux, avec des énigmes un peu trop tordues pour être honnêtes. L'humour rajouté dessus sonne plus comme une perte de temps imposée que comme quelque chose de vraiment "détente". Bref, je pense qu'il n'a pas su trouver son ton.