The Phantom Fellows

Two important things first: First, for windowed mode, press Alt + Enter. Second, it ends on a cliffhanger. I think this game will divide its players. If the game's style of humor matches yours, I think you'll love it. It didn't work for me. I really enjoyed Darkside Detective, I love absurdism, and I can see what the devs were going for here. My main issue is that much of the humor is repetitive. Not literally the same jokes over and over, but the same kind of jokes. Extremely long awkward conversations. The main protagonist's neurodivergence constantly making him say the wrong things. His ghost companion frequently talking down to him, in an equally overly wordy manner. The entire game is extremely wordy, so if it doesn't click, the playing experience becomes tiresome. I should note that I was streaming the game, so the long conversations did not make that fun, due to the amount of text to be read out loud. I think this is a game best played on your own, unhurried, without an audience. If the long conversations bore you, you can read and click through as fast as you like. Of course, important information could randomly show up in the middle of long irrelevant …

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 really enjoyed this game As an 80's kid, I don't like these 320x200 like games, but this was fun. The story & humor was just right and it really reminded me of a game in the golden era of adventure games (800x600) My inner reading voices are good, but I'd love it if the next one has a full voice acting and noses - on at least 640x480 9/10

Good and fun investigations pnc!

I really enjoyed The Phantom Fellows. I came expecting a fun old-school point-and-click adventure about ghosts and ended up getting genuinely attached to Oliver and Englebert. They’re a great duo, and I was actually a little sad when their adventure was over. There’s a surprising amount of stuff hidden in this game. After finishing the story, I kept going back for achievements, trying weird interactions and looking for things I had missed. I especially enjoyed all the little references to classic adventure games — the Space Quest ones definitely made me smile. Some puzzles made me think “how the hell was I supposed to figure that out?”, but honestly, that’s part of the charm of this genre. Funny, weird, made with a lot of attention to detail, and clearly with a lot of love for classic adventures. I finished it and still wanted to go back and find more. Definitely recommended.

Pretty fun dialogue and puzzles.