Phantom Spark Review

Nintendo seems to be waiting for the invention of real life hover cars before giving us another F-Zero game. But if they did decide to make another entry in their futuristic racing series, and then handed over development to a team of yoga instructors, we might end up with something like Phantom Spark.

This indie racing title has such ridiculously chill vibes that I’m surprised it didn’t exhort me to embrace my inner child while stretching my solar plexus. It’s a time trial racer where beating your own personal best ghost—and the occasional ghostly challenger—is the sole focus.

I’ll admit, I had my doubts when I realised there were no traditional races to be found here. Surely, trading paint and barging your way to the front of the pack is a big part of the thrill in any racing game? And so it is, usually. But with its soothing music and buttery smooth handling, Phantom Spark knew how to nudge me into a flow state where outshining my own ghost felt as rewarding as overtaking my rivals in a more traditional racer.

There are three domains on offer, comprising of ten main pathways (tracks) and a smattering of shorter, bitesize trials. The presentation really impressed me. The pathways are full of monumental stone architecture painted in pastel hues. Your ride looks more like a wispy alien creature than a traditional vehicle, and although there isn’t a story or explicit worldbuilding, I felt like I was racing around a series of beautiful temples on alien planets in some sort of pleasant purgatory or afterlife.

Each domain has a champion who gently encourages you to press onwards and improve your times. The pathways are rather short, and you could probably rush through all of them to reach the final champions’ pathway in under an hour, but that would be missing the point. There are bronze, silver, and gold medals to be won, and while the bronze medals were generally easy to nab, silver and especially gold medals are a stern test of your skill. The domain champions pop in frequently to challenge you, appearing in ghostly form alongside the ghost of your own personal best. This makes the time trialling feel like less of a lonely affair and encourages you to return to tracks even when the silver or gold medal time initially feels out of reach.

The handling feels great, and the pathways have a nice variety of features to master. There are banked corners, slopes, and ramps leading to jumps that often require you to weave between giant stone pillars before landing. Some paths have speed-killing grass at the side, which is usually best avoided but can sometimes be worth crossing if it allows you to cut a corner. There are boost areas that cover the whole of the pathway, which makes sense when you consider that the game is less about twitchy reactions than it is about learning how to best maintain and maximise your speed through corners. In general, the tracks seem to have been designed to avoid gimmicks or surprises that might throw you off course—or out of that flow state.

As the tooltips on loading screens often remind you, momentum is key. There’s a speed gauge at the bottom of the screen that fills up slowly as you accelerate. It takes quite a while to reach top speed, so you’re constantly trying to find a line through the course that preserves your hard-won momentum. Touching the sides or braking hard, because you messed up the approach to a corner, is usually enough to tank your time, but the disappointment is short lived, as you can restart races with a single button press without the interruption of a loading screen.

There are no alternative single-player modes and no online multiplayer as such, although you’ll see your best times added to the global leaderboards for each track (which really put me in my place when I saw that my gold medal time wasn’t as unbeatable as I first thought). Local multiplayer is available, with options for split screen and pass and play.

Phantom Spark knows exactly what it wants to be—a silky smooth, blissed-out time trial racer—and never strays beyond that. For some, that may be a turn off. It is a small game that seems to be less concerned with adding its own ideas to the F-Zero or Wipeout formula than subtracting from them. There are no alternative vehicles, no power ups, and no extra modes. There is an upgrade/experience track that ticks up as you progress, but all it does is unlock different colour combos for your vehicle.

After about ten hours with the game, I’d managed to grab a decent chunk of gold medals and a pirate’s hoard of silver. I mention this not to boast (I’m not particularly good at racing games), but to point out that, depending on your skill level, you might blast through this medal hunt in a relatively short amount of time. But at $20/£16.75, the price of entry feels fair for what’s on offer (and of course you could spend a practically infinite amount of time clawing your way to the top of the global leaderboards).

More to the point, Phantom Spark’s smallness and its total focus on time trial racing ends up being its best feature. It doesn’t demand a lot from you—just a single, perfect lap through a trippy alien landscape.

Now please excuse me while I reset the same race thirty times in a row in search of an elusive gold medal.