Phantom Spark

My usual Saturday night co-op crew had very specific expectations going into Phantom Spark: big field of racers, contact physics, someone screaming at a blue shell. What we got instead was something quieter and, honestly, weirder in the best possible way. This is a pure time-trial racer from Icelandic developer Ghosts, built entirely around beating your own ghost and the ghost of a domain champion across more than 30 hand-crafted Pathways spread across three distinct Domains. There are no weapons, no rubber-banding AI, no overtaking scrum. Just you, a hovering Spark craft, and the question of whether you can shave another hundredth of a second off your last run. The control scheme is about as stripped back as it gets: steer, accelerate, brake. That simplicity is intentional and it's where the game earns its Metacritic 82. The skill ceiling is genuinely steep once you start understanding that momentum is the whole game. Knowing when to lift off the throttle before a tight corner rather than braking hard, or whether your current run is clean enough to risk clipping that inner wall for a slingshot effect, is the kind of micro-decision that fuels obsessive replays. Instant restarts make failure feel cheap rather than punishing, which matters a lot. Each Pathway runs somewhere between 30 and 60 seconds, with longer Champion Pathway finals at the end of each Domain, so the loop is always fast and frictionless. The three Domains each bring their own visual theme and some environmental variety, like water streams that boost speed or dirt surfaces that shift handling slightly, though critics were right to flag that the gimmicks can start repeating before you finish the campaign. For a game that could have been a one-note solo experience, the local multiplayer situation is actually more interesting than the bare feature list implies. You get split-screen support for up to four players, but the more entertaining mode for couch sessions is Hotseat, a pass-the-controller format where everyone takes a turn on the same track and scores are compared. The split-screen mode itself feels a little toothless since there is no collision between players and Pathways run point-to-point rather than in circuits, so the side-by-side tension never really builds. For a group of four with drinks, Hotseat lands much better: short tracks, instant pressure, and the very human satisfaction of watching your friend's ghost get absolutely cooked. Wheel and HOTAS owners can sit this one out though. The game is built for gamepad and is genuinely excellent with one, but control remapping is absent, which will annoy anyone with non-standard setups or accessibility needs. Visually, Phantom Spark leans into a clean pastel aesthetic with alien architecture lining the tracks. It doesn't wow, but it never clutters either. The minimal HUD shows a speed bar at the bottom and time deltas at the top, and nothing else gets between you and the racing line. The soundtrack is a genuine highlight: ambient, flow-state music that adapts even in pause menus. If the game has a core weakness beyond the barebones content volume, it's that the three Domains don't offer quite enough track variety to justify an extended grind for gold medals. Leaderboard chasers will find a practically infinite time sink, but players looking for modes beyond time trials will hit a wall fast. Bring Phantom Spark to a couch session with the expectation of Hotseat competition and short-burst one-more-run energy, not a full racing game with traditional race modes. Approach it solo with patience for its momentum-first philosophy and you'll get a focused, genuinely satisfying racer that punches above its size. Come in expecting Wipeout combat or F-Zero's full race spectacle, and you'll bounce off within the hour. Riley, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Verified. Runs flawlessly on Linux out of the box. Based on 4 ProtonDB community reports.

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