A cruel mayor seeks to bring nightmares to life, and you’ll be taking them down while managing the daily struggles of your mental health in Phantasmata.
Alice and Drill are just skipping class. Doing some urban exploration. What the rebellious youth weren’t expecting to find was the Mayor’s new toy: a machine built to bring nightmares into the real world. This results in Alice becoming an enemy of the state and her pal Drills gets kidnapped. With the adults all being compliant (intentionally or not) in what’s going on, Alice will have to handle this huge problem herself.
Well, maybe not all by herself. There are twenty possible allies Alice can bring along with her, each with their own unique quest that will help you get to know them and their needs. If you take care of your pals, you’ll find yourself backed up by a crew of teens that have classes like Space Wrestler, Witch, Wereraven, Succubus, and Spaceship. If you don’t want a pal who can be a Spaceship backing you up in a fight, then we may need to have words.
Alice and her gang all have mental health afflictions that they’ll need to take care of throughout the game (which the developer means to implement as ‘Psyche Management’). Meditation, prescription drugs, and cannabis will be available to help manage each character’s mental health, with positive effects helping them live and fight throughout the game. Should you neglect their health, you will start to see damaging effects kick in.
Through this, the developer hopes to show the human side of mental health, and how caring for it is a normal part of everyday life, removing the stigma that can often be around it. “As a person with bipolar and PTSD I would like to give neurotypical players an idea of what it is like to have to maintain one’s mental health for survival while simultaneously showing the player that this is a normal and manageable part of life rather than portraying us as afflicted or broken.”
Which is a pretty lovely message to add to this colorful, surreal adventure in sticking it to some corrupt politicians.
Phantasmata is available now on Steam Early Access.
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