The Phantom gets a direct physical PS5 release with a booklet

Art of Play Interactive is selling a direct physical PlayStation 5 edition of its side-scrolling beat 'em up The Phantom, bundled with a bonus eight-page booklet. Priced at $59.95 on the Art of Play Shop, this standalone release puts the full game on a PS5 disc for collectors who missed the earlier boutique print runs.

The game isn't brand new. Originally announced in January 2023, The Phantom launched digitally on March 12, 2025 across PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam. Limited Run Games also handled a physical pre-order campaign for PS5 and Switch around the initial launch window, so this direct store listing acts as a way to grab a boxed PS5 copy straight from the developer without dealing with secondary market markups.

Fourteen stages against the Singh Brotherhood

Developed under an official license from King Features Syndicate, the game is a 2D arcade-style brawler with frame-by-frame hand-drawn animation. It's playable solo or in local two-player co-op. Players take control of either The Phantom or his partner Diana Palmer across a 14-level globetrotting campaign, fighting off the pirates of the Singh Brotherhood to rescue their son Kit (and calling in assists from Devil the wolf and Fraka the falcon along the way).

The $59.95 price tag on this physical edition is a steep jump from the $19.99 digital version on Steam. You're paying a $40 premium for the pressed disc, the case, and eight pages of printed paper, which is a hard sell unless you're committed to having a complete shelf of comic book brawlers. I'm curious whether the disc includes the post-launch patches that Art of Play worked on after the game's initial March 2025 rollout, since early players had plenty of complaints about sluggish movement speed and stiff combat.

Thirty years since Phantom 2040

Lee Falk created The Phantom as a daily newspaper strip in 1936, making "The Ghost Who Walks" one of comic history's earliest costumed crimefighters, predating both Superman and Batman. Despite that long history, the character has barely registered in video games. Before Art of Play's brawler arrived in 2025, the hero had been missing from consoles for three decades. His most notable prior outing was Viacom New Media's Phantom 2040 in 1995, a solid Metroidvania-style action platformer for the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and Game Gear based on the animated series of the same name.

Founded in 2012 with offices in Melbourne and the UK, Art of Play spent years building smaller branded interactive projects for properties like Marvel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Transformers before pivoting to full-scale console beat 'em ups. They've settled into a specific niche adapting vintage comic and animation licenses into 2D brawlers. Following The Phantom, the studio released another hand-drawn comic brawler, Lady Death: Demonicron, across PC and consoles in late August and September 2026, and they've also been crowdfunding a game based on the classic British cartoon Danger Mouse.

It's nice to see a physical instruction booklet included inside a standard PS5 case, even a thin eight-page one, since most modern boxes just give you a disc and empty plastic. Still, at sixty bucks, that's mostly an artifact for die-hard Phantom collectors.

Pick up Return of the Phantom on Humble Bundle.

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