Overview
Rollback Phantoms are echoes of dead humans — people whose minds dove into the Latent Space and did not come back. The Wreck’s processes absorbed what was left and keep running a corrupted copy. They appear throughout all biomes and become more erratic and faster as you approach the Kernel.
In the live proto the Rollback Phantom is implemented as proto_enemy_phantom.gd.
Behavior
A Rollback Phantom moves normally until it takes damage or is about to be hit — then it teleports, snapping to a new position and immediately “rewinding” its movement vector: for a brief instant it traces backward along its own previous path before resuming aggression. This makes it genuinely hard to track and creates false openings that close instantly.
On death it replays a glitchy log line — a corrupted system message that implies LOGOS remembers previous runs. The bark is cheap dread, delivered free with the kill.
Attack Pattern
- Teleport / rewind — on a telegraphed wind-up, blinks to a new position and briefly runs its previous path in reverse.
- Standard projectile or melee attack depending on biome tier; the teleport is the defining trait.
- Deep-biome variants teleport more frequently and with shorter telegraphs.
How to Fight
The telegraph is the opening: the moment the Phantom begins its blink wind-up, hold your position and aim at its likely destination, not its current one. Deep-dive Phantoms with short telegraphs reward watching movement patterns across multiple teleports to predict the loop.
Sustained-fire classes that can blanket an area have an edge; precise single-shot carries must time shots to the brief post-rewind window when the Phantom is moving predictably.
Threat Notes
- Tier: Trash / roaming mob
- Lore hook: a stuck reflex-loop running a corrupted human echo. The death-bark delivers free environmental lore — it implies LOGOS has records of you across runs. The implication is cheap dread; the truth is just corrupted process output.
- Names: all working names. OPEN — final name is Jay’s call.