nDreams hits many of those thrilling beats over the course of its three-ish hour campaign. Dramatic escapes under a hail of bullets, explosive sabotage missions, cat and mouse games with snipers, this has the lot. Much of what makes Phantom work is its rare sense of coherence, propped up with rules and parameters that make sure its players understand when they’re fully hidden and when they risk being spotted. Enemy spotlights skim the water, threatening to catch you like a deer in headlights, and level design features plenty of cover, distractions, and multiple paths to see you through to safety. When enemies do spot you, they shoot back without descending into a flustered confusion that kills immersion. By clearly establishing those boundaries, Phantom finds itself uniquely manageable.

The little things play a big part in the fun, too. If you’re out of noise-making sticky speakers to throw at enemies, for example, you can hurl an ammo clip behind them for a quick distraction. Opening doors and sabotaging machinery, meanwhile, are carried out with authentic physicality, rooting you in the experience that bit more. You can tell nDreams has poured a lot of love into the details here, mostly evident in Solid Snake actor David Hayter’s turn as a crazed Russian general that, while underutilized, feels like an alternate universe Metal Gear baddie.

It’s true, though, that the game’s welcome lack of mishaps stems from its relative simplicity. Boiled down to its core, Phantom isn’t about staying out of sight so much as staying out of the illuminated circle of an enemy flashlight. As long as you don’t accidentally sail too far into one, even on the hardest difficulties, chances are you’ll be able to sneak by without issue. Darkness should provide cover, yes, but in Phantom you’ll often find it’s more like an invisibility cloak.

Overcoming obstacles, too, is usually achieved by one of only a handful of tricks. Either you’re patiently waiting in the reeds for an enemy boat to pass (sometimes running so close you’d be impossible not to spot) or shooting something to cause a distraction. Phantom’s design is both a blessing and a curse, as there’s no verticality to open level design up, but there are missed opportunities under the ocean that I’d love to see explored later on. Phantom is undoubtedly a decent stealth game, but it’s the VR-centric design that really makes it stand out.

The game also adopts a sort of half-hearted Metroidvania structure you get the sense nDreams wanted to expand on. Early levels drop hints about returning to open up new paths with new tools, but the linear structure means you can only do this at the exact time the developer wants you to. Instead of a sprawling naval base, it’s a little like repeatedly circling around a one-way system. There’s a foundation here for a far more open-ended game that allowed players to familiarize themselves with an evolving environment that would become more intricate to navigate as you unlocked new mechanics and enemies became more advanced.

Fragments of that idea, at least, are evident, like revamping old levels with sniper nests and sea mines, though they don’t radically change up the gameplay so much as give you new obstacles to avoid. Save for a few tight spots, I sailed through on Hard difficulty without too much issue, though self-imposing certain restrictions like no-kill playthroughs will obviously augment the challenge, and you’ll unlock extras for beating missions as skillfully as possible. Those extras are important, too, because they give Phantom a welcome degree of longevity past its snappy campaign. You’ll unlock new challenge modes, items to revisit levels in freeplay and even old-school cheats to put a fun spin on things.