Phantasmagoria

Phantasmagoria is such a wonderful game! Adrienne and Don, a young married couple moved into a mansion once owned by Carno, a famous magician from the past. Spooky things start happening as Adrienne explores the mansion, the grounds, talks to people in the small town of Nipawompsett. This game has a gothic feel to it with the stunning mansion and grounds. I had such a fun time playing this game. I have played it several times and will play it again as I see things that I missed. There's always something new to see. I highly recommend it!

Well, the gameplay may be not the best, but seen as interactive movie this game can really create atmosphere, especially through the wonderful choir music and the good photography. The director really did good work in the movie sequences. For me, this wasn't a game that I just play until the end and then put it aside, as there are many details (especially in the chase sequence and the fifth chapter) that you can miss when you play it for the first time. The actors are great, Victoria Morsell (Adrienne Delaney) is wonderful, as are all members of the cast. To me, the second part is also good but lacks atmosphere to some degree, possibly because I'm a fan of such "haunted house" stories, and the second part is more a sex and crime thriller.

Ok, call me generous (or stupid), but I loved this game. Ok, 'tolerant' is another thing to call me. The idea was good, the graphics weren't bad at all, BUT it wasn't as scary as the hype suggested. I'm happy 'cos it was the only game I could finish in 2 days (not necessarily a good thing). Still, I loved it.

This is a wonderful piece of work, considering the budgetary concerns. True, alot of the early game is simply getting from point A to point B but it isn't a bad trip. Its not as predictable as some would have you believe either. Its pretty graphic in a cheesy Ed Wood type of way. The story does have enough twists in it to make it interesting. As for it being boring, the purpose of any point and click environment is to make you interact with the game. If you really want to play, it has its rewards. I just wish that the FMV scenes would make the lead female character a bit stronger and the blood looked less like raspberry syrup.

"Phantasmagoria" is an infamous point-and-click adventure game that was supposedly banned in Australia, though I remember seeing it for sale in at least one retailer.

Many of its scenes of violence just seem silly now. The game's macabre sense of humour helps to counterbalance that, however: when an apparently alcoholic woman has a wine bottle rammed through her eye socket and an overweight one is force fed apparently until she dies, you can see it's SUPPOSED to be ridiculous. When the game lets go of humour, there are some cringe-inducingly violent scenes: another woman has her head twisted around in a machine until it breaks, and if you linger too long on one screen, your protagonist will have her head torn apart. The rape scene, probably the game's most controversial moment, is still ugly, though a little improbable: both the parties involved are clothed at the time, leaving you wondering how sex, consensual or otherwise, could have occurred.

Having just played the inferior sequel, "A Puzzle of Flesh", I am obliged to make a comparison. The first title has a more familiar story, but it is told much more consistently, manages the aforementioned humorous tone amid the horror, and even has some genuinely scary moments - one jump scare got me better than anything in any movie with "Insidious" or "The Conjuring" in the title.

The story is a familiar one: a young couple move into a haunted mansion that has apparently been frozen in time for over a hundred years, when all the bad stuff in the house's history went down. Does anybody in real life purchase a home and not bother to remove any of the old furniture? Wouldn't they at least move some of their own stuff in? In the time honoured tradition of haunted house stories - see "The Amityville Horror", "The Shining", and "Burnt Offerings" - the husband starts to go crazy. Your task is to discover what is wrong with the house before he kills you.

There are quite a few interesting touches, like antiquated devices found around the home triggering memories of the evil man who owned the house: a magician named Zoltan, a more intriguing figure than you may have expected.

It's also less frustrating to play than the sequel, ironically because this game uses live action characters, but interposes them on computer generated backgrounds. These are easier to navigate than the photos of sets were in the sequel, though they are also quite ugly.

Overall, the first Phantasmagoria is still a good game, though as a point-and-click adventure title, it has nothing on the best titles from Lucasarts or even its own company (Sierra), and as a horror game, it's merely average.

My advice is to play the Gabriel Knight series instead.