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!

"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.

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.

This is an unforgettable game with an edge that you'll love if you're a fan of the crime horror genre. Think Se7en meets your favourite soap opera. It's not the easiest watch. There's some intense, violent scenes for its time and the game is not at all for the faint hearted.

There is an edge to this game that you simply don't see in video games anymore. Frankly, we aren't seeing many adventure games come out, let alone those where the story is driven by live-action cut scenes. The acting, direction and writing are feature-class and truly makes this game more memorable than most horror films that are out there these days.

Roberta Williams' Phantasmagoria was widely hyped as "the scariest and most frightening computer game ever devised". Well, I have a thing or two to comment about the media's hype towards this game and Mrs Williams' alleged writing talent.

There is little to be said of the plot. Considering the sheer amount of gaping plot holes and lacking characterisation, it's easily apparent that the story took second place to the opportunity to show off some video effects.

Unfortunately, not even video effects can save this one. Doing an etheral horror movie on a computer game budget can only result in one thing: that the audience either walks off in disgust at the cheapness, or laughs their ass off.

The latter turned out to be my experience with this product, as Mrs Williams' horrible dialogue and no-brainer story unfolded before my eyes. You'll have to look closely to spot any originality -- perhaps Mrs Williams was a little *too* inspired by such classics as The Shining and the CD-ROM classic The 7th Guest. Both the haunted mansion theme and the recurring spook images are nothing new, and are certainly not revitalized in this story.

Another gripe I have with the game is the length of it. While it comes on 7 CD's, there is little to be done in any of the locations of the game, save for clicking on a few hotspots and being "rewarded" with robot sequences of Adrienne opening various things or testing out furniture. It is not until late in the game that the "rewards" actually begin to be able to live up to what the game box states--mainly by providing actual FMV sequences of Carno's wives being murdered. But even here, the design team skimped out by providing the movies in low-key quality, obscuring much of the gory detail--which, be fair, is necessary in a horror product. (The same problem afflicted a similar title, Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within, where not only were the FMV sequences in low resolution, but the option to turn off the alternate scan lines was also missing.) Interactivity seemingly wasn't the order of the day, and I would estimate that any experienced adventure game player could play the game from start to finish within a time span of a couple of hours. I realize Mrs Williams intended the game to be accessible to adventure game newbies--but, honestly, if she was targeting newbies (who mainly occupy the adolescent age group), why go for the horror genre?

It is not until you pop in the final CD that the game actually lets up and starts going a little wild. There is one scene in particular, during the chase scene, in which Adrienne's flesh is shown being ripped off her skull. (Incidentally, the manual writers thought it prudent to mention in the readme file that Adrienne was going to be chased by Don in the 7th chapter--giving away a major plot point beforehand. Hello?)

If anything, Phantasmagoria is good for a few laughs. If you're spooked by this game, then may I suggest you stick with Williams' more famous line of games, the King's Quest series? At least in this series, she doesn't need writing talents.