October Game 3 - Phantasmagoria
I was listening to the most recent Quest Quest podcast while also deciding which game to cover next, and I think the game they covered. Phantasmagoria, would be great to cover here, too.
Please listen to the episode (it's always fantastic) because they get a lot deeper than I will here. And when you're done you can watch the playthrough from both decafjedi and PS_Garak's Adventure Tuesday group.
Anyway, onto the game (spoilers abound). I think it's fantastic and it's worth a playthrough, especially if you can find it for around $5, which it frequently drops to when on sale. The game is a point and click horror title from Sierra that uses live action actors with largely digitized backgrounds. It cost $4.5 million which, while not the most expensive game of the 90s, was still an astronomical sum for a video game. It tells the story of a young couple who moves into a giant house and finds out there are evil spirits who are eager to possess someone new.
Which is, honestly, a pretty generic for a horror tale. An evil entity takes over the original owner of the house and Adrienne accidentally releases it when she's exploring, which causes it to inhabit her husband. His personality changes and, like in The Shining, he becomes more unhinged and violent throughout the game. There's nothing groundbreaking in the story, but I think that's ok. The script was already 550 pages long, too much more and it would have felt unwieldy. It only needs to be a framework for the exploration and FMV scenes.
Where the game shines is early on when Adrienne is first exploring the house. The game does a solid job making things feel creepy and rewarding exploration. As the game progresses it also becomes a lot more violent. The player uncovers multiple death scenes when making wrong choices and while these have always been common in Sierra adventure games, they're a lot more gruesome when portrayed with live actors. The silly deaths and scolding narrator of Space Quest aren't here.
For example, Adrienne learns that the former owner of the house, Carno, murdered his five previous wives in pretty horrific ways, as the Wikipedia entry details below.
While the local townspeople believe all Carno's wives died of natural causes or accidentally, Adrienne learns through a series of visions that he murdered them in grotesque ways. Hortencia (Christine Armond), who avoided Zoltan's abuse by secluding herself in her greenhouse, is stabbed with gardening tools and suffocated with mulch. Victoria (Holley Chant), an alcoholic, is killed when Zoltan impales her eye with a wine bottle during an argument. An overly talkative third wife, Leonora (Dana Moody), has her mouth gagged and her neck contorted in a torture device. Finally, the food-loving Regina (Wanda Smith) is force-fed animal entrails through a funnel until she chokes to death.
The pacing of the game starts off really strong and exploring the house as Adrienne is very engaging. There is are plenty of new, secret rooms to visit and a handful of other locations to explore as well. However, it really falls apart at the end. I think it's hard to stick the landing in a horror story, and it definitely falls flat here. The game changes from a slow-paced exploration title into an almost arcade-style game. The ending is fine, but it's not what I remember from the game. I most remember the tense exploration and stumbling across an FMV of a horrific death (for a 1995 video game).
And, skip the opening cinematic in Chapter 4 if you do decide to play through it.
Phantasmagoria is for sale in lots of places, but as of this writing it's on sale on GOG.