Phantasmagoria (1995)

I’ve slayed number eight from “The 26”, my list of games I’m attempting to finish this year – all of which I’ve been wanting to play for years, but simply haven’t!

Phantasmagoria is a classic point-and-click style adventure game from 1995, with live actors over 3D rendered scenes. It’s extremely pixelated to look at these days, but it still works. I remember seeing it on store shelves and I’m pretty sure I read some positive reviews about it back then. Apparently it also had a reputation for having graphic images, which I’d forgotten about before I played it. I got it on Steam (along with 33 other titles new to my collectionbacklog) from the Humble Sierra Bundle for $20.

Like many of the good classic adventure games, there’s generally no way to fail, but there are apparently exceptions. Thankfully, I didn’t encounter any on my playthrough, other than a portion at the end which is intentionally a bit of trial and error. The inventory system is limited to eight items and you will never carry more. I rarely found that I had to resort to using everything on everything, except in two places where I got stuck and it wouldn’t have helped. The first place I got stuck, I’d missed a section of a room. The second time, I blame on a bad design choice (I needed to use an item on myself instead of the more obvious location). Outside of that, there was a puzzle that I had “solved” immediately, but the game never let me use that solution until much later on – a simple “hmm… maybe later” from the main character would’ve been a perfect fix for that frustration instead of having her say “why didn’t I think of that before?” when I had thought of it before, two whole in-game days ago… The rest was just some damn fine classic point-and-click adventure gaming!

The story is a fairly obvious one, but it’s still interesting to uncover the details of exactly what went down. On reading a walkthrough after finishing, I apparently missed an entire room, and a few cut-scenes, so if you really want to catch everything, make sure to keep exploring through each of the game’s seven chapters (or just catch the missed scenes on YouTube). A summary scene near the end may reveal a couple of bits you’ve missed since it will show a few clips of earlier sequences. Some of the acting is pretty hammy though, so prepare yourself for a little late-night made-for-TV-movie style cheese – mostly from Don.

And on those aforementioned graphic images… well… yeah, the game’s reputation is probably deserved. There’s some pretty gruesome stuff packed into these pixels, as well as a forced sex scene (no nudity). And if you’re an animal lover, you may not be happy here – there’s a rabbit prop that is being skinned, for one thing, but that’s as visually bad as it gets for the animals, and the animals were all under supervision of a professional handler. There’s also a censoring option in the game, which I left off (the default).

Lastly, the score – the compositions, the chorals, the ambient bits, and the stings here and there all work together to enhance the atmosphere of the game. Job well done there. (And no, the piano isn’t part of any puzzle.)

Overall, I’d call this a good game. It respects the player’s time (you can skip around quite quickly), the suspense in the story builds up to the climax, and the ending sequence was definitely satisfying (and somewhat horrifying) to finally conquer.

I adjusted the DOSBox dosboxPHANT.conf configuration file slightly for this game to ensure the correct 4:3 aspect ratio after the stretch on my 16:9 monitor started to bother me, setting fullresolution=desktop and windowresolution=original under [sdl], as well as aspect=true under [render]. If the Sierra logo on startup appears to be circular, you’ve probably got it right.

• Phantasmagoria
  #8 of 26 (2017)

  14 hours playtime

  no achievements