Roberta Williams' Phantasmagoria

The Good
When CDs started flooding the market in the first few years of the 1990's, many people thought the future of video games lied in interactive movies. The veteran adventure game designer Sierra became affected by this craze for a short while, and presented its own take on the new fashion: Phantasmagoria, a seven-disc extravagant monstrosity complete with live footage, digitized graphics, and stylized medieval-sounding choirs.

If getting scared is the only thing you look for in a horror game, then Phantasmagoria might not be as disappointing as it turned out to be for those who expected good adventure gameplay. Roberta Williams apparently had enough of innocent fairy tale storytelling in her King's Quest series and unleashed what must have been the darkest images concocted by her imagination onto this title. The game contains some of the most disturbing, unsettling scenes in the history of the medium - but that's not what makes it horrifying. Rather, it is the perpetual building of suspense, the long stretches of wandering preceding the brutality, during which not much is happening, but many things are foreshadowed, resulting in a convincingly ominous atmosphere.

All this is further enhanced by technology. The superbly detailed graphics are all digitized images, looking strikingly real and immersing you into the nauseating opulence of a haunted castle. The much-hyped video sequences may be too numerous and pointless in many cases, but they create a peculiar bond between you and the protagonist, as you watch her react to everything she notices in photorealistic detail. Those videos of the heroine adjusting her hair or curiously poking suspicious household items may be mundane, but that is exactly what makes the ensuing horror effects more prominent and long-lasting.

Exploration is accompanied by cozy MIDI music, but the movies boast symphonic soundtrack with occasional choir. The music that plays when you first load the game is singularly impressive: it is a real cantata written in over-saturated late 19th century style, which itself took some cues from medieval church music. The amalgamation of video, music, and interactivity are best displayed in the game's final chapter, which is the only one actually having what is commonly called interactive movie gameplay: you have to make the right choices while watching a tensely scripted sequence unfold.

The Bad
The guys from Sierra must have been too busy orchestrating the music score, filming the main actress opening drawers, and researching cases of psychotic behavior, because they seem to have forgotten all about the most important component of game design: the gameplay.

Indeed, stripped of its shiny appearance, Phantasmagoria turns out to be an impoverished, rudimentary adventure game, weak and pitiful like a fasting vegetarian cat. Suffice to say that the first King's Quest, produced eleven years prior by the same designer, is a more advanced and more interactive game. It is as if all progress in the genre achieved by Sierra and other developers in all those years has been negated.

Phantasmagoria is woefully easy. It has only a handful of what could be considered puzzles if they weren't trivially obvious item manipulations along the lines of "use key on door". The rest of the game is pretty much all aimless wandering. Like a Japanese adventure, Phantasmagoria is full of annoyingly awkward, ridiculously artificial scripting constituting the main obstacle in your path: if you knew exactly which particular room will magically trigger the next event, you'd be able to finish the entire game in a matter of minutes. All you do in the game during six chapters out of seven is wander around and click on things without any apparent reason, knowing that one of those meaningless actions will let you proceed.

Remember how endearingly fulfilling it was to try out stuff in adventure games and witness the game commenting it in the form of text descriptions? Well, there is nothing like that in Phantasmagoria. Instead of well-written commentaries the only feedback you'll get here are nondescript short movies. Even worse is the fact that nearly nothing in that lush, degenerate scenery can be interacted with. You enter a room full of furniture and trinkets, but the game only allows you to click on one or two spots. To put it simply, you hardly ever play Phantasmagoria; you watch it.

Unfortunately, even as a movie Phantasmagoria is not very good. There are interesting elements in the story, but otherwise the whole thing makes next to no sense. Adrianne, the main protagonist, prefers to stand coquettishly in front of a mirror and comb her hair instead of running the hell out of a house where bloody visions pop out of fireplaces and a tender pony-tailed husband can become an overacting homicidal maniac at any moment. Described as an intellectual, Adrienne nevertheless exhibits behavior traits of an insultingly submissive and oftentimes plainly stupid individual, neither displaying believable emotional or mental damages caused by the unspeakable horrors she witnesses, nor showing any traces of logic and willpower, walking from room to room like a zombie even when it becomes perfectly clear that the place is haunted.

Also, I found the amount of sickening scenes of torture and murder in the second half of the game excessive. The story would have been much more convincing if there were only one particular criminal act to investigate, with more background and evidence than we eventually receive for the several victims depicted in the game. The horror becomes grotesque and, inadvertently, almost cartoony as we begin to feel emotional numbness caused by the proliferation of violence.

The Bottom Line
No amount of lavishly decadent digitized decor and symphonic tracks with Latin lyrics can change the fact that Phantasmagoria is an overbloated, cheesy horror story with tiny bits of gameplay collapsing under the weight of multimedia aspirations. There is appeal and historic interest here, but it doesn't justify giving up on quality adventure gameplay Sierra has been delivering for years. For a better representation of the same technology and style, try the sequel or The Beast Within.

The Good
Phantasmagoria is maybe one of the most controversial games ever released. Not because of its subject, but because of its purposes. First of all, it came on 7 CDs, consuming over 3 GB. It was a lot. Games were (and still are) much smaller those days. The also celebrated Full Throttle and The Dig (both from Lucas Arts, released that same year) had only one CD-ROM each. The two largest games before (in number of CDs) were Under A Killing Moon and Wing Commander 3, both occupying 4 CD-ROMs each. But Phantasmagoria had 7. It was amazing. Can you remember of another game consuming so many CDs?

It was an interactive movie. Interactive movies are all the rage those times, mainly because of Phantasmagoria, The 7th Guest, Under A Killing Moon and other impressive titles. And Phantasmagoria was the main representative of the style that year.

Well, game companies do not produce interactive movies anymore. Why? Well, Phantasmagoria is probably one of the reasons why interactive movies became so popular and also because they lose popularity. Let me explain.

Multimedia kits were very popular those days (kits with a CD-ROM drive and a sound card, remember? - not so long ago, although it may look like ages). Double-speed CD-ROM drives and 16-bit sound cards made full-motion video possible and people wanted to see videos on their computers. They wanted to feel the technological improvement brought by that equipment. They had heard a single CD could contain 650 MB of memory and they wanted to take advantage of it. Games should look very beautiful and sound terrific. What about a game with 7 CDs and 3 GB? Wow! Nobody could even think of that a few years before.

Well, Phantasmagoria had everything multimedia newcomers were expecting. It was a multimedia showcase.

Phantasmagoria graphics were out of this world. Although they had only 256 colors, no one payed much attention to it. They were displayed in 640x480 Super VGA resolution, which made the pixels much smaller than in traditional 320x200 VGA games. And the graphics were all filmed and digitalised, just like a movie. You could play with a real person, you interacted with real persons, you could walk through real places. Well, almost, as the actors were filmed in front of a blue screen and the backgrounds all were produced and rendered in computers. But they were very well done. They looked like reality. And they looked tridimensional. You didn't have to interact with drawings. And that was amazing.

Realism was added by alien elements which were not part of the game, like people eventually walking on the streets. The lack of realism of other adventure games were present, though. The main character, Adrienne, doesn't change her clothes the whole game.

And there were the videos. The whole game looked like a big movie, but one could easily identify the video sequences. They were very frequent in the game and during their appearance there was no possibility of interacting with the characters. But they were so great! They were very well done and sometimes looked like a real movie.

Chapter 7 (meaning CD 7) was unique. It featured a real interactive movie. In the last part of the game, your role is to control Adrienne through a movie sequence (or something which really looks like a movie sequence).

Sound quality was outrageous. Music was just perfect, really nice, played by an orchestra and executed beautifully since you had a 16-bit sound card. The song from the presentation itself (played in latin?) was great! Could have been taken from an opera.

Dilogues featured the crystal-clear voices of actors. Sound effects quality was equally superb.

The controls of the game were very easy to handle. The game was very comfortable to play and the interface was very nice and pleasant. Very similar to any other top-notch 3rd person-perspective adventure game.

The story was very nice, really elaborated. Phantasmagoria had over 100 pages of script. It was indeed a real movie. The story was about a couple who bought and old mansion. But strange, supernatural things had happened there before and they began to realise that. The suspense is kept to be delivered homeopatically until the end, when terror reveals itself without masks. There are 7 CDs of a terrific story-telling.

Roberta Williams managed to create a great horror tale. In order to do that, she used lots of videos, showed strange things happening without a reason, then showed ghostly appearances, then blood and finally the source of evil. That's phsycological terror and the most efficient type. It is much more terrifying than seeing monsters from the beginning, like in most terror games. That makes Phantasmagoria really scary, a really piece of art.

Yes, there are lots of violent scenes. Then, what? They contribute to create a great atmosphere. If you don't want to see violence, don't play an horror game, in which violence is more than expected. And there's also a lighter Phantasmagoria version, without the strongest parts, which is recommended for those who are not prepared to such disturbing scenes.

Graphics, sound and a great story make the game really involving. They create a good ambience most adventures (including interactive movies) fail to develop. And the fact that you see the character you're playing with (third person perspective) may contribute to make the game more involving.

Well, that's why Phantasmagoria became popular.

The Bad
And why did it become unpopular? Many players critics realise quickly that the game had lots of problems. In fact.

First of all, it's an interactive movie. Interactive movies may be beautiful and may create a good atmosphere, but they are not so interactive as they should be. Players cannot interfere in dialogs, as many of them are in full-motion video. And the character does many things by herself, also because players don't have control when videos are been played.

Second, the game is too easy. Yes, it's easy. It doesn't require sophisticated thinking and the puzzles are not hard. They are very easy indeed. Most of them are solved just by exploring the house, going to the garden or back to the bedroom. Something ridiculous if you think of those intrincated, elaborated and creative Monkey Island puzzles. Nothing like that here. Piece of cake.

And there's also a red skull in the menu which gives away clues as you click on it. It makes the game even easier, as it contains its own walkthrough.

Third, the game is too short. You read it right. Although it spreads over 7 CDs, it is short. Very short. That's in part because of the lack of interactiveness. The video sequences may be long (maybe not long enough for 3 GB, I should admit; some video compression would be fine), but the game is really short. You spend half an hour watching a video, then you have to get out of a situation or solve a puzzle and then you have another half an hour of video. It is really annoying. When you realise, a whole CD is gone and had just solved three easy puzzles. Gameplay is not fluent at all.

If you concentrate all your actions, they would be so few you'd think "Why does this game has 7 CDs? It should have half!". Indeed. It's ridiculous. And even if it had 20 CDs it would still be short.

And that's why Phantasmagoria also became unpopular.

But there are a few other things that could be better in this game, in comparison to other interactive movies. Technical ones, I mean.

First, graphics are great, but they have only 256 colors. Other interactive movies had astonishing 16 million color graphics. That would make the game impossible to run on a 486 processor, but would improve the atmosphere.

And there was no real full-motion video. Video was also very nice, but it was displayed in 10 frames per second. Full-motion video means 30 fps (frames per second), just like in television. The 11th Hour (also released in 1995) and other interactive movies had real full-motion (30 fps) video, but Phantasmagoria didn't. And the video compression was so crap they had to use 7 discs.

Just another little thing: the background in the mansion was perfectly done, but the background in the city was not. It looked totally artificial.

As you can see, nobody can be perfect, even on the technical side.

The Bottom Line
Phantasmagoria may provide an incredible atmosphere and a captivating suspense story, but it lacks gameplay. It's worth a try if you know what to expect.

The Good
When people often think of Roberta Williams, they usually think of King's Quest, a series of adventure games established in the Eighties that had you doing such things as finding magic items, rescuing princesses, and dealing with evil wizards. What some people don't know is that Williams herself also developed non-KQ games, with some notable examples being The Colonel's Bequest, Mystery House, and Mixed-up Mother Goose. Her latest non-KQ title is Phantasmagoria, an interactive movie caught up in the same era where video game companies believed that they were the future of gaming.

Don Gordon (played by David Homb) is a magazine photographer who has an interest in 18th- and 19th-century architecture. His wife, Adrienne Delaney (Victoria Morsell), is a successful book writer who has started working on her new novel. When Don comes across a 19th-century dwelling on a remote island, he convinces Adrienne to buy it as it would be the perfect place to write her novel. But as soon as they take up residency, things take a turn for the worse. Adrienne finds out about the history of the mansion and discovers that its previous occupant was Zoltan “Carno” Carnovasch (Robert Miano), a magician who had a tragic past and was married five times to women who had either disappeared or died in grotesque ways. As the days go by, Adrienne realizes that she must confront Don in his psychotic state and deal with whatever is possessing him.

The front cover shows a grey image of a woman lying on a bed. When I saw the game in stores, I thought it was a bunch of ninjas doing something sinister. A look inside the box reveals seven black-covered CDs with a line of blood splattered across them and the number of the CD also written in blood. The front cover of the manual reflects the imagery on the box, and it covers installation and how to control the game, plus a very brief walkthrough at the end.

Phantasmagoria shares the same mechanics as King's Quest VII, with the game being split across multiple chapters. The player can select which one they want to start off with, but I don't recommend doing this as you will be playing the game out of sequence. The interface is the same, with one half the main screen, and the other reserved for your inventory, control panel, and the examine icons. New additions include the introduction of the hintkeeper and the ability to save your game at any point. The interface remains on the screen until the game's end credits are over.

Phantasmagoria was intended to be played by adults, and Sierra couldn't stress that enough. Two minutes in and there's a sex scene involving the main characters, as well as some nudity thrown in for good measure. During the game, I didn't have any problems watching short movies that had a decent amount of gore, but it was enough to cause controversy not just around the world, but in its home country. The introduction to chapter four features a rape scene, and the intensity of this scene made it uncomfortable to watch.

The opening menu features the same music as heard in the trailer for the game, and it sounds great. The choirs that can be heard also serve as incidental music for most of the movies featuring blood and gore. Each musical piece is unique to each chapter, and as you progress through the chapters, they get more intense. As far as I know, Phantasmagoria is the only Sierra interactive movie where you can choose what sound card you want to use for the game, not just Sound Blaster.

There are two highlights in this game. One of them is the story of how Carno became possessed, as told by an old man named Malcolm (Douglas Seale). The other is the “chase” sequence that occurs in the last chapter. I was impressed by Homb's performance that if Sierra's next Dr. Brain installment was an interactive movie, he would have made a perfect candidate. Also, the game records everything you do in this chapter and you can watch how you played it out. You could also have a little bit of fun with it. I got Adrienne to warm up before she makes her escape from Don.

The Bad
Before you start playing, you have to enter your name, and that name is used for just the one save slot. This means you cannot go back to an earlier point in the game where something is about to happen. I hate this mechanism, and I'm glad that it wasn't reintroduced to later Sierra games. Because of the way the interface is designed, you hardly could examine things and could only interact with them. (The exception is the portraits of Carno and his wives.) So basically you were guided through the game.

During the end credits, you hear a song called “Take a Stand” which is sung by Mark Seibert. I enjoyed listening to it, but it is inappropriate. It sounds like it was released in the Eighties, and it doesn't blend well with the game's theme

The Bottom Line
The concept for Phantasmagoria started in the late Eighties, but Roberta Williams waited a number of years for technology to catch up, and understandably so. Imagine what the game would look like if it was done in Sierra's old AGI engine. The game is a horror adventure game that generated a lot of controversy when it was released. The blood and gore wasn't actually real, and like a lot of Hollywood movies, many props and objects were put in good use to make us think it was.

Despite some problems with the game mechanics, the game is quite good, and it has a nice soundtrack filled with choirs that suit its intense scenes. I didn't have a problem with the 3D-rendered backgrounds, which was the norm for interactive movies back in the day. As I mentioned, I like the backstory involving Carno and his wives, and the aforementioned chase scene which was very well done and made Homb shine. Sierra released a sequel called A Puzzle of Flesh which has nothing to do with the original game and used actual locations around Seattle.

The Good
I'd be lying through my teeth, if I'd claim Phantasmagoria as a good game. In fact I feel quite the opposite: as a game Phantasmagoria fails miserably thanks to poor design choices, but the game is not only thing Phantasmagoria is, as it is actually pretty entertaining, albeit some places rather poorly acted and written, interactive horror movie.

The story takes a couple of chapters to get going, but after it does it easily overcomes the poor design choices and keeps you entertained to the end. The game is actually pretty short, seasoned adventurers should go through it pretty fast, so in that sense it's a good way to spend an evening, if you are looking for b-horror horror.

The musical score is pretty good as well. It provides a nice atmosphere to the game and in FMV sequences the music is just superb.

The acting is mostly OK. The main cast does ham up pretty often, but luckily enough there's some good acting in the mix as well. Victoria Morsell does pretty good as the lead, despite she does have some cringe worthy dialogue. Robert Miano as Zoltan brings in good performance as well.

The Bad
The writing is a bit of a hit and miss. Some aspects of the game are well written, but some are just laughable bad. Some pretty sub par actors manage to enhance the poor quality of the script at places, but luckily enough nothing really important is missed even if you skip those parts.

Some poor design choices hinder the gameplay, such as unnecessary FMV segments in room transition or badly done conversations, which don't flow very naturally.

The graphics are mostly pretty ugly pre-rendered 3D. The FMV sequences look a bit better, but it's difficult to claim Phantasmagoria as a pretty game.

The Bottom Line
Phantasmagoria is a short and easy game. It does have very little merits as a good game, but as a b-movie it works surprisingly well despite it does have more than a couple of cliches in its sleeve of scare tricks.

It's not the best example of FMV games, but there's a lot worse candidates out there. Phantasmagoria is not a total failure, so if you're interested in FMV games you should check it out.

The Good
Oh dear. I bought this on a whim because I wanted to see if this game really was as terrible as PC Gamer had made it out to be. It wasn't. It's worse.

What I liked about the game? Hmm. Well I have to say, I liked the nice heavy weight of the box due to the 7 CDs. And that's all I can think of.

The Bad
And while 7 CDs is kind of a good thing at first (it gives the impression of a long game), it was just ridiculous back then. Hell, a lot of games still don't use this much space.

But the 7 CDs themselves aren't the problem. It's the fact that Sierra chose to store the exact same data on all those 7 CDs with maybe a 10th of the CDs contained different data. Basically, it could easily have fit on 2 CDs if they made you install one CD to your hard drive.

The truth is that Phantasmagoria isn't a game. It's a poor excuse of a B-movie which lets you walk from one area to the other. There's hardly any puzzles at all! To call this an adventure game is a real joke.

Most "puzzles" consisted of you finding the next room you have to walk to. This means walking to every single room in the castle to find the one that will trigger the next movie clip.

The movies are so poorly done, with really awful special effects and horrible acting that it even becomes torture just to watch them.

Luckily, the game only takes an hour to complete or so. 7 CDs for a game which is only a fraction the length of classics like Monkey Island which easily take 10 times longer to complete! A disgrace!

The Bottom Line
Oh, it's easy to describe this game: it's a B-movie disguising itself as a game by making you walk from room to room to see the next piece of the dreadful story. It shouldn't be called a game at all. No, it was lesson to all developers. A lesson that taught them that lots of FMV doesn't make a good game. Games like Under A Killing Moon showed how it should be done, Phantasmagoria shows how NOT to do it.

The Good
Nothing is really good about Phantasmagoria... the only thing that really made me freeze in awe with this game is the fact that it comes on 7 seperate CDs -- which is not necessarily a good thing, but definitely scary.

The Bad
Terrible acting on the actors' side, a pretty dumb storyline, completely unproportional scenario design (why is it that every house has to be a lot bigger on the inside than it is on the outside?), passable graphics as best and same goes for the music and horrible gameplay.
What's worse is, the game isn't even remotely scary!

I believe Phantasmagoria was a complete flop in every respect, which is a shame considering that its wonderful sequel Phantasmagoria II: A Puzzle of Flesh wasn't really a sequel at all, but rather a redefinition of the genre.

Too bad Sierra didn't put as much effort into this game as they did with their other masterpieces.

The Bottom Line
A pretty bad adventure game that takes up a ridiculous amount of space without a good reason. If you expect to find spine-tingling horror video sequences here, you'd be more than disappointed.