Roberta Williams' Phantasmagoria

aka: Phantasm, Phantasmagoria, Phantasmagoria de Roberta Williams
Moby ID: 1164
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Description official descriptions

A writer named Adrienne Delaney has just moved into an old mansion with her photographer husband Donald. Shortly after moving in, Adrienne begins to experience horrifying nightmares and have odd encounters inside the creepy old abode. Furthermore, the house is having a severe effect on her husband, changing him for the worse. Adrienne must discover the secret of the house before the unknown force consumes her husband, and unravel the terrible events that have happened in the past.

Phantasmagoria is an adventure game that places heavy emphasis on full motion video for exposition and cutscenes at various junctures to advance the storyline. Adrienne is represented as a digitized character roaming around pre-rendered settings in the house. She inspects various rooms, finds items, adds them to her inventory, finds places to use the items, and triggers advancements in the plot.

Puzzle-solving element is present, though reduced compared to most other adventure games made by Sierra. There are seven chapters in the game, as well as a status screen that tracks the player's progress within the chapter. If the player happens to get stuck in the game, a talking skull icon who identifies himself as the hintkeeper can supply the player with hints on request. It is possible to start playing the game from any chapter.

Spellings

  • ファンタズム - Japanese spelling
  • 幽魂 1 - Taiwanese spelling
  • 로베르타 윌리엄즈의 판타스마고리아 - Korean spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

158 People (147 developers, 11 thanks) · View all

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Movie Sequences Scored By
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[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 66% (based on 32 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 118 ratings with 12 reviews)

Quite horrible, really.

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.

DOS · by Tomer Gabel (4539) · 2000

Technical Marvel, Gaming Disaster

The Good
The video capture was mind-blowing at the time. Pre-render backgrounds were decent, if somewhat out of place with the live-action. The music was fantastic. An original score, featuring a huge choir at many points, created the overall feel of the game.

The Bad
The violence was more disgusting than scary. Scenes of torture-killings detracted from the macabre feeling Williams seemed to be going for. The point and click game design made the game to easy (as did the 'hint master' character). The 7-disc bundle was a red-herring in terms of game length -- multiple disc merely prevent constant switching for the various video sequences.

The Bottom Line
Robert Williams, the creator of the King's Quest Series and designed for Phantasmagoria, promised a game where gaming quality would not be sacrificed to support the new video-capture marvel that would be here new series. Too bad she couldn't deliver. Rather than top rate horror adventure, Sierra gave us a pretty-to-look-at, boring-to-play disaster. The acting was sub-par, the puzzles were insultingly simple for any gamer, and the overall 7-disc experience was over in a matter of hours. Truly the beginning of the end for the Sierra empire.

Windows · by Game22 (35) · 2004

Yikes! You scared the meaning out of my gameplay!..

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.

DOS · by Unicorn Lynx (181780) · 2016

[ View all 12 player reviews ]

Trivia

Absinthe

In the bar on the first floor there is a bottle of absinthe. As the game progresses, the bottle goes from full to nearly empty before it is removed from the bar altogether. Someone is drinking it.

Actors

Victoria Morsell, who plays Adrienne, and David Homb, who plays Don, started dating a week after they began filming together. The picture that sits on the night stand in the character's bedroom found a new home in the couple's living room after the game was finished.

Opening Theme

The opening theme for the game is called Consumite Furore, which translates to "Expend Your Rage," and was written by Mark Seibert based on an English text by Roberta Williams. The words in English and Latin are, respectively :

Come into this talisman || O Spirit of Darkness || Mighty Asteroth, I command you || And fill this stone with your rage || Fill it with your sulphurous powers|| Expend your angers on it || Those powers I will assume || I command you.

Venite in fascinum || O spiritus tenebrarum || Magne Asterothe, te iubeo || Et implete hunc lapidem vestro furore || Implete eum viribus sulfuratis vestris || Consumite eum iris vestris || Istas vires adsumem || Iubeo te.

Development

The game was finished by the latter part of 1994, and was ready for release, however Sierra chose to call back some of the cast and crew members for two additional sessions of filming. Filming initially took an additional month and, three months later, was resumed for another couple of weeks.

References

  • The original title for the game was going to be Scary Tales but the name was changed to its current title during production. There is a directory for temporary files that the game installs called SCARY in honor of the early title.
  • The office of Bob Thompkins, Adrianne's sleazy real estate agent, is decorated with posters of girls from another Sierra adventure game, Leisure Suit Larry 6.

Release(s)

  • Due to strict censorship policies, Phantasmagoria was banned in Australia.
  • The German version of the game was banned in Germany on March 31st, 1998.

Awards

  • Power Play
    • Issue 02/1996 – Biggest Disappointment in 1995

Information also contributed by MrBucket, phlux, Straw Hubert and Zovni.

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  • MobyGames ID: 1164
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Derrick 'Knight' Steele.

SEGA Saturn added by roushimsx. Windows 3.x added by MAT. Macintosh added by Jeanne.

Additional contributors: Jeanne, Ajan, roushimsx, formercontrib, ケヴィン, Zeppin, Paulus18950, Cantillon, lee jun ho, Patrick Bregger, Victor Vance, ZeTomes.

Game added March 27, 2000. Last modified February 21, 2024.