Phantasmagoria (PC)

Phantasmagoria (PC) :

I got a couple of complaints previously that I didn't have enough PC games included on the blog. That's something I intend to remedy in future! The problem has always been that I've never had a PC very capable of running games, and being someone who's always had consoles I've always found the setting up of PC games very fiddly and annoying....

Thank heavens for http://www.gog.com/  then! After finally getting a semi-decent PC, I decided to try them out and was very pleased to find that when you download games from there, they get rid of most of the faffing about setting up DOSbox, etc. and just let you get straight into playing the games! Phantasmagoria was the first game I decided to give a go..

Writer Adrienne Delaney has just moved into a new home with her husband Don, hoping to find inspiration for a new horror novel. The house used to be owned by a famous 19th Century magician named Zoltan Carnovasch, and is filled with all manner of spooky items and props.....

However, what the happy couple don't realise is that old "Carno" was a bit of a nasty piece of work, who liked to practice all manner of dark deeds! As Adrienne explores the house, she starts to uncover things that should really be left covered, and things soon escalate to horrific heights!

Being from 1995, the game uses Full Motion Video, the "next big thing" in videogames at the time. Having only experienced console FMV games until very recently though, I can safely say that the PC handled such games a lot better than most consoles of the time, especially when they applied it to point-and-click style games such as this.....

It's fairly easy to control Adrienne, and exploring the mansion and discovering it's secrets is a lot of fun! There are quite a few odd characters you'll bump into during the course of the game too, and although the acting skills vary from character to character, it just helps add to the B-movie style feel of the whole thing...

The game was very controversial on it's release. Designed by Sierra's Roberta Williams who was known for producing family-friendly fare, it features lots of violence, some really gory cut-scenes and most controversial of all, the infamous "rape scene" where Don forces himself onto Adrienne....

Because of this, the game was banned in Australia and many US stores decided not to stock it. This didn't really affect sales though, with Phantasmagoria being one of the best selling games of 1995. No doubt this pleased Sierra, who had invested a lot of time and money into the project...

The script for the game was four times larger than most movie scripts, being 550 pages long and having 100 additional storyboard pages to assist artists in creating the 800 scenes in the game! Filming took four months, with the final chase sequence alone eating up a week of that time. Actress Victoria Morsell spent hour after hour in front of a blue-screen performing the hundreds of different actions players can make her character do in the game, and another 200 people were involved in production! And that's not including the 135-strong Gregorian Choir that was used for the game's score!

So did it all pay off? Well....yes! The game is a lot of fun to play, and although it sometimes suffers from the usual point and click problems like needing to click on something at the right time and in the right place to activate it, and wandering around with not much happening if you're not sure how to advance, it never really gets too difficult or boring. As I mentioned, sometimes the acting can be a bit iffy but overall it's a good game that had to be included on the blog...even if Roberta Williams herself doesn't see it as gruesome (see video below)!