Phantasmagoria

This is an interesting artifact of gaming history, but as a game it is pretty terrible. There's an okay story beneath it, but the the FMV implementation is awful. Every little thing involves Adrienne staring at the thing you click on and playing with her hair for 20 seconds. The designers seem to have been way too impressed with the idea of FMV, so they try to force you to stare at your character staring at things for painfully long intervals. The lead actress is fine, but the rest of the acting is mostly terrible. Why in the world is the guy playing the husband doing an Elvis impression? The last chapter is one of the worst things in the history of gaming. A series of rapid fire clicks at the right time or die, and then watch the same painfully bad FMV clips over again, then die again, then the same clips, die, etc. Do it with a walkthrough or risk putting your fist through your monitor. FMV can be done very well, and there are far, far better FMV games on GoG: Tex Murphy, Gabriel Knight 2, even Phantasmagoria 2 is much better than this crapfest.

Top classic!

I've played soo many fmv games. I used to be obsessed with them and my dad used to keep buying them for me every other month! He was as obsessed as I was..>But I had NEVER bothered buying Phantasmagoria because of the content ( I was about 12-14) then and my father heard about how great it was but how gory it was.. Let me just tell you, I am sooo glad he didn't buy this for me because I experienced this as an adult and loved every minute of it... From the beginning I was blown away by the ease of the point and click part of the game, as well as all of the rooms and objects that needed to be examined! There were soo many of them! I felt like a kid again going around clicking on anything that could be clicked. I am kind of hesitant about playing phantasmagoria 2 since i've seen the reviews, plus I do not want to spoil all the awesomeness that Phantasmagoria 1 possessed. It is truly an amazing game, one of the best (if not THEE best) fmv game out there. Those who haven't played it I am DEMANDING YOU TO PLAY THIS GAME! It truly is one i'll never forget.

"Phantasmagoria" takes an interesting story and turns it into something redundant and uninteresting because of poor game mechanics. The game itself can be played through in a relatively short time... assuming, that is, that the game does not auto-save over a save that you create before a major event. At the end of the 6th chapter, I created a save to ensure that if there was a problem going into the final chapter, I could go back--but suddenly, despite there being no auto-save function earlier in the game, the game replaced the save file at a point in which the game could no longer be finished. I had to start the previous chapter again to collect all necessary items. Sadly, this was the most time-consuming part of an otherwise linear and relatively straight-forward sequence of events. As other reviews note, this game can stump you at times because of minute details on useable items (i.e., an object that you have held for a while and has an interactive element that the cursor does not always notice). The game can also be difficult to navigate because of unclear environments (that is, it's not always obvious where you can go). A final frustrating element was that there were so many items you could interact with that did not actually do anything for the game--you can sit on several couches and chairs to absolutely no purpose. These mechanics made the game feel long, but the actual game play (and not frustrated fumblings with interface) was short.

As a point-and-click graphical adventure it's simply terrible. The game and puzzle design fluctuates between completely obvious and impossibly unintuitive. It's very common to find yourself without a clear picture of what to do next. No wonder it was designed with a very prominent hint system. Clear proof of the poor game design. Certainly rushed into production. The "full motion video" (as it was called at the time) is a gimmick, shoehorned in to capitalize on the CD-ROM fad. The game hasn't aged well. But… it has some nostalgic value.