I feel its presence, the icy fingers upon my throat.
I hear its eerie sounds, unsettling my every thought.
I try in vain to slumber, my reveries gripped by violent terror.
My only salvation, the shock of awakening.
Something is very, very wrong here.
Master storyteller Roberta Williams challenge...
I feel its presence, the icy fingers upon my throat.
I hear its eerie sounds, unsettling my every thought.
I try in vain to slumber, my reveries gripped by violent terror.
My only salvation, the shock of awakening.
Something is very, very wrong here.
Master storyteller Roberta Williams challenges you to experience the ultimate interactive nightmare.
A thrilling storyline designed by a professional writer - Roberta Williams
One of the first games utilizing full-motion video technology so well
See for yourself what caused so much controversy around this game!
Last chapter (7) has an inexplicable behavior, in that it seems to require that one perform certain actions *prior to* beginning a "critical" part of the story. Within that part, one may not restore game from previous saves, but only restart exact scenes in which one dies. The effect is that one may enter those scenes fundamentally unprepared for what happens in them (due to not having adequately prepared by gathering items). So one enters situation in which there can never be a satisfactory result, only death of character.
It is the strangest game design aspect I have encountered. I feel that I must be missing something, because no one could reasonably design a game with such a clearly unsatisfactory result. I can only recommend that you skip this game as one which has not a lot of entertainment in chapters 1-6 and then an unacceptable design in the handling of last chapter (7).
Honestly this is not a good game, if you like FMV games you'll be way better off playing something like Gabriel Knight 2 or Wing Commander 3. This games pales in comparison. I'm glad it's a short one though.
The acting is not that bad and the overall puzzles and stuff are average, however, the plot is really uninteresting and just boring, the characters have almost no background and it's hard to keep engaged.
Phantasmagoria is ostensibly a horror game, but amusingly very little horror actually happens. It largely boils down to watching our heroine, who wears the same clothes every day and sleeps with her shoes on, wander around the interior of her ponderously gigantic whimsical funhouse of a mansion that makes absolutely no logical sense while her horrible husband slowly becomes more and more evil while working on unplugging a stuck drain.
The story supposedly focuses on how they moved into this monstrosity of a building sight unseen and knowing nothing about it, only for Adrien (our heroine) to use a letter opener to chisel a hole in the back of a fireplace to discover the hidden Satanic church in her house and unwittingly unleash a demonic spirit that had possessed the mansion's former owner and now decides to possess her husband Don. However, most of the play time is dedicated to such things as inviting an elderly hobo and her mentally challenged gorilla of a son to live with her forever, introducing herself to an antiques dealer a dozen times in the same conversation, and fetching drain cleaner for her asshole of a husband.
The actual "horror" aspects are way, way funnier than they are sinister. The opening cinematic features Adrien dreaming about early 90s CG magician's props and a chimney full of hooks, but the scene immediately following it where she has sex with Don is far more horrific. Goofy hands grope her from inside her mattress, a teddy bear's head falls off as she discovers a cartoon fart cloud hovering above a crib, and a drifter throws up the gelatinous head of a dead magician.
The only value this game really has is laughing at how ridiculous it all is. It's FMV cheese from that era where 8 CDs of game automatically meant better even if nobody involved knew how to write, act, or design logical puzzles. Don is a hilariously pathetic monster, the hobos are comically terrible, and the real estate agent and his pal Wallfish are the best of them all.
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Last 30 daysLast 90 daysLast 6 monthsWheneverAfter releaseDuring Early Access
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