Phantasmagoria

I bought this game and it will not play. I've contacted customer service and haven't received a reply. Any help would be appreciated.

GOG, it's way beyond fraud to silently increase the regular price of a 30 year old title by 20% to end up at the roughly the old price with discount afterwards. This time last year, the regular price was 8.29EUR, now it's 9.99EUR. Do you think, we don't find out?!

One of the worst games ever. Let's start with the fact that this is an excrutiatingly bad and long unskippable cutscene with the most generic horror story you can ever imagine, which copies the shining, but in a horrible, bland and painfully mediocre way. I want to emphasie the "boring" part. This game is aggressively boring. No, no. It doesn't just bore you because it's oblivious to its horrid story. It tortures you. Let me explain: Imagine you are reading a book that has an answer hidden within its pages, but most of it is complete non-sequitur and chapters end with absoultely no rhyme or reason, the proverbial gun on wall does not fire, it just hangs there. Beating the game is total guesswork, and in the last chapter it means you have to guess from 20 different outcomes in order to progress or you die instanlty. Yes. And if you spam ESC to skip the cutscenes, the last one, will ask you if you want to continue or not, and if you press ESC by accident, you have to replay the whole game again. I mean the whole 7 hours of watching a girl stare at things for painfully long periods of time while playing with her hair, freaking out by the same thing over and over again and not leaving the house or calling the cops when she gets raped, manhandled, discovers a dead body in her garden or sees actual ghosts. No. Then you have to sit through the part where an old man, who falls asleep at every word, then wakes up midesntence and stutters the same story you have been seeing through character dialogue and clues THE WHOLE game in a 10 minute long shot of a dude in a wheelchair. This game is physically painful to play. The locations repeat, the items don't make any sense at all and the typos are just as good as the narrative of the whole thing, which doesn't follow itself (the main cillian killed 8 people, yet they say he's only killed 5). The game is unnecessarily cruel too, but not only this, the acting is so bad it makes you physically uncomfortable.

Phantasmagoria is in my top 5 of worst games I ever played (and I've played thousands). I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me, but if you look at reviews of the time, you'll see many agreed. A few examples of why it's a poor game to me: - it has 7 CDs yet it takes maybe 3 hours to complete: on those 7 CDs there's nowhere near as much content as you'd believe because most content is repeated on all 7 CDs - "puzzles" consist of going from room A to room B to watch a new clip being played. Aside from this, there's only a handful of items you can pick up and use in the entire game and the function of most is very obvious - There's very little logic to the game. The events are triggered in order so if you have to go to room B, you won't be able to do ANYTHING until you go to room B. And there's no reason WHY you should go to room B so you end up going to all rooms until you trigger the next event or .. you can "cheat" and ask for a hint. Seriously, to me this is the anti-game. It's a disgrace as an adventure game yet certain people still love the game for its horror elements. It's a good game for starting adventure gamers though - if they don't mind terrible acting and cheesy horror sequences but be warned: this is a lot worse than Gabriel Knight Beast Within which uses the same engine. That game was huge, had interesting locations and characters, proper acting, lots of items and puzzles. This game has none of those.

So like... first of, don't expect a game. There are no puzzles here. You pick up some items and use them, but there's nothing to "solve" or figure out. It's an interactive film. The script isn't great, the acting is mostly tolerable (though they sure did front-load the worst of it -- looking at you, "breakfast table flirting after opening sex scene). Several people mention the game being "gorey" and I was expecting like basements full of bloody, dismembered corpses. But mostly it's like people being murdered and yeah, there's blood. But I grew up on Doom, and this was tame. But let's talk about themes. To do this, I have to spoil some things, so skip from here if you don't want to see it. There's some really uncomfortable domestic abuse in this game. (Yes, poor Don wasn't "himself," I understand, that's not the problem.) The woman you play gets yelled at and it's messed up, but then she just goes and does something else, and as soon as her man seems hurt and vulnerable, she's RIGHT back there to try and comfort him. She's literally seeing flashbacks of murder, but no, let's go try to comfort your recently-turned-abusive husband? No, get out of that relationship! Again, spoiler, but after getting yelled at, and husband comes in and tries to get romantic. Wife brushes him off, he persists, and you can see it on her face this look like, "There's no way out of this, is there. He wants it, and there's nothing I can do to stop him." And yes, he rapes his wife. And she breaks down crying in the bathroom afterwards. And then the next day, she is still trying to be supportive of him. Like WHAT?! I know a lot of these gender/relationship roles were tropes back in the 90s, but jeez, it's uncomfortable. Feel free to play this to understand it in the context of when it was made. But I can't recommend it as enjoyable on its own these days. It feels like playing a documentary of the death of adventure games.