I received Phantasmagoria for Christmas in 1995, and was completely sucked in its atmosphere. I spent the rest of winter break in my bedroom with the lights out and the door closed, my feet icy to the point of numbness (heat didn't circulate well in my folks' house unless all the interior doors were open), totally absorbed in this game.
By 1995 standards, it was an excellent game. It was on CD-ROM for one thing; for those of you who weren't there -- or should I say who weren't "then" -- you could stamp the word "CD-ROM" on a bag of used kitty litter in 1995 and people would line up to pay you $40 for it. It was THE sexy new consumer tech of the mid-90s.
Also, Phantasmagoria featured honest-to-God living, breathing actors. Absolutely none of them had been in anything the average user would have seen. The only actor in Phantasmagoria who I had ever seen elsewhere was the little old man who played Malcolm, who I recognized from a Cheers rerun in which Sam and Diane almost buy a house. But Phantasmagoria came years before Ron Perlman and Lt. Worf turned up doing voice work in the Fallout games, so the presence of an actual human beings, whether you'd heard of them or not, was astounding. And, as other reviewers have noted, this game was released pretty much at the height of the full-motion video craze. None of the actors, I guess I should mention, are what you'd call "good."
The game is, in fact, truly creepy at times. That mansion and its decor establish an eerie mood that is complemented by the music. The kill scenes still hold up well to the mayhem you see on today's raft of corpse-puzzler TV shows, eg CSI, in terms of gore and gusto. I mean, the scene with the trowel is still memorable, in my opinion.
The problem is the game is way, way too linear. If you missed some detail or didn't solve a puzzle correctly, there was no moving on until you got it right. In my case, I spent days wandering around the mansion and the nearby town, trying to figure out what came next, because I didn't realize I was carrying a letter opener. Honestly, I'd looked at the object a dozen times and didn't notice there was a button on it. And why couldn't I have just gone to the kitchen and gotten a butter knife to finish that task? Anyway, there were a few other times when I got hung up, and at these times Phantasmagoria is truly mind-numbing. Basically, you have to scour the entire game environment, mousing over every object in sight until you stumble on something that wasn't there before, or that you previously had been unable to interact with. Or you'd have to go around talking to all the NPCs, seeing if you'd get something out of them aside from chit-chat. I seriously wanted to choke the woman in the antique store.
There was a love scene and a rape scene which are going to seem pretty tame by today's standards. Also, the game came on a whopping seven CDs. Seven CDs! That's completely insane. The saving grace was that the game's story takes place over the course of seven days, and each CD corresponds to a single day, so there wasn't a lot of swapping.
The game amounts to a marginally interactive horror movie. If you look at it in that light, it's something of a moderate success. I mean, it's way more enjoyable than Halloween 3, 4, or 5, or any other of a thousand third-rate horror movies that have zero plot and a gaggle of bad actors who'll never work in a good, or even average, movie. Phantasmagoria actually creates an immersive atmosphere and a little bit of suspense. The tradeoff, of course, is that you don't have to spend five days watching Halloween 3 waiting for the protagonist to realize that his Silver Shamrock mask conceals a letter opener.
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