...but still a little south of average. The second Phantasmagoria game fixed a few of the problems with the first game. You can skip individual lines of dialog, helpful if you've had to replay a section. Scene transitions are much quicker. Load times are pretty nonexistant, and the acting is downright GOOD for a videogame of this era. On the other hand, other problems the first game had are even worse here. Once again, it's not really a videogame at all; it's grainy movie with the illusion of player interaction. Phantasmagoria 2's story is more dialog-heavy than the first game, which you carry out by clicking on the other characters over and and over and over. That's it. You click. Sometimes you show them items from your inventory and talk about them. There's one particular scene with your character's therapist in which you've got to show her about 10 different items to get through. You've got to keep hunting through your inventory to find items she'll interact with at specific times. It's tedious. Gone is the irritating "rotate every item to see if something's on the back" thing the 1st game didn't tell you about, but it's replaced by a system of combining items that the game never tells you that you can do. Equally frustrating. The last challenge of the game is a non-intuitve puzzle that it gives you no clues on how to solve. The story's fine and I would watch this as a movie, but it's not really a game.
I won't rag on this very hard, especially since the game's unfinshed. The artwork is compellingly beautiful, done in a pixel-based style that is high on nostalgic charm. The game, as it presently stands, even boasts some neat-looking animation on its cut scenes. No voiceovers, but that really isn't a problem for me. Seems to be a lot happening in the story, cutting from the realworld into a dreamstate through the use of a book with unexplained magical properties. I didn't see enough of the plot in the demo to really understand the depth of what was happening. What didn't work for me was what I saw of the gameplay itself. I was taken through lengthy dialog with no selectable options, then sent down an unbranching path to the only available location. All actions were handled with the spacebar. Whenever a prompt came up, I pressed it, and the game shuffled me off to its next bit. I'd guess the story is going to be the big draw on this one, not the gameplay. I never felt like I was exploring anything or participating in the story, though. Just doing what I was explictly told to do and going where I was explictly sent. Early days, I know, but I didn't see anything that would make me want to check out a later version of this game. The developers should have sat on this demo until it was more than just attractive windowdressing.
I played this game constantly in junior high. Obviously, it's a Sierra game, but you don't have to deal with an annoying parser system ("Get ye flask...You can't get ye flask!"). Pointing and clicking is handled by large, easy-to-understand icons. "Look" is an eye, "touch" is a hand...very intuitive. The graphics have the blockiness of circa '91 VGA, but everything has vibrant grades of color, kind of like stepping into a pixilated Pre-Raphaelite painting. The animation is suprisingly fluid and the soundtrack will be stuck in your head for days; the widow's theme is a longtime favorite of mine. There's a lot of game to explore, and you can uncover multiple endings. Most of the puzzles make sense and are usually pretty forgiving about letting you tinker with them to arrive at its solution. The difficulty is just about right; I was able to 100% it as a lad in the pre-internet-walkthrough days, but it took many intermittent months to cough up all its secrets. It tries for a few of what it calls "arcade" action sequences...really just more point-and-clicking on a stricter time limit. Still enjoyable, just not the change-up the manual seems to think they are. This game had copy protection on it, meaning you need info contained in the manual to proceed. Kind of a pain, usually, but this game's copy protection is integrated so well into the story that I didn't even realize what it was until many years after I'd played it! It's all fun and thematically appropriate; a hand-speak alphabet to communicate with trees, gemstone lore, coats of arms (this one was bugged; it's always the 2nd one you're shown). If you're not a fan of Sierra type point-and-click adventure games, this probably won't be the one that changes your mind. However, it's very playable and enjoyable with art that still looks good to my eyes and a compelling story. Once you've played through it, it's exactly the same each time, but for my money, it's worth returning to every couple of years.
