This is an incredible value for your money. Although there is evidence of a rushed release, I haven't found any glitches that can't be fixed with a little bit of .cfg file tinkering. But more importantly, you get a TON of tables, and some of the more complicated ones like Partyland can keep you playing for hours and hours!
This game oozes style, and it's worth playing just to see what it would be like to live inside a spy-action comic book. The graphics, music, and story are all pretty good. But as a first person shooter, it was lacking even when it was released. Controls are fairly standard, but the gameplay itself is repetitive and boring, and if I remember correctly you have to play through checkpoints instead of just starting from saved games. I recommend trying a demo if you can still find it, or buying it if you love the style so much you don't mind thoroughly mediocre shooting action.
I saved up and bought this game for myself when it was brand new, and my appetite was at its peak for scary games. I'd been up to my eyes in DOOM, but the concept of a Sierra adventure game featuring both full-motion video AND R-rated scares appealed to me. I loved it and loathed it and played it three times. Here's my take, fifteen years later, and hopefully without too much rose-tint in my lenses: Pros: + The mansion and its grounds are a fantastic setting, and the nearby town is too, but to a lesser extent. It's all quite unbelievable, but the whole place just oozes atmosphere, and I can remember spending lots of time enjoying just wandering around the slightly creepy grounds, or through the rooms still with their original lunatic-stage-magician decor. + The music. Not exactly Academy Award material, but it's sufficiently eerie, scary, and at times, sweet. It does everything it needs to, and rarely if ever got on my nerves. + The back story. Granted, Pink-Shirt-Girl wandering around discovering clues isn't so interesting, but just the concept of Zoltan, this Bluebeard of stage magicians, was fantastic. + The ghoulish hint system. There's a talking skull in the interface, who in a devilish baritone will give hints or identify items. I used to laugh at the way he tried to make everything sound ominous. "A... FIREPLACE POKER!" + Nasty, brutal, gory death scenes. It's a Sierra-game staple that your character can often die in horrible ways for accidentally straying into the wrong pixel. That doesn't happen so much in Phantasmagoria, but when you do stray far enough from the path, the main character does not go out tidily. "Whoops, you didn't see the cliff?" is not a fun way to die. "Whoops, your body was horribly mutilated in homage to the writings of Edgar Allen Poe!" is a fun way to die. Cons (among many): - This game came on CD-ROM because people had tiny, inefficient hard drives. Each disc contains tons of redundant content, and there were constant seek-times as the optical drive sped up and stopped. There was a lot of disc-swapping, although thankfully only in a linear progression as each disc spanned a day in the week-long story. This flaw might be eliminated in the GOG version, we'll have to see. - The acting. It's terrible. Sometimes in a funny way, sometimes not. - The puzzles. They are Sierra material. Basically, enjoy making healthy use of the hint system and walkthroughs. - The graphics. A lot of them still hold up, but the presence of FMV characters against CGI backgrounds has always stood out as a low-water mark in gaming. I give the game 3 stars, and recommend it with the caveat that you have to be able to enjoy a) Sierra adventure games, b) Bad horror movies, and c) a certain nostalgia for the turning point when gaming could have gone horribly wrong (aka, FMV chapter-books).
