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.
