Phantasmagoria

Sierra was among the largest video game companies in the 1980s. By the 1990s, their star was dimming. They had missed the biggest adventure game hits, The 7th Guest and Myst, now putting them in a position to catch up. LucasArts was topping them with consistently funny adventures that didn’t waste a player’s time with dead ends and trick deaths. They needed something big to remind everyone why they were industry leaders.

A “phantasmagoria” was a term for an old Vaudville-era show using an early, crude form of a slide projector (called a magic lantern). Spirits and ghosts projected onto silk screens appeared to be “floating” in the theatre. The term makes for a fitting title. The game is about an old Vaudville magician named Carno, famous for his shocking stage acts, and the couple who inherit his twisted estate. It is also an unintentionally fitting description for the game itself – a lot of magic lanterns and silk screens that produce great-looking effects, trying to distract you from the story and terror that aren’t there.

I had heard this game was scary, with some legitimate psychological horror at surprising odds with the usual output of the house that King’s Quest built. I’ll grant that horror is more personal than comedy, which makes it much more subjective. But Phantasmagoria didn’t scare me, didn’t even make me a little unsettled. It reminded me the most of the 90’s remake of The House On Haunted Hill – a campy old plot with updated raunchy, full-color gore.

You play as mystery novelist Adrienne Delaney (Victoria Morsell). Her husband Don (David Homb) is a magazine photographer who happens across the old island estate of Zoltan “Carno” Carnovasch while on one of his shoots. Apparently it is for sale, and game opens in your first day in the new home. This gives an excuse for you to have not fully explored the grounds yet. As you wander, you’ll discover a bit of the history of Carno and the house, meet some new friends in town, find the expected bevy of hidden secrets, and unintentionally release a demon that inhabits the body of your husband and turns him into a raging asshole.

Phantasmagoria takes the digital actor conept Sierra used in creating its characters for Police Quest 3 and applies it to video. Actors are shot in front of a bluescreen and composited into elaborate digital backgrounds. In theory, you’re getting the gorgeous, CG-rendered locations of Myst, but even better because it’s also a true interactive movie with real actors. Roberta Williams stated in many interviews that she believed having real people was crucial to creating horror and empathy for the characters, and I suppose I see her point. Yet in practice, the execution isn’t a great deal different than any other adventure game, while the human actor isn’t treated or handled differently than an animated character.

In previous games, your animated protagonist would stand stock still until you click somewhere in the game world. The character then goes through a few cycles of animation as he/she/it saunters over to the specified point, then goes still again. Sierra applied this exact thinking to video. You watch a video of Adrienne walking, then a noticeable jump to a still image of her in a “default” position, waiting for new input. Her default position is to stand like a Marine at attention, so every single action requires her to both start and end in this position. It’s annoying to watch constant extra seconds of her walking around to her starting position, flipping her hair back, and awkwardly straightening up and looking ahead, to match the still image shown next.

There is also the much-panned fact that she doesn’t change her stinky clothes for an entire week. I’m not going to say that it detracted in any way from the game, but it does reinforce that she’s just another adventure game character; this time made of video frames instead of artwork. The cracks of an “interactive movie” are starting to show.

Transitions are, at least, smartly edited. I don’t think it ever took more than a second to move from place to place, while a “fast forward” button lets you jump ahead to the end of any movement cycle. Don’t worry about using this feature – any key plot scenes are shown in a separate movie format that use the escape key to skip instead of the button. If you feel things are dragging, by all means, hit that fast forward button and you won’t miss anything.

Another great move is to divide the game’s seven discs into seven discreet chapters. This limits your disc-swapping to the start of a new chapter, while you can explore the entire mansion grounds without having to switch discs for certain rooms or unique events. There’s only one section where you must retreat to a previous disc, but this is for the longest “plot revelation” movie sequence in the game. This system works well and is very appreciated.

The mansion seems to have been built by the same contractor who put up Stauf’s digs in The 7th Guest. Oak, marble, and gold trim are judiciously used, along with some gaudy fabrics to give it an overwhelmingly Victorian, opulent feel. Carno’s mansion has a distinctly carnival atmosphere, both in decoration and music, meant to reflect his character. It also has the effect of making the environment seem more like a sideshow, and less in the realm of standard or Gothic horror, which helps Phantasmagoria stand out.

The most important thing that can be said about the graphics is that they match video and pre-rendered graphics reasonably well. No one’s going to confuse these outlandish rooms and scraggly digital trees as real sets, but lighting and scale for the actors is mostly appropriate and believable. This is some of the earliest work in this realm (The Phantom Menace wouldn’t touch all-digital sets for another six years) and it’s competent overall. Again, clearly fake sets, but you could make a good argument that they’re supposed to be stylistically unreal. The whole show is also leagues better technically than anything seen on a Sega CD. Compression is light, with an option for a smaller, scanlined window for slower computers.

The characters are a varied group, all performed well enough by a collection of TV and B-movie actors. Aside from Adrienne and her husband, there’s the antique store owner who has a lot of convenient information on Carno. There’s an even more convenient hundred-year-old man (Douglas Seale) who lived with Carno back in the day, and has a voice like the Emperor from Star Wars. He gives one of the best performances, and I found myself really trying to listen to what he had to say through his frail, frightened voice. Great setup for Carno’s evil and acted expertly.

Adrienne is played well by Morsell and makes for a suitable heroine. She’s got some bad line reads (they all do) but overall, she’s smart, capable, and the mystery writer profession is presumably a license to be inquisitive and clever. However, she blows off more supernatural sightings than Dana Scully; all to explain why she hasn’t immediately packed up and run from the house (“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she says, having just met several). She’s no ditzy scream queen though, and I suppose the nicest thing that can be said is that you don’t want her to die.

I can’t say the same for the other major characters. There’s a silly bag lady and her oafish son who feature into the plot, but elicit more eyebrow-raising than laughs. They’re supposed to be the comic relief, but they come off as simply silly and overly hammy. Your husband is a weird dude from the get, kind of like Nicholson in The Shining. I don’t buy this as a loving marriage, no matter how many smooches they trade at the start. It makes his transition less believable and way less tragic. By the end, he’s leaned hard into being a performative, cackling madman; like a child trying to get attention. I’ve got to blame Roberta Williams as director the most here – his “insanity” is pure cliché and totally unearned. Carno (Robert Miano), who you will see in the expected visions of the past, does a much better job at being actually threatening.

Much of Phantasmagoria’s reputation comes from its sex scenes. There are two, and Sierra played it mostly safe here. The first is of the suggestive humping variety, but no actual nudity is shown. This is meant to contrast the second – the game’s notorious rape scene where we see how Adrienne’s husband has gone from a gentle lover to a possessed jerkwad. It’s certainly uncomfortable as he paws at a disinterested Adrienne who finally gives in, only to see the demons take over and get rough. After a number of violent thrusts (through his boxers?), he scurries off and she’s left in tears. If he’s supposed to feel remorse or confusion, it doesn’t come across in his expressions. Overall, it feels like the scene failed to get whatever its point was across. Instead, it’s just one more stop on his path to total insanity and never mentioned again, making it come off as crass shock value.

Those deaths are even further shock value; probably more graphic and imaginative that you have heard or would expect. They are certainly above a typical mainstream Jason/Freddy picture of the time, with some brutally creative kills before Saw made that an entire genre. They’re pretty much the most excitement of the show, but not for the squeamish. Part of what makes them so gory, I think, is that they’re almost always brightly lit, while film usually puts such results in shadow. This is offset by keeping them to quick movie sequences. You can never click on a corpse and view a close-up still, like a typical adventure item, or allow the gory scene to be up on your screen for more than a second. A password-locked censorship option exists, but the game’s themes hardly make this a game for the kids anyway.

I was originally disappointed with the speed at which I was blazing through the discs. Indeed, the crucial plot elements of a chapter will only take about thirty minutes per disc to drive through. However, this is still a Sierra adventure and exploration is rewarded. Instead of points, you’ll usually find extra backstory, or visions and corpses tucked in out-of-the-way areas. They help to color the motives and emotional state of Adrienne, if you assume these are all scenes you’re “meant” to have seen by the end. In most cases, it will be quite obvious when something in a room has changed, or when a new discovery is available, so it’s worth popping your head in every door as you pass by. As said, having the whole mansion grounds copied on each disc makes this easy to do.

This is one of Sierra’s most straightforward adventures, almost surely designed for new audiences. You’ll never need to pick an action verb; just click what makes the cursor turn red. You can only hold eight items at a time and their sole use is usually obvious (like a key on a door). Otherwise, you can pull the item from inventory and mouse over everything until the cursor turns red. If you get particularly stuck, there’s an in-game hint system. Clicking the skull on your interface bar gives a direct clue (i.e. “Someone waits inside the house”) without apparent penalty.

Unlike Sierra’s previous quests, this game is also completely linear. You won’t “miss” an item you’ll need in a later disc, you can update your save at any point, and you cannot die. The exception is the last chapter where you can frequently die, but this is all contained to the last disc with no need to swap back to a previous one. When you die in these sections, you can also restart from the beginning of the final scene, or review the previous choices you made to try a new sequence of actions. No need to ever juggle saves.

This game, according to Sierra’s own marketing, cost four million dollars to make. Does this show in the final product? Did all that money translate in some meaningful way to the player? I was impressed with the graphics and the skillful marriage between a pre-rendered background and a full-video actor. 7th Guest toyed with the idea, but to sustain it through an entire game – and sustain it believably – is no small accomplishment. I was legitimately surprised, I’ll even bump that up to “shocked,” at the level of gore and graphic violence they got away with for the time. Expect a lot of molded dummy heads filled with butcher shop offal. But like the tame sex scenes, it feels like Sierra was desperate for controversy without actually doing anything that could get them in trouble.

But I was incredibly disappointed with the familiar plot, and lack of real story innovation outside of the macabre carnival kills. The game does a fair job of pacing out its story and holding its cards, but there’s also a lot of building up to nothing. The haunted house/possessed lover line been done before, and better. It also makes little use of the interactive medium to bring the horror to a personal level or have you make decisions. Instead, you simply guide the protagonist around and observe the results. It’s an impressive technical achievement, and a decent try at an “interactive movie,” but your avatar on the screen is definitely more scared than you will ever be.

 

The Good

Impressive work with video and digital backgrounds. Certainly has no qualms about pushing boundaries and being an “adult” game.

 

The Bad

Story is not quite as impressive or mature. Certainly a lot of violence and a lot of backstory, but not a lot of originality, and not even a campy level of horror.