Games of the Abstract: Phantasmagoria (1995)

 

Developer: Sierra Entertainment

Publisher: Sierra Entertainment

One Player

ScummVM / Windows / MS-DOS / Sega Saturn

 

This story starts not with a couple in 1995 - a female author named Adrienne Delaney (Victoria Morsell) and her photographer husband Don Gordon (David Homb) buying the manor of a famous 19th-century magician, Zoltan "Carno" Carnovasch (Robert Miano) off the coast of a small New England island - but in 1979, when a husband and wife team named Ken and Roberta Williams founded a small company that would later become known as Sierra Entertainment. Sierra, in the eighties, developed their legacy with the Williams involved in creating the King's Quest franchise alongside release other point-n-click adventure games such as the Leisure Suit Larry and Police Quest franchises. Phantasmagoria is, however, entirely the production of Roberta Williams, her last major game up until 2022, when she left the industry in the late nineties, embarking in 2022 a virtual reality reimagining of Colossal Cave Adventure, a legendary 1976-77 text adventure game with a profound influence on gaming into the eighties onwards¹. Phantasmagoria in hindsight, as a huge success at the time, is a product of its era, a cheesy Full Motion Video horror game which took seven discs for a CD-PC release to house, eight for the Japanese only Sega Saturn version², which stretched its budget but also exhibits all its peculiar quirks stumbling along.

Adrienne and Don have acquired the manor of Carnovasch, which is insanely elaborate as your main location, so much so I wonder how, even for a cursed building that could not be sold, it was available in their price range or with the issue of how much upkeep would be required for an author (even a successful one) and a photographer to pay. There is a fortune teller machine and an automated piano in the foyer, even such a thing as a foyer alongside numerous bedrooms and esoteric locations. There is also enough signs early on, before Adrian accidentally finds a secret alter room and unleashes an evil that possesses Don, warns that they should have left the place and complained it was not suitable as a living location. The abrupt hallucinations of ghosts grabbing her on the bed, or the ectoplasmic cloud over the cot in an abandoned baby's room should have been warning enough, but we would have had a game that lasted one disc of seven. Even her then-modern laptop has warning messages on it telling her to leave. This is still a point n click game too, which does streamline the chance of too many tangents and puzzles to figure out compared to others from this period. Its biggest aesthetic touch is that this is FMV, in which for the production, Sierra built their own film studio in Oakhurst, California, the same location as Sierra's headquarters, costing $1.5 million to build³.

Roberta Williams wanted to make a horror game, only waiting for the arrival for CD technology to finally pull her ideal off⁴, taking inspiration from the likes of Stephen King for this production ⁵. They had even hired Peter Maris, an more obscure film maker but someone who did make Delirium (1979), one of the obscurer films threatened with the British Video Nasty scare of censoring films in the VHS era in the early eighties. Prominently, this was a full production which hired outside help from the film making industry, involving filming our actors, both the leads, side actors, and even a few animals, including a cat the lead owns whose name "Spaz" has not aged well in the slightest, and splicing them into a fully rendered 3D world of digital architecture and landscape. At the time, all of this was a risk, Roberta Williams needing to make this a success as filming for the game took nearly four months, with actors pulling six-day weeks in twelve-hour shifts, nearly two years to produce, and with the budget having gone from its originally planned $800,000 to $4.5 million⁶. Even the seven discs this needed for the PC release was not even the goal, merely a result when originally, less discs were needed such as five⁷.

It has dated, with the seams between the actors clearly there, but it also has a unreality which was compelling for me, the world of its setting interesting once the manor begins to slowly be opened up. Secret passages are found, you come to love the trusty crowbar, and the esoteric rooms have back-story as you go through of this tale, the dated aesthetics not undercutting the tone for me in the slightest. It did come with a price, as alongside the fact the story worked around this, including a lack of building Adrienne and Don's relationship Roberta Williams regretted not having⁷, the seven discs are because one of each seven chapters take one each. The Saturn release is a curiosity but just for why the eight disc, following how, interestingly but a loss for the West, Japan got a lot of Western computer point n click and FMV games for the console, such as the Dark Seed series, which involved art by H.R. Gigar, or an obscurity like DeathMask, a re-titling of a 1996 tech-noir FMV game called Angel Devoid: Face of the Enemy⁸. This being the era of Myst (1993), developer Cyan's runaway success, ported onto anything from the Atari Jaguar's CD add-on to the Saturn in the United States, Britain and Japan at least, we had a push for FMV or more elaborate visual content even if, truthfully, the technology was struggling as much as innovating.

This is not a dismissal of the modern era of FMV games, which are their own type of game worthy of their own time, but they include independent productions which cannot have the budgets these older games had, or named actors involved, tragically the push for this bizarre period of FMV games with such budgets fascinating to return to. Ironically a lot of these productions were still struggling, and it cannot denied, whilst a game which is meant to evoke even in its title a more sombre haunted house tone, this particular one was struggling with its goal too. The title "phantasmagoria" is a form of horror theatre that (among other techniques) used one or more magic lanterns to project frightening images, suggesting a more serious tone in the choice, but this does play like a straight to video horror film from the era, with a cheesy end credit theme from an eighties movie, and some of the gruesome scenes, particularly a woman being fed against her will organs and meat, which Herschell Gordon Lewis, the innovator of the splatter genre and an exploitation directing legend, would have had in one of his films.

You will see the technical aspirations, their ambition and struggles, in how, whilst you will use the skip button to get going past repeated animations, each move to a new spot in the same room has a full walk animation from actress Victoria Morsell, as with going through doors. Whilst discretely cutting outside, you even can have Adrienne use the bathroom, get a drink of water, sit down and brush her hair among other actions not related to the puzzles, even with one I approve of where she has the ability to pet a dog in town, a location consisting of only a couple of places. Cut scenes of note cannot be skipped, and the story follows, like The Shining, Don becoming a demonic figure who is a sadist for the sake of it. It is a part of looking at this for a greater meaning I will say that, as a project from Roberta Williams where she created and co-wrote it, including a notorious scene I will get onto later, that it becomes about a woman who finds the person she should trust, her husband, becoming dangerous. Phantasmagoria sadly stumbles through tones, but the concepts of toxic masculinity, including possessiveness and misogyny, even a touch of the tale of Bluebeard, are here, all sticking out as fascinating as a pioneering horror tale in FMV which is, whilst deeply flawed, a woman's tale about the demonic nature of men.

There is still within this the traditional point and click template, but even in mind older games still took countless floppy discs in the day, I still say for myself the limitations of the FMV format were seen. Even if a Guybrush Threepwood would not be able to comb his hair, I say the issue can be summed up with this project's limited just in how, for Chapter 2, the entire puzzle for the disc is to acquire drain cleaner, making sure you acquired the dollar bill from the Carnavaste Estate, and bring it back to Dom, all there is to do. Whilst you are able to talk to the town locales for flavour back-story, such as a slime ball real estate agent who sold Adrienne the house, the second disc is this, to just buy drain cleaner, as the main plot thrust. This presents the flaw, whilst this older style of game is compelling for me, some with cult actors and huge budgets, that they created a conflict between the practicalities of the resources in stepping into full motion live action performances.

The game itself is in a genre I also have a cold reaction to, entirely because point n click is a genre that I have struggled, to the point of the lure of the walkthrough, for puzzles which are not based on practical logic and encouraging wasting hours lost on a clue or a spot you missed. This is a problem I struggle with, wishing to appreciate all gaming genres including point n click adventures, and whilst Phantasmagoria thankfully ignores more esoteric puzzles of its brethren, instead the gaming flaws at play here is not signposting the trajectory you are supposed to go with, such as a nail you were supposed to spot in one shot. The use of the nail, [Spoiler Warning] to get a key jammed in a door, and using old faithful crowbar to get it [Spoiler Ends], was a puzzle I did not need the red skull in the left corner of the screen to get clues for, because it was a practical puzzle which has a logic, and literally would be something you would attempt to try if faced with a similar problem. I find with point n clicks too many options, some illogical ones you would not get even with a surreal landscape, and an obscure game like Garage: Bad Dream Adventure (1999), an experimental Japanese game which came from the boom in these games, far more rewarding in restriction your options, and even in its surreal nightmare world having more logical sense with keys and props only having some practical options.

This shows my terrible puzzle solving skills, yet at the same time, Phantasmagoria also does have a structure which undermines the plot. Tone is a huge issue for what is mostly a cheesy haunted house tale, even ending on that aforementioned rock ballad, but the structure of the game even undercuts itself. Case in point, the first overt realisation something has gone wrong, not just an omen, was Adrienne visualising a murder of a woman in the greenhouse with a trowel, only to find the bones from nearly a century before in a nearby flower pot. This is not tied into how Adrienne, who would be traumatised after these reveals, talks to the telephone operation technician returning to the house afterwards without any sense of this even being hidden by a mask of fake emotion. There is also the most notorious scene, which does mean a review that has wished to be playful does have a trigger warning now for this passage and for the game itself, even though Sierra included a password locked censorship option for its more adult content. It is a rape scene, and it is significant, from a female creator, the scene itself (whether you think of the acting quality throughout) is probably as best you could have done tackling this subject with compassion and care. In the scene, discretely done, you have rape as a horrifying act of power, made traumatising as, initially a couple who love each other and in an initially consensual act, it turns into the fear of the one Adrienne should feel safe with, her husband, being a threat who hurts her.

In its own space, it is one of the most carefully dealt with depictions of this, the creators and those involved to be praised for tackling it as thoughtfully as they did. Tragically, it is tonally alien from the rest of the game to the point it is heart breaking, where you are after introduced to a pair of goofy side characters, a mother and son living in the barn, and a game whose tone after is more playfully macabre than the severity of this notorious scene, one of many factors which led to Phantasmagoria being a very controversial game in this era, and banned in Australia⁹. It hurts more that nothing tonally is wrong with the scene, nothing is tasteless about the scene, except this moment should have not been in this game. The rest feels ridiculous in comparison. The side characters are two homeless people, the mother an older woman whose red knitted hat makes her look like a gnome, her son taken from the stereotype, back from John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1937) and Lennie, of the strong simpleton who is broadly portrayed here. When the game is actually gory, it is in the finale chapter where, structurally altering, you have to make snap choices, the tone including a full face ripping which feels further out of place too. It is one of the only gore scenes too in this game said to be notorious for these, paling in comparison to a production like Harvester (1996) from the time, like a nativity school play to that bizarre entity's many transgressions from a year later, which emphasises how the choices for even an interactive narrative tale are out of focus.

Phantasmagoria is now a game you can get cheaply in digital form, rather than that bulky seven disc set, and when it works, it is fun, even fun when you see the limitations and frustrations. It is a game I admire for the ambition, but as talked of, it is a mess, and in terms of a horror tale itself, it is also with so many frustrations. Its tonal problems are tragic, and it was clearly a game which wanted to be serious but is tonally and structurally at war with itself. It is considered a historical production, worthy of all the credit it deserves, but struggling within itself. It managed to be one of Sierra's best selling games at the time, nearly a year after release doubling its opening week sales numbers and topping more than 600,000 units sold⁶, which made the struggles in producing the game worthwhile. This was however as mentioned, until the 2022 Colossal Cave Adventure project, the last thing Roberta Williams worked on. Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh (1996), the follow up, would be its own separate narrative, like an anthology of FMV puzzle games without ever reaching the promise that suggests. Roberta Williams was not involved, the one line between both being Lorelei Shannon, a female writer of horror novels and computer games who went from penning the Phantasmagoria: The Official Sierra Insider's Guide (1995) for the first game to being the designer and writer of the second game's narrative. As someone coming to these older horror games aware they will have their limitations and potential flaws, I look to Phantasmagoria with less concern of its age, only that, with fair warning to the reader, it is a game whose war with its ambition and drama is to be found, where in a game which has a very transgressive, and ugly, sequence which is yet as carefully done with real emotionally power to it, it soon after contrasts it with "Look at my new britches!" as a credible line of dialogue from a comedic side character. As the review swelled like a monster from the depths just in all the references I had to include for context, let alone number of lines, this is all for a game which is all these flaws but clearly had something to even want to spend the time, as an amateur writer, to devote obsessing over the details, and this barely scratches the surface of this fascinating oddity.

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1) Ken And Roberta Williams Are Remaking Colossal Cave Adventure, written by Kat Bailey for IGN.com, published March 21st 2022, and updated March 29th 2022.

2) Phantasmagoria Tried to Be Like a Horror Movie, Didn’t Quite Succeed, written by Logan Westbrook for Escapist Magazine, published March 11th 2011

3) "Sierra roadshow missing star: 'Phantasmagoria' missing from software maker's unveiling of new products". The Fresno Bee. p. D1. Also found on Phantasmagoria Tim Buckley - dopcadental

4) Phantasmagoria: The Official Sierra Insider's Guide by Lorelei Shannon, taken from "An Interview with Roberta Williams" on page 5. Published in 1995 by Sierra On-line, Incorporated.

5) Sierra Stays In The Game With Variety Of New Titles, written by Steven L. Kent for the Seattle Times and published on July 9th 1995.

6) Horror Gaming Essentials: Phantasmagoria by Kevin Hoover, for Horror Obsessive, published on September 27th 2019.

7) Roberta Williams: Sierra On-Line, posted by Andy Bellatti for Adventure Classic Gaming, first posted on 25 October 1999. Last updated on 17 July 2010.

8) The packaging alone for the Sega Saturn release, whilst ridiculous in quantity, does at least make this game look like the most awesome Arrow Video boutique film set, befitting this fascinating video game.

9) Reservoir Dogs game banned in Australia, by Brendan Sinclair for Gamespot.com, published on June 28th 2006.