Sierra has been hard at work on Phantasmagoria for almost a year past its original release date now. It's hard to begrudge them this time. After all, we're talking about the most ambitious computer game ever produced. Of course, the technology will be obsolete any minute now, but let's try to live in the present, shall we? The bandages have finally been cut away, and at long last the world
can see what all that surgery led to.
Sad to say, the prognosis is not good. But how could that be? We've all seen the screen shots and heard about the million-dollar studio built just for this game. What could go wrong? Well, I hate to remind Roberta Williams and all the other designers out there of this simple fact, but great graphics do NOT guarantee a great game. Beautiful setting, sure. Good-looking video, for the most part. Some good sound and a really impressive soundtrack. But a game? No, not much of one.
Just looking at things from a thoroughly impartial time scale, I completed the entire adventure in ten hours, with a bare minimum of help from the on-line "hintkeeper". We're talking about a game that comes on seven CD-ROMs, gang. An unprecedented amount of storage space for ten measly hours? That's a determined weekend at best. I have friends who are still trying to figure out Myst. To keep the player from finishing things too quickly, the game structure changes on disc 7. Suddenly you're caught up in a chase with a limited amount of time to make the right decision or you DIE. It's the only time in the whole game that your character can expire. This portion of the game plays like a live-action version of Dragon's Lair. The save function is disabled so you have to do everything in order without screwing up, or you start over. This little maneuver was also used by a game called Maabus a couple of months back. To put it mildly, it doesn't make things any more fun.
Then there's the matter of Phantasmagoria's main selling point. It's supposed to scare the bejeebers out of you, that's the whole point. That's not very likely unless you're already overtired and strung out on too much coffee. One of the quotes on the box declares the game to be "in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Hitchcock and Stephen King." (from PC Gamer, being the ever-impartial souls that they are.) Ignoring the fact that each of these artists has his own quite unique style, they do have in common a powerful sense of timing and atmosphere. That's what makes stories like The Tell-Tale Heart so damn creepy. How can you manage effective timing in a game like this, where the story is subject to the whims of the player?
So if the goal of effective terror is already somewhat undermined by the whole medium of an adventure game, wouldn't it be a good idea to hire effective talent to make the best show possible? No, the actors don't have to be celebrities, but you could at least get someone with, you know, talent. The cast of Phantasmagoria is not awful, but they can't manage to work against the disadvantage that the format has already thrown them.
The best example of this is our heroine, Adrienne Delaney, played by Victoria Morsell. Adrienne is wandering around her spooky house, frequently encountering evidence of the supernatural. On her first day in the place she finds an old nursery, complete with a cloud of spooky stuff hovering over the crib. She runs her hand through it and finds it to be cold and clammy. You get about five seconds of the kind of reaction you might expect from someone pondering an unidentified substance in the fridge. Then she goes about her perky business in the rest of the house. Personally, I think finding a bad vibe cloud like that would make me seriously consider moving the heck out of the house. But after finding the cloud, a cellar making sobbing noises and an electrically charged torture machine, Adrienne doesn't even talk things over with her husband, Don.
It's very surprising to me that Roberta Williams, who has been so adamant about making women the protagonists in her recent games, would allow Adrienne to be such a ... well, there's no nice word for it. She's a bimbo, okay? At least she comes across as one. There are only so many things to interact with in a given room, and almost every mirror in the house is a hot spot. Now, by day five, creepy things do start to appear in those mirrors, but every time you click on them before this, Adrienne checks her hair and her lipstick and adjusts her jeans. It's really amusing how much attention she gives to her appearance when you consider that she wears the same ensemble every day: an ugly cream orange pullover with black jeans. (Halloween colors, get it?)
Also, Adrienne does not supply the internal monologue you usually get in an adventure game character. You rarely hear her saying or thinking things like "I can't do that," or "That's a silly idea." Since I am often annoyed by these error messages, I probably shouldn't complain too loudly about this, but this lack of introspection combined with Adrienne's Barbie-doll looks and the zombie-like stance she takes between player commands add up to a strong feeling that there's just nobody home.
Husband Don (played by David Homb) starts out as a pretty nice guy, but gets possessed by an unspeakably evil thingy and over the course of a week turns into a homicidal maniac, just like the house's last owner, Carno the magician. Some of the best sequences in the game are the flashbacks featuring Robert Miano as Carno, who conveys both suave dignity and ickiness. On the other hand, as Don gets worse and worse, so does his acting, until his psycho scenes are just plain goofy. The supporting cast isn't much better, usually falling into cliche melodrama: the sleazy, cigar-smoking real-estate agent, the wacky unpredictable clairvoyant and her big dumb son who just wants an animal to hug and pet and call George. Overall, the acting level is more on a level with a soap opera than a Hitchcock film.
The director of Phantasmagoria, Peter Maris, has actually helmed quite a few Hollywood films. Since I haven't seen any of them, I can't make any comparisons with the game, but the word that came to mind while playing was "overkill." There were so many camera angle shifts that I found myself disoriented more than once. There is a part of the game where Victoria has to follow the clairvoyant's mentally challenged son to an important plot development. Before I could start out, he had disappeared off the screen, and would not reappear until I stumbled across him at the final destination, which took a while, given all the angle shifting that was going on. Real helpful there, Lenny. ("Dah, chee, tanks George." Okay, he never says that, but it would have been great.)
Just as there are aspects of adventure games that undermine a movie-like structure, there are also cinematic cliches that under NO circumstances should be used in this sort of game. Near the game's end, you've finally managed to talk with the one man alive who knew Carno, and who has some important information on how to get the evil beastie to go away. He tells you the items you will need to work the spell to win the game. Then he says "And here's what you do..." and the scene FADES OUT! Hello, he was talking to me, after all, the guy...um, I mean gal, who has to actually do this stuff, don't you think it would be helpful if I could hear the plan?!?
Phantasmagoria is not the worst game I've ever played, but it's almost inconceivable to me that Sierra could have put as much time and money into it as they did without someone along the line figuring out that something was fundamentally wrong with it. Or maybe they knew, and decided nobody would care. News flash, folks: gamers don't like being taken for a ride like that. Lots of folks bought this game when it was first released, but when potential customers hear the reactions of those poor saps a week later, the cash flow is going to cut off pretty quick. And how much of an audience do you think there will be for the sequel that Sierra is already pushing?
