Phantasmagoria

darth-azrael (66)in #retrogaming • 6 years ago (edited)

http://www.megalextoria.com/wordpress/index.php/2018/08/17/phantasmagoria/

While a lot of early "multimedia" games were nothing but crappy FMV products with little to know play value or point-and-click adventures with nonsensical puzzles and questionable plot, there were some pretty good ones too. Phantasmagoria is one of those.

Phantasmagoria is in fact a point-and-click adventure but it was designed by Roberta Williams so you know it is going to be something better than average. It cost over $4.5 million to make which for 1995 was massive. This game was also far larger than similar games of the time and spanned 7 CDs.

Fortunately, it all paid off for Sierra. Phantasmagoria was a huge hit and Sierra sold $12 million worth of games in the first weekend. This type of point-and-click adventure/interactive movie was reaching the peak of its popularity around this time and Phantasmagoria was one of the best in the genre.

The plot of Phantasmagoria involves a mystery novelist and her husband purchasing a mansion once owned by a famous musician whose five wives all died under mysterious circumstances. Adrienne (the novelist) explores the mansion looking for inspiration for her next novel. Before you know it, a demon is accidentally released and bad things start to happen...

If you like point-and-click adventures of this type, then Phantasmagoria is a great one to try. However, since it has not been re-released to the best of my knowledge, you will have to struggle through trying to make it work on modern hardware or play on a vintage PC or Mac. A Sega Saturn version was also released but unfortunately it was only available for the Japanese market.