Phantasmagoria - Sierra On-Line PC CD-ROM - œ49.99 Reviewed by Neil Shipman Phantasmagoria is the first foray into the horror genre for author and designer Roberta Williams who is already justly acclaimed for numerous other Sierra adventures including the King's Quest series. The first few minutes of this interactive movie introduce you to two of the main characters and set the scene for the horrors which will unfold over the course of the next two weeks of their lives. Don is a freelance magazine photographer and his wife, Adrienne, whose actions you direct, is a novelist. At the start you see Don snapping a few landscape pictures, then the camera focuses in on a large, Gothic style mansion situated on an island. Suddenly, to the insistent beat of demonic chanting together with screams and the sound of rattling chains, you're into a confused world of surreal images. Arms reach up through the ground, strange faces float past and the props of a stage magician appear in front of you. Rushing headlong through this corridor of the imagination you end up looking at a young woman struggling to escape from a chair into which she has been shackled. Thankfully, before the swinging blade above her head can decapitate her, she wakes up from this nightmare. A portent of things to come? Pray it's only a nightmare (it says on the box). Adrienne's first night in the house on the Karnovasch estate which she and Don have just bought would be enough to scare most people witless. At the very least you would expect such an experience to put her off exploring the mansion the next morning. But such naive and foolhardy behaviour is the stuff of horror books, movies and now interactive graphic adventures. So, after Don goes off to look at converting one of the old bathrooms into a dark room for his photography you, as Adrienne, begin to take a good look around the house which you now own. The game is split into seven chapters and you can determine your progress through each one by accessing the control panel at the bottom of the screen. I don't propose to comment in detail on the screen layout or all the various game options because David Froude covered these fully in his review in issue 44 of SynTax. At the beginning of chapter one, whilst waiting for you to take control, Adrienne sits at the kitchen table, looking around and fidgeting. This initial voluntary movement on her part adds considerably to the realism of the adventure but, unfortunately, it doesn't continue throughout the game. When she finishes walking somewhere or using a particular item, Adrienne takes up the position of a gymnast about to start on her floor exercises at the Olympics, standing tall with her feet together and her arms at her sides. This has presumably been done for technical reasons to enable video footage of the actress responding to your directions to be meshed in with real backgrounds, 20 movie sets and computer graphics. However, it does look rather artificial and therefore makes it harder for you to become completely engrossed in the adventure. The house originally belonged to Zoltan Karnovasch. Carno, as he was known, was more than just a stage magician and, as you make progress through the game, you learn that he had delved into the black arts, conjuring up a demon which led him to murder all five of his wives. Interwoven into this storyline is the sub-plot of the relationship between Carno's last wife, Marie, and his props man, Gaston, who between them try to despatch the magician to the next world. As Adrienne explores the house with its three storeys plus tower rooms, cellar and crypt, the feeling that evil permeates the place gradually grows upon you. Lying on one of the beds is particularly horrifying and would give anyone other than Adrienne good reason to pack their bags and get away before something terrible happens! In looking around the Karnovasch estate I did find that changes in viewpoint were initially disorientating although I soon became familiar with these. It would probably have helped if I'd drawn a map but, while I usually do that with text adventures, it's somehow never seemed very appropriate with most graphic ones. The end of the first chapter is one of the turning points in the story when Adrienne unwittingly releases the demonic presence from the box in which it has been safely contained for the last hundred years. (You just knew she'd go and do something like that, didn't you?) Chapter two sees Don displaying bouts of irrational anger as the evil takes control of him. Adrienne, on a trip to the local small township, learns more about the Karnovasch estate, and the rumour that it is haunted does nothing to quell her mounting sense of unease. Adrienne's interaction with other people in the story is quite convincing although there is nothing that you can do to direct the course of her conversations. Simply clicking on a character until they have run out of new things to say and start repeating themselves does not really help to involve the player in the adventure. It would have been far better to be able to select appropriate questions or responses from a list of, say, three or four options. In this way you would feel that you have more control over the eventual outcome. On the whole, the actors do a good job in conveying the feelings and emotions of the characters they are portraying. In particular, you cannot fail to be drawn in by Adrienne's increasingly scared and uncertain nature as she finds out more about Carno's past, and Don's gradual descent into insanity as the evil takes hold of him is really quite disturbing. There are a number of occasions when you'll be frightened or, at least, startled by some of the events in Phantasmagoria. Typical horror movie techniques like building up the tension with menacing music, combined with clever camera angles viewing the scene from a different perspective, have you on the edge of your seat knowing that something scary is about to occur - but however well prepared you might be, you still jump when it happens! At the start of each chapter, short video introductions move the story along and help to keep the adventure well paced. Here again, the director has used cinematic techniques like travelling and panning. One particular video where the camera travels along a river then swoops up and over the bank to focus in on Don and Adrienne picnicking is particularly effective. The atmospheric music enhances the feeling that you are observing them through someone or something else's eyes and the sense of a lurking evil presence is intensified. The detail of the locations in the house and the nearby town of Nipawomsett is most impressive, although there are some obviously computer-generated pictures, like the logs which are stacked by the side door and are far too regular to be real. Crackling flames, reflections in mirrors, the sound of a car pulling up outside and of birds singing all help to add believability to the adventure. You will also notice day to day changes like the level of alcohol in a bottle of absinthe going down as Don imbibes the bittering essence of wormwood; increasingly alarming warnings contained in the garbled text on Adrienne's computer; and more and more worrying messages delivered by the tarot card reader automaton in the main hall. However, as David Froude remarked in his review, with such fine attention to detail throughout the whole adventure it seems odd that all the characters wear the same clothes day after day. This is particularly noticeable with Adrienne who remains clad in the same orange sweatshirt, black jeans and white trainers to the bitter end. And just how, I wonder, does she manage to carry a poker, hammer, newspaper, bottle of drain cleaner, etc without it showing? If you play adventures because you enjoy solving problems then Phantasmagoria is not for you. Progress through the story is very linear and the puzzles are relatively simple and few and far between. For example, what do you do with a lens piece to a telescope? Simply fit it to the instrument itself in the very next location. Hardly gives you the feeling of, "Wow! I cracked that one. Brilliant!" does it? Some of the objects Adrienne finds enable her to see past events with which they have been associated. This way of incorporating flashbacks into the adventure works well and gives the player a fuller understanding of how Carno and his wives met their deaths. Phantasmagoria has an 18 rating which it probably deserves, partly for a controversial rape scene at the start of chapter four and partly for the particularly gruesome ways in which people are killed. From chapter five onwards the pace of the story seems to quicken as Adrienne uncovers more of the mysteries surrounding Carno and his practice of the black arts. In the final chapter, her headlong rush from death at the hands of a crazed Don and the evil that possesses him is cleverly designed. It takes place in real time and there are a number of different puzzles to be solved along the way in the space of a few short minutes. If you fail to escape, you are treated to a graphic view of Adrienne's death on the Throne of Terror. You then have the option of reviewing the movie up to the point just before you went wrong so that you can have another shot at it. This is a much better way than having to restore the game from a previously saved position. Conclusion: Phantasmagoria is not a game for the more squeamish amongst you. Neither is it likely to give inveterate problem-solvers much enjoyment. There is far too much time spent watching a movie take place in front of you with just the occasional click with the mouse button necessary to keep the story on track. Consequently, you end up feeling more like a passive voyeur rather than an active participant. The high quality graphics, good acting, extremely atmospheric music and satanic, Latin chanting contribute to the adventure exuding a feeling of evil. Play it with the volume up and the lights off and you'll be sure to have a few scary movements! After having played half the adventure I didn't feel I was enjoying it enough to carry on. However, by the time I reached the end I was glad I'd persevered because I got caught up in the story and desperately wanted to reach the denouement. I wouldn't pay the full price for it but I was happy with what I got for œ19.99 on special offer. Phantasmagoria has become the biggest selling game in Sierra's history and is still high up in the charts. I shall certainly look at Phantasmagoria II but, once again, not until I can pick it up relatively cheaply. Finally, I played Phantasmagoria on a 486 DX2/66 with 8Mb RAM and twin speed CD-ROM, a slightly higher specification system than the minimum requirements specified on the box. The only minor problem that I noticed was the tendency for the graphics to be slightly jerky but this was probably the fault of my rather slow graphics card. Minimum System Requirements: 486/25 MHz processor 8 MB RAM 5 MB available hard disk space (recommended) 640 x 480 Super VGA monitor and graphics card with 256 colours 2-speed CD-ROM drive Windows compatible sound card with DAC Windows compatible mouse and mouse driver MS-DOS 5.0 or higher Windows 3.1 or higher ------------------- In Frobs We Trust ! ------------------- - o -