I'm a 20-year old with no nostalgia goggles, but lots of love for both retro gaming and quality point'n'clicks. I'm at the early Chapter 2 of Phantasmagoria and the gameplay is mostly a terrible bore. Its reputation often seems to stem more from the boundary-pushing graphics and "mature" content rather than any actual game-related merits, so I'll ask out right - does it get much better? The premise is the most basic haunted house story you can get, but it is somewhat fun to explore all of its nooks and crannies. Or it would be if not the game's selling point - FMV sequences. Phantasmagoria makes sure to give player time to behold the compressed pixelated mess of our heroine looking into a mirror or washing her hands for what can be 15 seconds. Great fun.

Does it pick up and redeem itself with plot/puzzles/atmosphere/all of the above or is it all pain, no gain afffair?

if you're still at early chapter 2 you can expect a minimal curve of improvement overall, but not much, give it to the beginning of chapter 4 and if you're still not into it, give it up

it's certainly just an average game, and the gameplay elements are definitely easy throughout, but it's even EASIER in the beginning because you're just getting going

you get a bit of the history of the house which is interesting, seeing the different ways different people die

and if you save the game often and try to die and see how you can die, that is fun

if you want a good FMV game from this period, there are many other betters, but this one is easy and worth playing once if it interests you

Interesting. I loved the first Phantasmagoria game. It's one of the games I replay pretty frequently (once a year, maybe).

The graphics were really *never* boundary pushing, at all...;) I bought the game when it initially shipped, so long ago my memories have cobwebs on top of cobwebs, and I recall being severely disappointed by the graphics of the game *then.* You can apply a couple of patches to remove the scanlines from the animation clips (DOS version), but that only marginally improves things--still, I'd advise you do that. (There is a thread in this forum with links for it.) I keep P1 around as a collector's item, but each time I fire it up I cringe at the horribly overdone melodrama...;) The two principal people in the game have horrible chemistry together on top of that--they simply aren't even believable together. If I had to sum it up, the game has no elegance, no finesse--it's just crude and rude--everything is just "too much" and the pace of the game is dreadfully slow because of it. FMV, imo, has yet to reach its peak--the potential today is simply awesome--but few developers are trying to use it; opting for polygon-driven 3d, instead. I hope that will change as the tech is ubiquitous for it today!

What I think sunk the game when it was released (and a lot of people liked it fine--I'm just a bit more of a critic, I suppose) was the computer-game tech level of the time--it was still a time of DOS, Win3.1, when 640x480 was considered "high" resolution and x86-driven animation clips were 8/16-bit and often the size of postage stamps...;) Also, I think the music was pretty bad--way, way overdone and heavy-handed. It promised one atmosphere but the game delivered another--oil and water. My advice is to stick with it as long as you can take it but not to feel bad if you get bored and decide to move on to something else...;)

Thanks for all the answers, nice to see not everyone praises this game up to high heavens as some kind of an adventure gaming classic. I finished it after all back in December and my opinion stays the same - boring, cliche gane devoid of any creativity.

Pssh, I bet you think The Ring and Paranormal Activity are actually good too.

Easy there! Don't knock Paranormal Activity... my name is in the Special Thanks (with about two hundred other people) :D Everyone is going to have a different experience, naturally. Especially if you didn't really play the game when it originally came out. These days games have far more to them - in terms of how much story and graphics they can cram into a game.

For me, yes, Phantasmagoria is "cliche" - it's got this whole haunted house thing going for it, the husband goes crazy, and what not... but for a game, back then? To have the amount of violence that it had? And though the story is "cliche" - or perhaps "typical" - again, I thought the game was executed beautifully. There is a memory that will last forever in my head where me and my (then, soon to be wife), my best friend and his wife were all sitting in front of the computer playing - and we walk in the room, and the empty crib suddenly rocks and a baby's heard crying - we ALL freaked out.

Haven't watched any of them, my horror faves are Argento, Fulci and the like, so a missed troll.

A better game using the same tech and made around the same time is "Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within." FMVs (full-motion videos, the term back then for cut-scenes with live actors) are still quite pixellated, but the game is better made, better written, and more challenging overall.

FMV games were frowned upon even in those days because video playback on the PC was still in its infancy. When DVD video came out in 1997, there were hopes that FMV games would look a lot better. But the FMV genre died swiftly and completely before DVD became mainstream. Still, two games that used DVD-quality videos someone got made: Wing Commander 5, and Tex Murphy: Overseer. The GOG versions of both of these games work with modern PCs. But those early DVD videos are still noticeably ugly compared to today's high definition video.