ScummVM is the nostalgia balm for all my old point and click adventure games, and now we even can play the FMV games. And why not to start with one of the more infamous FMV-games Sierra put out? Phantasmagoria, caused such an uproar at release due to the gore and rape-scene within it that religious groups asked for a boycott, which lead to the game being one of the best-selling games that year... or maybe overall for Sierra. Funny how that works. And I can kinda see it cause it's really grotesque, but it is quite clear this is an 18+ game, just look at the box art, beheaded woman with an M for mature plastered right there. On the other hand by todays standards it's really tame in comparison.
So basic story is that Adrienne Delany, writer, together with her husband photographer Don Gordon has bought a house that used to belong to the illusionist Zoltan Carnovach. While looking around Adrienne by accident released a demon from a locked box in a walled in chapel. The demon possesses her husband that becomes more violent and aggressive. Meanwhile Adrienne begin to notice unnatural phenomenas and having strange dreams. She begin to see things like ectoplasm in the nursery and visions through the different mirrors in the mansion. So during the course of the game you first piece together that Zoltan had been possessed by a demon and how it effects him as he kills his wives, one by one in very grotesque detail. The first gets a gardening shovel shoved into her mouth and then stuffed with dirt and thereafter her body is hidden in a pot. The second one get her neck snapped with a torture device, the third got stuffed with animal entrails until she suffocates, the fourth a drunkard gets her head shoved into a bottle of wine and the body gets stuffed in a wine casket. Gruesome.
Meanwhile Don is getting aggressive and starts by killing their cat, and in the last chapter while running around the mansion you can find the cadavers of several of the supporting characters as Don have been busy in preparation for killing Adrienne. You kill Don and then do a ritual at an underground study where you send the demon back into hell or wherever it came from. Adrienne escapes and a girl power song turns up during the credits. I never finished this as a kid, me and my best friend from school played from cd 1 to cd 6, but we stepped out after the ending scene when Don bash the head in of Mike the telephone guy.
So what do I think of it now? It's a slow game, to get the most out of it you gotta play the long game and go through a routine and click everything at every chapter. That way you can discover small changes to things like an absinth bottle that slowly gets more empty as time goes or a cigarette case that loses one of the cigarette between a chapter or the painting that's get more filled out until it shows the true face of the demon. And then of course the horrible murder scenes as shown in different mirrors at different chapters. Music enhances it as well so when you hear the Gregorian chanting you know it's about to get bloody. Acting is cheesy at times and really goes over the deep end at the last chapter. In the right mood it works all right, but it's maybe too slow for its best. Mostly the quietness. Other reviewers commented on it and I have to agree, since Adrienne very seldom inner monolog the player don't know what she thinks or get hints on what to do. Cause its hard to understand the logic that my hammer or crowbar isn't enough to break through the walled in chapel in chapter 1, but the secret letter opener is what you need. This of course is the puzzle that stopped my dad from continuing the game (which isn't a problem here since you can choose to start from any of the seven chapters). If you wanna know the solution its that a cat statue you picked up you can actually enlarge and find a button on the back. Some solution, that they only use for this puzzle which feels like a bit of waste. Of course other games used it much more often. They have an inbuilt hint system, but it's not always that good. For example in chapter 2 I though I had done everything and was looking for Don to give some drain cleaners, but I couldn't find him and all the hint system said was find Don to give him the drain cleaners. Turns out that I had to reenter the antique shop in order to get some more information and from there I could continue to find Don.
So it was a bit of a mess there. Past that no problem really, until the game crashed going into chapter 6 by missing some file for some reason so had to make a new save and start from chapter 6 directly. For a one time playthrough it can be fun if you like horror. It could have been a bit better though. For example Don goes crazy from chapter 1 to chapter 2 and constantly be aggressive from that point on. Part of me seem it a bit unrealistic, maybe he should have a longer more torn reaction to his behaviour as the demon take over his mind with the culmination in chapter 6 when he whacks Mike and then chapter 7 starts. Another problem is that in chapter 7 if you know what you do you can pick up necessary items before triggering the event that puts the game in "running from the crazy slasher"-mode, and it takes away a lot of the horror if you do. Really, in my playthrough only Mike and Don was killed and you hadn't found the bodies of the vagrants. Of course, it helps my squeamish heart as the games put it.
Inga kommentarer:
Skicka en kommentar