Take the killer games Alone in the Dark and The 7th Guest, add a bit of Kubrick's The Shining, throw in live actors and a third person perspective and you have all the ingredients of the new Sierra CD-ROM title Phantasmagoria .
The plot of Phantasmagoria doesn't break any new groundΓÇöan attractive young couple buy a spooky old house, discover a bunch of creepy goings-on, and then the husband goes wacko and tries to deep six his wife. Along the way there are objects to collect and a couple of gruesome deaths to experience, including the family cat covered in blood and a neat graphic of the heroine with her head split open. But apart from that, the game is pretty disappointing. The puzzles which need to be solved aren't very puzzling, and while the online hint system makes the game more user-friendly, it reduces the difficulty factor to the point where you can pretty much walk through the game. Anyone who beat MystΓÇöhell, anyone who played MystΓÇöshould be able to cruise through Phantasmagoria in a night or two. If the title can maintain your interest for that long.
Even if the plot is a simple retread from recent horror titles, Phantasmagoria is a step forward in live-action fantasy gaming purely from a technical standpoint. The combination of live actors with "sets" created with SGI hardware hasnΓÇÖt really been successfully accomplished to date. That said, the actions bums out because the main character is forced to return to an unnaturally neutral position between each scenario, and this makes the already leisurely paced narrative grind to a halt. The cast's overall performance is on par with the interactive movie standardΓÇöand that's not a compliment. Disregard the minimum hardware requirements, playing Phantasmagoria on anything less than a Pentium with a quad-speed CD-ROM drive only makes things even sloooower.
If youΓÇÖre itching for a horror fix, take a trip to your local video store and rent The Shining or Halloween. At least the carnage is delivered fast enough to make you jolt in your seat.
