It’s an admirable attempt, but like practically every FMV-based game, it falls victim to two things: terrible production values and incredibly sparse gameplay. If King’s Quest IV dared to make gamers cry, Phantasmagoria dared to give gamers nightmares. Phantasmagoria was to be something different, a truly adult horror story.
It didn’t help that, by most accounts, the game was pretty bad.īy the mid ‘80s, Roberta Williams was still mostly known for her fairy tale style King’s Quest, with a few dalliances in murder mysteries with the Laura Bow games. History eventually confirmed that FMV-based games were an evolutionary dead end, however, marking Phantasmagoria as a call-to-arms for a war that never happened. It’s certainly revolutionary in combining full motion video of live actors with the framework of an adventure game. Still, while Mystery House and King’s Quest remain important landmarks – the former for introducing graphics to text adventures, the latter for implementing full visuals and character controls – Phantasmagoria doesn’t command nearly the same respect.
Would it be too harsh to criticize Roberta Williams? She was undoubtedly a pioneer of the adventure gaming scene, but years and years of genre evolution have revealed that maybe she wasn’t the best game designer.
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