2021
Bad sign when people's selling point of a game is that you see, actually, this is the rare game without microtransactions. What benevolence! Semantic debate on whether the game's multiple paid DLC packs constitute microtransactions aside, this comes off to me as tacit admission that Vampire Survivors has the dirty vibe of the sort of hyperaddictive barely-game explicitly designed to extract money from its playerbase. And while it has enough sense to steer clear of all that stuff, do you not value your time?
I see some people deriding this as pure irony, a mockery of modern art. This is a profound misreading. This is not a work of nihilism, it is one of exuberant joy. When it says "Art's cool ;^)", it is saying that Art's cool ;^).
2001
Red Faction is a game that's been kicking around in my head for the twenty or so years it's been since I'd last played it. I've been meaning to go back to it for years, as my memories of the game were quite fond ones. What I have found in returning to this game, however, is that memories can be unreliable, even outright incorrect.
Aspects of this game unearthed memories buried deep within my brain, things that without my knowing I've been carrying with me for a couple decades: the enemy call outs and death screams; the incredibly stupid line at the beginning as the mining corporation thug attacks your comrade, "You threatenin' me? Yeah, well threaten this!"; a select few sequences here and there. But what I also came to realize is that this game that I looked back on so fondly? It's a total blur. I remember almost none of it. And for good reason: it kind of sucks.
For the purpose of not making this drag on too much (edit: about that... oops), when Red Faction is at its best, it's a pretty fun FPS. Shooting feels for the most part good, although I do think the spread could use to be tuned to be a bit less dramatic. There's a world in which this could be a game right in there in the same breath (or at least not far off) as the greats. So why is it, then, that I sort of hate this game?
Right as you start accruing an arsenal of decent weapons, Red Faction decides to flip a switch and turn into a stealth game. It takes all of your weapons but the silenced pistol from you, gives you a disguise, and tells not to get too close to anyone or they'll see through it. The game never communicates any of this information well enough to not feel fucking terrible and I found myself instead wishing I were playing No One Lives Forever or, shit, even one of the new Hitman games. Even if you set off alarms, and you will, you can't break out of your disguise and pick up new weapons; you have to hope you can make do with the magazine of bullets you were given. After some trial and error and strong use of quick saving and curse words you'll find your way through, but it never feels rewarding or that you've done something well. Oh and by the way? After that whole miserable sequence and more traditional shooting segments where you get your weapons back the game does it again, it fucking does it again, but this time in a more confusing area with deadlier enemies.
Even with those awful parts I wasn't overly down on the game, but then it turns into one of the least enjoyable FPSes I've ever played. For the last third or so of the game, nearly every single area you take battle in contains at least one enemy with an instagib rail gun that shoots through walls. It makes every encounter basically random: you will die dozens of times the instant you walk around a corner, well before any person could react. It feels like playing a multiplayer shooter in a lobby full of cheaters. It is horrendously fucking unfun. Except of course when you're using the gun yourself. It is awfully satisfying ripping a single cartoonishly powerful round through a line of clueless enemies from a couple rooms down the hall.
But it's not just the rail guns that made me ultimately hate the game: more generally speaking, the last stretch has a severe leap in difficulty that never feels properly challenging so much as it does cheap. Sometimes you'll open a door and be greeted by an unavoidable rocket an enemy has already sent your way. Sometimes enemies will be spawned behind you from dead-end corridors. There are stretches where there are more health items than you can use and then others where there are so few you end up riding the quick load button until you get by without taking a hit. I didn't happen to find healing before the (for the record, really, really bad) final boss fight, so I had to beat it without taking a single hit.
I should also make quick note of the game's defining feature: the so-called "Geo-Mod" technology, wherein explosions excavate the game's terrain. From a technology standpoint it's pretty neat, especially for 2001, but also: it barely exists. There's almost nowhere to use it in the single-player campaign and the places you can are at best superficial. Volition's method of stopping players from using the technology to perform sequence breaks appears to have been basically stopping the player from ever being able to use it at all. I think if they had instead taken the exact opposite approach and embraced the potential game-breaking nature of deformable terrain, the game would be profoundly more interesting. Instead, we're left with little more than a few walls in empty rooms you can make small dents in.
Before I get out of here, I've already rambled on too long, let me just briefly touch on the story. How fucking cool of a concept is taking part in a full-on violent revolution against the capitalist fucks who have been killing your fellow workers. It whips ass, right? Unfortunately no. I can't possibly imagine the concept for this game wasn't to at least some extent inspired by the real life labor history of miners such as that documented in the essential documentary Harlan County, USA, but rather than using any of that to enrich the plot or even attempt at making anything grounded in reality, Red Faction just kind of throws in some weird old cyborg guy who floats around evilly and has a forcefield. And a weird lady who also floats around evilly and has a forcefield. There's a virus or some shit too? I don't fucking know. It's written badly and acted stiffly and I didn't care about a goddamn thing that was happening. Wasted potential.
I still don't have the answer for how much of this game I actually ever played in the first place. It very well could have been that I cheated my way through the whole thing. Was my fond memory of this game based on a reality where I barely even played it? I don't know. Regardless, now that memory is replaced with a new one, and it goes a little something like this: Red Faction—a game I thought I liked.
Aspects of this game unearthed memories buried deep within my brain, things that without my knowing I've been carrying with me for a couple decades: the enemy call outs and death screams; the incredibly stupid line at the beginning as the mining corporation thug attacks your comrade, "You threatenin' me? Yeah, well threaten this!"; a select few sequences here and there. But what I also came to realize is that this game that I looked back on so fondly? It's a total blur. I remember almost none of it. And for good reason: it kind of sucks.
For the purpose of not making this drag on too much (edit: about that... oops), when Red Faction is at its best, it's a pretty fun FPS. Shooting feels for the most part good, although I do think the spread could use to be tuned to be a bit less dramatic. There's a world in which this could be a game right in there in the same breath (or at least not far off) as the greats. So why is it, then, that I sort of hate this game?
Right as you start accruing an arsenal of decent weapons, Red Faction decides to flip a switch and turn into a stealth game. It takes all of your weapons but the silenced pistol from you, gives you a disguise, and tells not to get too close to anyone or they'll see through it. The game never communicates any of this information well enough to not feel fucking terrible and I found myself instead wishing I were playing No One Lives Forever or, shit, even one of the new Hitman games. Even if you set off alarms, and you will, you can't break out of your disguise and pick up new weapons; you have to hope you can make do with the magazine of bullets you were given. After some trial and error and strong use of quick saving and curse words you'll find your way through, but it never feels rewarding or that you've done something well. Oh and by the way? After that whole miserable sequence and more traditional shooting segments where you get your weapons back the game does it again, it fucking does it again, but this time in a more confusing area with deadlier enemies.
Even with those awful parts I wasn't overly down on the game, but then it turns into one of the least enjoyable FPSes I've ever played. For the last third or so of the game, nearly every single area you take battle in contains at least one enemy with an instagib rail gun that shoots through walls. It makes every encounter basically random: you will die dozens of times the instant you walk around a corner, well before any person could react. It feels like playing a multiplayer shooter in a lobby full of cheaters. It is horrendously fucking unfun. Except of course when you're using the gun yourself. It is awfully satisfying ripping a single cartoonishly powerful round through a line of clueless enemies from a couple rooms down the hall.
But it's not just the rail guns that made me ultimately hate the game: more generally speaking, the last stretch has a severe leap in difficulty that never feels properly challenging so much as it does cheap. Sometimes you'll open a door and be greeted by an unavoidable rocket an enemy has already sent your way. Sometimes enemies will be spawned behind you from dead-end corridors. There are stretches where there are more health items than you can use and then others where there are so few you end up riding the quick load button until you get by without taking a hit. I didn't happen to find healing before the (for the record, really, really bad) final boss fight, so I had to beat it without taking a single hit.
I should also make quick note of the game's defining feature: the so-called "Geo-Mod" technology, wherein explosions excavate the game's terrain. From a technology standpoint it's pretty neat, especially for 2001, but also: it barely exists. There's almost nowhere to use it in the single-player campaign and the places you can are at best superficial. Volition's method of stopping players from using the technology to perform sequence breaks appears to have been basically stopping the player from ever being able to use it at all. I think if they had instead taken the exact opposite approach and embraced the potential game-breaking nature of deformable terrain, the game would be profoundly more interesting. Instead, we're left with little more than a few walls in empty rooms you can make small dents in.
Before I get out of here, I've already rambled on too long, let me just briefly touch on the story. How fucking cool of a concept is taking part in a full-on violent revolution against the capitalist fucks who have been killing your fellow workers. It whips ass, right? Unfortunately no. I can't possibly imagine the concept for this game wasn't to at least some extent inspired by the real life labor history of miners such as that documented in the essential documentary Harlan County, USA, but rather than using any of that to enrich the plot or even attempt at making anything grounded in reality, Red Faction just kind of throws in some weird old cyborg guy who floats around evilly and has a forcefield. And a weird lady who also floats around evilly and has a forcefield. There's a virus or some shit too? I don't fucking know. It's written badly and acted stiffly and I didn't care about a goddamn thing that was happening. Wasted potential.
I still don't have the answer for how much of this game I actually ever played in the first place. It very well could have been that I cheated my way through the whole thing. Was my fond memory of this game based on a reality where I barely even played it? I don't know. Regardless, now that memory is replaced with a new one, and it goes a little something like this: Red Faction—a game I thought I liked.
Played the PC version, though it's not listed as a platform here.
In this game you play a Frankenstein who's just read the Wikipedia article on existentialism and who keeps walking around saying things like "but if I'm made from a bunch of dead parts am I really even living?" And you do a bunch of shitty Myst puzzles for some reason. Oh right and Tim Curry is Frankenstein's Doctor.
Anyway, I'm throwing this one in the trash after getting somewhere around halfway through. Somehow they made a Myst-like game with Tim Curry and a damn Frankenstein more boring than regular old Myst. This thing has zero charm, the puzzles suck ass, the layout of the world is pointlessly labyrinthine, god I hate this game. I guess I laughed when Tim Curry yelled not to touch his notes and it sort of sounded like he said nuts, so that's something.
Bummer that my month of FMV games ended with such an absolute fucking nothing of a game. Guess they can't all be winners huh.
In this game you play a Frankenstein who's just read the Wikipedia article on existentialism and who keeps walking around saying things like "but if I'm made from a bunch of dead parts am I really even living?" And you do a bunch of shitty Myst puzzles for some reason. Oh right and Tim Curry is Frankenstein's Doctor.
Anyway, I'm throwing this one in the trash after getting somewhere around halfway through. Somehow they made a Myst-like game with Tim Curry and a damn Frankenstein more boring than regular old Myst. This thing has zero charm, the puzzles suck ass, the layout of the world is pointlessly labyrinthine, god I hate this game. I guess I laughed when Tim Curry yelled not to touch his notes and it sort of sounded like he said nuts, so that's something.
Bummer that my month of FMV games ended with such an absolute fucking nothing of a game. Guess they can't all be winners huh.
1996
My favorite of the System Sacom FMV games, Lunacy feels like a fitting expansion upon the ideas laid down in the two Mansion of Hidden Souls games. I do find a great deal of charm in those games' constraints, but nevertheless I consider this an improvement in nearly every respect.
The town is a wonderfully moody place to walk around, the characters are fun, the music is great. I wish the English voice actors were credited, because by god does one of the characters sound like the scientist in Half-Life. One of the antagonists approaches the player character by saying "Hiya, stupid", which is one of the funniest things I've ever seen in a video game and alone makes it a game worth playing.
My only real complaint is that, like many, I do find the change of environment in the second disc to be much worse than the town of the first disc, but I appreciate what System Sacom was going for. There was also one puzzle on that disc whose solution seems to be hoping you made the correct 1-in-4 guess and reloading if you got it wrong. It's supposed to involve matching a song you heard earlier, but even listening to all the options removes your ability to complete the puzzle without reloading. Very clumsy; hopefully I missed something.
Otherwise, I absolutely love this game. Hands down my favorite of the FMV games I've been going through this month, and one I can unreservedly recommend to anyone looking for something a little bit weird. Just, like, don't pay $350 for it or whatever game collector motherfuckers are asking for it these days.
The town is a wonderfully moody place to walk around, the characters are fun, the music is great. I wish the English voice actors were credited, because by god does one of the characters sound like the scientist in Half-Life. One of the antagonists approaches the player character by saying "Hiya, stupid", which is one of the funniest things I've ever seen in a video game and alone makes it a game worth playing.
My only real complaint is that, like many, I do find the change of environment in the second disc to be much worse than the town of the first disc, but I appreciate what System Sacom was going for. There was also one puzzle on that disc whose solution seems to be hoping you made the correct 1-in-4 guess and reloading if you got it wrong. It's supposed to involve matching a song you heard earlier, but even listening to all the options removes your ability to complete the puzzle without reloading. Very clumsy; hopefully I missed something.
Otherwise, I absolutely love this game. Hands down my favorite of the FMV games I've been going through this month, and one I can unreservedly recommend to anyone looking for something a little bit weird. Just, like, don't pay $350 for it or whatever game collector motherfuckers are asking for it these days.
This review contains spoilers
I'm very tired so I'm not going to make any effort to tie all of my thoughts together into a well-organized, cohesive review and instead just kind of spew it all out. I finished this game over a week ago and if I don't get anything down now I never will.
The Sega Saturn Mansion of Hidden Souls game improves over the game that came before it by actually caring about the characters who inhabit the mansion. Whereas the Sega CD game had maybe one character we got to know enough about to care, this one has many: There's the adventure-seeker who sought out the mansion as another of his things to conquest only to find it boring once he's done so, a man whose outward scariness we learn is merely a defense mechanism carried over from his difficult life, a young girl with abusive parents who's just looking for the love she wasn't getting, and so on. It's all very human and is exactly what I thought was missed potential from the first game.
So why don't I truly love this game? Well, it's a tough one. Firstly, it must be said: whereas the first game only ever showed the residents of the mansion in their butterfly forms, this one made the decision to assign human faces to the butterflies. I do think there was logic to this choice: from a gameplay perspective it's much easier for the player to be able to keep track of characters who look different, something the Sega CD game worked around by keeping each butterfly contained within their respective rooms and giving them bizarrely exaggerated accents. It's an effective way to lift those restraints, but there's something about it just involving human faces that makes the whole thing feel a little cheaper, more blunt.
It would be really unfair of me toward the game to not point out that I think there's more to this decision, and that the game subtly makes a big reveal in a very clever way, but I'm literally falling asleep writing this so I'm just glossing things over real fast now. It is cool though.
The puzzles, if you can call them that, are about as uncomplicated as in the previous game. Most everything is solved by simply walking into whatever room triggers the next event. Unfortunately, this time around there doesn't seem to be a hint system, which can lead to frustration. The one new gameplay element is something of a QTE-style dialogue mechanic. On the normal difficulty you will be expected to quickly respond to things that might not even be yes or no questions by pressing the A or C buttons for "yes" or "no" respectively. The game doesn't wait for input, nor does it even prompt for the button presses. I'm not sure if this can render you unable to progress, but it sucks. Playing on easy pauses the game whenever you are meant to respond, and even if answering "yes" or "no" doesn't always make sense for the circumstances, at least it's more playable this way.
Then, finally, there's the ending, and damn is that shit stupid. Anyway, off to sleep now. Maybe I'll edit this up into something more coherent someday. But I doubt it.
The Sega Saturn Mansion of Hidden Souls game improves over the game that came before it by actually caring about the characters who inhabit the mansion. Whereas the Sega CD game had maybe one character we got to know enough about to care, this one has many: There's the adventure-seeker who sought out the mansion as another of his things to conquest only to find it boring once he's done so, a man whose outward scariness we learn is merely a defense mechanism carried over from his difficult life, a young girl with abusive parents who's just looking for the love she wasn't getting, and so on. It's all very human and is exactly what I thought was missed potential from the first game.
So why don't I truly love this game? Well, it's a tough one. Firstly, it must be said: whereas the first game only ever showed the residents of the mansion in their butterfly forms, this one made the decision to assign human faces to the butterflies. I do think there was logic to this choice: from a gameplay perspective it's much easier for the player to be able to keep track of characters who look different, something the Sega CD game worked around by keeping each butterfly contained within their respective rooms and giving them bizarrely exaggerated accents. It's an effective way to lift those restraints, but there's something about it just involving human faces that makes the whole thing feel a little cheaper, more blunt.
It would be really unfair of me toward the game to not point out that I think there's more to this decision, and that the game subtly makes a big reveal in a very clever way, but I'm literally falling asleep writing this so I'm just glossing things over real fast now. It is cool though.
The puzzles, if you can call them that, are about as uncomplicated as in the previous game. Most everything is solved by simply walking into whatever room triggers the next event. Unfortunately, this time around there doesn't seem to be a hint system, which can lead to frustration. The one new gameplay element is something of a QTE-style dialogue mechanic. On the normal difficulty you will be expected to quickly respond to things that might not even be yes or no questions by pressing the A or C buttons for "yes" or "no" respectively. The game doesn't wait for input, nor does it even prompt for the button presses. I'm not sure if this can render you unable to progress, but it sucks. Playing on easy pauses the game whenever you are meant to respond, and even if answering "yes" or "no" doesn't always make sense for the circumstances, at least it's more playable this way.
Then, finally, there's the ending, and damn is that shit stupid. Anyway, off to sleep now. Maybe I'll edit this up into something more coherent someday. But I doubt it.
1995
Excruciatingly slow, simple puzzles, and what feels like half of the rather short playtime is spent spinning a big ass dial.
But god is it cool as hell.
But god is it cool as hell.
It goes a little like this: you and your sister are hanging out in the 3 FPS Meadow and see a mysterious butterfly. Your sister wants to take chase and see where it leads you, but you're a bit of a weenie and protest the idea, saying you'll get in trouble and besides, that's awfully close to where grandma said ghosts turn people into butterflies. Even more excited by the thought, she follows the butterfly anyway and lo and behold gets sucked into the titular Mansion. And so into the mansion you must go in hope of saving her humanity.
Inside the mansion you find its inhabitants—butterflies with unconvincing accents and the rooms that represent the interests they had as humans. In the game's best moment, a butterfly tells the player how in her days as a musician she longed to shed herself of her human body. Now, as a butterfly, she just wishes she were able to play the piano again, to be able to do the things that filled her soul. It brings to mind the scene in Wings of Desire where Peter Falk explains to the main character, an angel contemplating giving up his high standing for a permanent return to the corporeal world, his decision to do this very same thing. Being unable to interact with and therefore truly experience the world is an unfulfilling way to exist (to crudely paraphrase one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema). But here in Mansion of Hidden Souls, the words are spoken from someone for whom it's too late. She already made her decision, perhaps hastily in a time of pain, and now she's left in eternal regret of the things she can never experience again. It's a beautiful scene despite the voice actor doing maybe the most insane attempt at a Southern accent I've ever heard.
Unfortunately, that's the first and last time the game succeeds in doing anything emotionally resonant whatsoever. There are other butterflies we meet: an Australian butterfly specimen collector repulsed by the human form but who we never learn enough about to be interesting; an artist who we know is an artist on account of his room having a couple easels in it; a lady whose entire thing is that she's kind of mean and hangs out in bars; and finally a girl who, like, I don't know, is just kinda there.
It's this hasty characterization that makes Mansion of Hidden Souls a mere sliver of its potential. I want to poke around into the lives and minds of complex individuals and find out what made them get entangled in—if not outright seek out—the loss of their human form. What insecurities and sadnesses and ennuis and stubbornnesses brought them here? What brings so many people into wishing they were no longer human? Is there, maybe, a richness to Experiencing and Feeling we often overlook in our misery, like the butterfly who just wishes she could play music again?
Sadly, Mansion of Hidden Souls is largely uninterested in those questions: after all we have a sister to save and only one disc in which to do it.
Inside the mansion you find its inhabitants—butterflies with unconvincing accents and the rooms that represent the interests they had as humans. In the game's best moment, a butterfly tells the player how in her days as a musician she longed to shed herself of her human body. Now, as a butterfly, she just wishes she were able to play the piano again, to be able to do the things that filled her soul. It brings to mind the scene in Wings of Desire where Peter Falk explains to the main character, an angel contemplating giving up his high standing for a permanent return to the corporeal world, his decision to do this very same thing. Being unable to interact with and therefore truly experience the world is an unfulfilling way to exist (to crudely paraphrase one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema). But here in Mansion of Hidden Souls, the words are spoken from someone for whom it's too late. She already made her decision, perhaps hastily in a time of pain, and now she's left in eternal regret of the things she can never experience again. It's a beautiful scene despite the voice actor doing maybe the most insane attempt at a Southern accent I've ever heard.
Unfortunately, that's the first and last time the game succeeds in doing anything emotionally resonant whatsoever. There are other butterflies we meet: an Australian butterfly specimen collector repulsed by the human form but who we never learn enough about to be interesting; an artist who we know is an artist on account of his room having a couple easels in it; a lady whose entire thing is that she's kind of mean and hangs out in bars; and finally a girl who, like, I don't know, is just kinda there.
It's this hasty characterization that makes Mansion of Hidden Souls a mere sliver of its potential. I want to poke around into the lives and minds of complex individuals and find out what made them get entangled in—if not outright seek out—the loss of their human form. What insecurities and sadnesses and ennuis and stubbornnesses brought them here? What brings so many people into wishing they were no longer human? Is there, maybe, a richness to Experiencing and Feeling we often overlook in our misery, like the butterfly who just wishes she could play music again?
Sadly, Mansion of Hidden Souls is largely uninterested in those questions: after all we have a sister to save and only one disc in which to do it.
Absolutely delightful "Myst but not bullshit" game using Naohisa Inoue's fantastical paintings as a source material. It's short, it's devoid of challenge, it controls exactly as clunky as you'd expect from a first-person Playstation game without analog controls. If you said it's not really even a game at all I don't know I'd have a compelling counterargument.
But I also had a smile on my face the entire goddamn time I played it. Sometimes you just gotta let the vibes take over and have a good ass time. You making friends with dinosaurs in whatever game you love? Didn't think so. And I'd publicly post my social security number on the internet for one of the megezo plushes they made for this game.
To be a little less jokey in tone for half a second: Iblard: Laputa no Kaeru Machi's overarching story of self-doubt as physical manifestations you must acknowledge but dismiss kind of bowled me over a little bit. We'll just say that it hits close to home and leave it at that. Maybe if that's not your default headspace the game won't resonate with you in the way it did me. I don't know.
If I had to give any points of reference for this game, think LSD Dream Emulator if it had structure. Or, of course, any of the other System Sacom games like Mansion of Hidden Souls, but instead of weird (dour) it's weird (whimsical).
This game rocks, it's an all-time favorite, I sincerely wish we existed in a world where more games made me feel the way I did playing through this one.
Could do without the full-screen flashing endemic to the game's main point of friction, however. Luckily you can manipulate the game enough for it to not happen too badly.
But I also had a smile on my face the entire goddamn time I played it. Sometimes you just gotta let the vibes take over and have a good ass time. You making friends with dinosaurs in whatever game you love? Didn't think so. And I'd publicly post my social security number on the internet for one of the megezo plushes they made for this game.
To be a little less jokey in tone for half a second: Iblard: Laputa no Kaeru Machi's overarching story of self-doubt as physical manifestations you must acknowledge but dismiss kind of bowled me over a little bit. We'll just say that it hits close to home and leave it at that. Maybe if that's not your default headspace the game won't resonate with you in the way it did me. I don't know.
If I had to give any points of reference for this game, think LSD Dream Emulator if it had structure. Or, of course, any of the other System Sacom games like Mansion of Hidden Souls, but instead of weird (dour) it's weird (whimsical).
This game rocks, it's an all-time favorite, I sincerely wish we existed in a world where more games made me feel the way I did playing through this one.
Could do without the full-screen flashing endemic to the game's main point of friction, however. Luckily you can manipulate the game enough for it to not happen too badly.
Categorically worse than its predecessor in almost every way: where Phantasmagoria was quite straightforward for a PC adventure game, the sequel is irritatingly obscure at every moment. If you attempt to go through this game without a guide, be prepared for a miserable time. I got stuck for no less than an hour because I hadn't thought of showing every character every item in my inventory. Most of the game's puzzles consist of typing in passwords that are no more logical than someone said them to you in a cutscene once, or, you found the words somewhere in the world. If that sounds like every adventure game ever, you're not wrong, but somehow they're even worse in practice here. At one point you go to a particular location and are turned away by the police in a way reminiscent of any video game telling you "you can't do this right now; try something else", maybe leading any regular person to go elsewhere in the world. Well, not so in this game—inexplicably, the solution is to just click the area again and this time the cop won't be there because ???.
If the puzzles aren't bad enough, somehow the game has a user interface so much worse than Phantasmagoria 1 it's astonishing. Navigating through the world is regularly frustrating, and the mouse cursor might be the worst I've ever seen in a video game. I guess it's supposed to be your workplace's logo, the negative space of a W contained in a circle, but it just kinda looks like pointy teeth to me. It sucks real bad. Navigating through the inventory is a chore, and you will have to play around in there for solutions.
On top of all this, the audio mixing might be the worst of all time in a video game. I'm willing to believe the horrendous mix between the videos and music are ScummVM's doing, but that aside, the dialogue in cutscenes frequently range from an inaudible mumble to loud screams. I felt like I needed a volume knob to ride the entire time.
If I'm being nitpicky to a degree I wasn't for the first game, ultimately the reason is thus: whereas the first game was charming and engaging, there's really not a whole lot here to love. There's some intrigue in the conspiracy behind your workplace, but it's all an overwrought mess that's not all that fun to uncover. The death scenes are fun in a goofy slasher flick type of way, but that's about it. I guess the game does have a scene with a titty or two and some bondage scenes, which I suppose is rather wild for a video game in 1996, but also: so what. However, to its credit, the game does have a kind of surprising gay romance subplot to it that's handled astonishingly sweetly. Arguably the only sincerely affecting scene in the whole thing.
At the end of the day, sadly, this just isn't a very good game. There's certainly some value to it in the way that there's value to a lousy horror movie, but unlike the game that came before it, I doubt you'll be coming out of Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh with much sincere respect for it.
If the puzzles aren't bad enough, somehow the game has a user interface so much worse than Phantasmagoria 1 it's astonishing. Navigating through the world is regularly frustrating, and the mouse cursor might be the worst I've ever seen in a video game. I guess it's supposed to be your workplace's logo, the negative space of a W contained in a circle, but it just kinda looks like pointy teeth to me. It sucks real bad. Navigating through the inventory is a chore, and you will have to play around in there for solutions.
On top of all this, the audio mixing might be the worst of all time in a video game. I'm willing to believe the horrendous mix between the videos and music are ScummVM's doing, but that aside, the dialogue in cutscenes frequently range from an inaudible mumble to loud screams. I felt like I needed a volume knob to ride the entire time.
If I'm being nitpicky to a degree I wasn't for the first game, ultimately the reason is thus: whereas the first game was charming and engaging, there's really not a whole lot here to love. There's some intrigue in the conspiracy behind your workplace, but it's all an overwrought mess that's not all that fun to uncover. The death scenes are fun in a goofy slasher flick type of way, but that's about it. I guess the game does have a scene with a titty or two and some bondage scenes, which I suppose is rather wild for a video game in 1996, but also: so what. However, to its credit, the game does have a kind of surprising gay romance subplot to it that's handled astonishingly sweetly. Arguably the only sincerely affecting scene in the whole thing.
At the end of the day, sadly, this just isn't a very good game. There's certainly some value to it in the way that there's value to a lousy horror movie, but unlike the game that came before it, I doubt you'll be coming out of Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh with much sincere respect for it.
1995
This review contains spoilers
I went into this expecting some real Sierra Adventure Game bullshit, but as it turns out, this is a surprisingly benevolent one of those: unlike many of its contemporaries, Phantasmagoria features a hint system you can use at any time without penalty. Perhaps real adventure game sickos would hold this against the game, but to any normal person this is a much more enjoyable experience than getting immediately frustrated and sticking to a guide for the rest of the playthrough. I briefly glanced at a guide at the very end of the game, but otherwise found it to be quite breezy and fun.
As far as the story and all that, well, it's as cheesy as you'd expect from FMV games of the era, but it's got its moments. Getting deeper and deeper into the mysteries your weird ass house contains is sincerely intriguing, and the subplot of domestic abuse is handled with surprising gravitas. I do, however, find it to be undermined by the supernatural element that supposedly caused it: I do not believe the demons of Phantasmagoria are analogous to, say, BOB's stand-in for the evil brought into the world by mankind—or even that it's making all that salient a point on a controlling relationship at all. Rather, it just kinda seems that your Good Husband went Bad because some ghosts got his ass or whatever. I don't know. Feels like some great lost potential, even if it gets some things right along the way.
Nevertheless, it's a worthy experience for sure, and engaging to a degree I never expected when I went into it.
As far as the story and all that, well, it's as cheesy as you'd expect from FMV games of the era, but it's got its moments. Getting deeper and deeper into the mysteries your weird ass house contains is sincerely intriguing, and the subplot of domestic abuse is handled with surprising gravitas. I do, however, find it to be undermined by the supernatural element that supposedly caused it: I do not believe the demons of Phantasmagoria are analogous to, say, BOB's stand-in for the evil brought into the world by mankind—or even that it's making all that salient a point on a controlling relationship at all. Rather, it just kinda seems that your Good Husband went Bad because some ghosts got his ass or whatever. I don't know. Feels like some great lost potential, even if it gets some things right along the way.
Nevertheless, it's a worthy experience for sure, and engaging to a degree I never expected when I went into it.
1996
Not going to pretend this is a good game, but it is charming.