It's a totally superficial element of the interface.) Throughout the game, the requisite spooky atmosphere is reliably generated by crypts, blood, skeletons, rats, glowing eyes, swirly ghosts, and organ music. (Which has no connection with the story, by the way. The in-game hint feature is in the form of a talking skull.
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The opening cutscene features a fly-by through a dungeon corridor full of body parts, torture implements, mirrors, caskets, and monster faces. Williams's taste in horror is, let's say, traditional. This is the perfect game for Halloween in fact, it plays like a walk through a Halloween haunted house. She unwittingly releases the evil influence, and the phantasmagoria begins. While husband Don gets down to some manly restoration work on the property, Adrienne is left to wander around the place and get acquainted with her new home. The old mansion, formerly owned by a stage magician and rumored dabbler in the dark arts, is naturally haunted, inhabited by restless ghosts, an ancient evil, and memories of its dark past. Phantasmagoria tells the story of novelist Adrienne Delaney and her photographer husband, who purchase and move into the old Carnevash estate outside a small town in Maine. While initially curious about what a "grown-up" Williams oeuvre would look like, having played it through, I would now have to agree that Phantasmagoria is Roberta Williams through and through. Williams herself is quick to point out that she has often worked with darker themes in murder-mystery games like Mystery House and The Colonel's Bequest, and that, far from an outlier, Phantasmagoria is representative of her body of work. I grew up on Roberta Williams, with King's Quest being my first foray into the adventure-gaming world (King's Quest V on NES, to be precise) I associated her authorial stamp with its sunny storybook locales and fairy-tale motifs, as well as with other nursery-ready works like her 1987 tots' title Mixed-Up Mother Goose. The mystique of mature content in a game drew me, especially coming as it did from Roberta Williams, prolific author of numerous well-known adventure games (notably the King's Quest series), since it seemed to be a departure from her usual style.
Controversial, for its provocative move to expand audiences by introducing mature and explicit content into a computer game - then even more than now perceived as primarily a children's medium - including a much-publicized "rape scene" that got the game boycotted by some retailers and even banned in Australia. Groundbreaking, for its unprecedented use of fully integrated full-motion video ( FMV) production techniques, which required a 550-page script, four months of filming, a whopping $400 million budget, and an ungainly seven cds' worth of game data. In 1995 when Sierra released it, the now-classic horror adventure game was both groundbreaking and controversial. I've been waiting for years to play Phantasmagoria.