Phantasmagoria!

Phantasmagoria is a mid-90s horror adventure game from Sierra and the creators of the vaunted King’s Quest series.  At that point in time, adventure games were undergoing a decline, not necessarily due to quality, but due to the growing popularity of action and strategy games on the PC.  In that light, Phantasmagoria feels like an ambitious attempt to establish a new generation of adventure games that would propel the genre into the next century.

I think in my mind, I’ve always seen Phantasmagoria as a grander and more important game than it actually was.  That’s because as a kid I first saw this game when it was featured in a brief segment on the local evening news.  While the game did garner some controversy due to its depiction of violence against women, the segment I saw was actually more of a fluff piece extolling the game’s story and use of digitized human actors.  In my little kid brain, it was clear to me that if an institution as important as the local Fox affiliate had deigned to give Phantasmagoria air time, then it must be a really great game! As an adult, of course, I understand that segments like these are used by news stations as padding for when they don’t have enough real news stories to cover their 30 minute block.  Nonetheless, the praise this game received has been ingrained in my head for two decades since, and I’ve always held Phantasmagoria in high esteem, despite never having played the game.

The lesson here is that you shouldn’t trust what you see on the news.

Phantasmagoria is a horror-themed, story-driven adventure game that follows Adrian Delaney, a semi-popular novelist, and her husband Don, an equally semi-famous photographer who have decided to move to the quiet New England town of Nipawomsett so that Adrian can peacefully work on her next novel.  As hip young affluent weirdos, the couple have decided to make their residence in the abandoned (but surprisingly well-kept) home of Zoltan “Carno” Carnovash, a 19th century magician and serial widower. What could possibly go wrong?

Unsurprisingly, Carno’s seemingly bad luck in love was no mere coincidence, as he was in fact under demonic possession and driven to murder his wives by otherworldy forces.  And while Carno may be long dead, the dark spirit of his madness still lies dormant in the house and finds a long-awaited vessel in Don. This plot really exists somewhere in a spectrum between Stephen King’s The Shining and one of those terrible Lifetime channel movies where the female main characters are more or less tortured by their husbands for 90 commercial-saturated minutes. 

The first chapter of Phantasmagoria starts with Adrian and Don settling into their new home, and the place really is something else.  The peculiarities of this quasi-mansion estate include a giant face sculpted into the side of the building, sphinxes guarding an ominous locked door in the foyer, a live electric chair, a room filled with creepy baby laughter, and a secret chapel hidden behind the library amongst other things.  As someone who recently became involved in the home buying process and came to realize the intense scrutiny it requires, the absurdity of the house leaves me wondering who would ever buy into something like this.  What’s more is that Adrian and Don seem barely cognizant of how bizarre their surroundings are. Early in the story, there are some throwaway comments where they make fun of the builder, but that is the one singular time that I can remember where they express concern over the eccentricities of the house.  Never do they ever seem bothered by the fact that there is a WORKING ELECTRIC CHAIR IN THE GUEST BEDROOM.

Haunted houses work best when they have a modicum of subtlety, otherwise the audience will struggle with suspension of disbelief.  Characters that choose to live in a place that is overtly unnatural or dangerous just aren’t that believable, especially when those characters are people of means like Adrian and Don who could easily afford to live wherever they want.  But to be fair, in the starting chapter where the player gets to explore the house for the first time, the house did manage to capture my imagination even if it clashed with my incredulity. “Hmm, I wonder what’s waiting behind this scary door guarded by sphinxes,” I said to myself.  “I can’t wait to see how the story uses the electric chair,” I thought. As stupidly overt as the house is, it sets up curiosity for the rest of the story. Unfortunately, when compared to these expectations, the rest of the game up to the climax feels rather uneventful.

Phantasmagoria is a seven chapter ordeal.  At the end of the first chapter, Don becomes possessed after Adrian unseals the demon that’s been trapped in the house, and it feels like the story is about to take off, but then………..well not much really happens.  Adrian spends the following chapters somewhat aimlessly poking around town and the house, as Don becomes more aggressive and abusive toward her. It’s hard to articulate how empty the plot of Phantasmagoria can be at times.  Adrian’s motivations are often unclear, and she is seemingly oblivious to the growing danger in her own marriage. Most chapters involve her exploring a new area of the estate, and unlocking little snippets of Carno and his victims’ story.  The problem is that Carno’s story really isn’t that interesting. It’s the very cliche story of a stage magician whose lust for true magic leads him to becoming the thrall of dark forces.

……And then there’s Harriet and Cyrus.  A not insignificant chunk of this game is taken up by a bizarre subplot where Adrian discovers a homeless mother and son living in her barn, who she promptly puts to work doing household chores and lawn work.  The questionable undertones of this story element aside, these characters do very little to advance the core plot of Don’s descent into madness or play into the horror that is supposed to be the game’s core. They simply serve to be emblematic of the padding that fills out this game.

While Phantasmagoria aspires to be a grand horror game, there’s not a lot of scares to be had in the first six chapters.  Although Don is slowly becoming more and more of a dick, Adrian is never in any real danger. The scares come at specific points in the story when Adrian has visions of the various ways in which Carno murdered his wives.  The scenes are pretty gruesome and really exist more for shock value than to develop true suspense and tension. As you can tell from the screenshots, Phantasmagoria uses digitized footage of live actors, and when the game was released, it came under a fair bit of controversy for its depiction of violence against women.  The whole affair reeks of 90’s schlock. There’s even a painful to watch sex scene midway that crosses the line into rape and just feels incredibly tone deaf compared to the rest of the game.

Outside of the story, the game is sprinkled with light adventure game puzzle solving.  It’s standard adventure game fare: find items to get other items to clear obstacles that are in the path of your progress.  The puzzles are actually surprisingly easy. At the point in time when this game was released, adventure games were starting to come under fire for the obtuse and absurd logic they required, with Sierra, the company behind this title, being one of the largest targets.  Phantasmagoria is incredibly easy when compared to this standard as a result of taking this criticism to heart and wanting to focus more on the story.

The final chapter of Phantasmagoria is a major departure from its preceedings.  The game’s climax turns into more of an interactive movie with Don finally breaking down into a murderous rampage.  In an extended chase sequence, Adrian must evade Don while finding a safe path out of the house. This segment is very trial and error in nature:  go down the wrong hallway or into the wrong room and Don will meet Adrian with a gruesome death. This is the part of the game where it best approaches proper horror, and yet it still doesn’t quite reach its goals.  As a deranged killer, Don, himself, is more cartoonish than threatening, and once again the game falls back on its primary means of achieving horror which is to simply use cheap, gratuitous blood and gore for shock value, although I will admit the practical special effects used in these scenes is quite impressive.

Horror is fairly relative, especially in the context of time.  I’m left wondering if I had experienced this game for the first time as a kid in the 90s, would I find it scary?  Maybe I would and maybe I’m just too old and desensitized now to get any chills from cheap gore. Certainly, the game reviewed and sold well upon its release.  On the other hand, time and age may account for the scares falling flat, but it doesn’t excuse the story for feeling underdeveloped.

Phantasmagoria was a late in life product of Sierra, known for many classic adventure games such as King’s Quest and Space Quest.  I have honestly never played a Sierra adventure game other than this one, so I can’t say if its representative of the company’s typical quality or not.  Reading the history of this game, it’s clear the team went into this project with a lot of ambition, but became ensnared in practical constraints such as time, budget, and early 90s technology.  For its time, Phantasmagoria was an unparalleled production, and I can respect the work and aspiration that went into this game even if I think it has aged poorly.

Ico Retrospective: Mystery, Imagination, and Immersion

Recently, I picked up The Ico and Shadow of the Colossus Collection for PS3. For those who may not know, these two games form a sort of incomplete spiritual trilogy with each other and are products of Team Ico, a subset of Sony’s Japan Studio. Though gameplay varies a fair bit between titles, they both place a heavy focus on immersion through quiet aesthetic detail and minimalist gameplay. Having played through Shadow before, I’ve focused so far entirely on Ico, which was a completely pristine experience for me. I followed previews of this game pretty closely before its release, back when the PS2 was the hot new platform, but in the end, however, the PS2 original released during a time in which gaming fell away as a priority for me, so until now, I’ve had no experience with it.

Ico is much more of a puzzle game than its follow-up. For those who have somehow never heard talk of this game from its many enthusiastic fans, the setup for the game is that the protagonist (who I believe is named Ico) must help a princess-like character, named Yorda, escape a deserted castle, where she has been imprisoned by a dark queen. The game is mostly a puzzle game where Ico must figure out how to guide Yorda through a long series of environmental obstacles and ultimately find a way to open the castle’s gates. Occasionally, the pair will be ambushed by shadow creatures, and Ico must fight them off. Interestingly, there is no health bar for this side of the game; rather Ico must keep the monsters from successfully kidnapping Yorda to prevent game over. Regardless, Ico primarily feels puzzle-focused, with the combat only serving as a diversion. This is in contrast to Shadow which is definitely more combat-focused, although some would argue that the means of vanquishing each colossus has a puzzle-like nature to it. So essentially, Shadow is a combat-puzzle hybrid, while combat and puzzles form distinct segments of gameplay in Ico.

In a lot of ways, Ico feels ahead of its time. There was a long period when the term “puzzle game” meant something like Tetris, where pieces of stuff fall from the sky and need to be strategically arranged and eliminated to avoid the screen from filling up. Puzzle adventure games like Ico were very rare and not super popular. I can only think of one other example of such a game from this era which is Luigi’s Mansion, and that game was not especially well received. Eventually, the later releases of Portal and Braid would lead to a huge wave of puzzle adventure games designed by smaller developers, and the Tetris-based definition of the puzzle genre has mostly been supplanted. Ico even has the emotional, sentimental feel carried by a lot of indie puzzle games of this new ilk. By contrast, Shadow of the Colossus is a relatively unique game, focused entirely on seeking out and defeating a long series of bosses. It doesn’t really seem to fall in with any other movements or trends in gaming.

Ico and Shadow are some of the very few games I’ve played that actually manage to capture an adventurous feel to them, which is a feat considering that they are almost entirely linear. This is, of course, a result of Team Ico’s focus on gameplay in service of immersion. That is, the various challenges placed upon the player are only meant as a mechanism to bring the player closer to the characters and their desperate situation, a means of creating an emotional bond. This is not an adolescent empowerment fantasy as so many games are. Those sorts of games always feel more like a theme park ride, a sequence of vicarious thrills meticulously arranged to wow the player. Ico, on the other hand and despite its linearity, feels more like an expedition into an unknown world, akin to games like Fallout, Dark Souls, and the original Legend of Zelda. There is a grip of danger, uncertainty, and mystery in Ico and Yorda’s quest.

The mystery is a key component of this sort of immersion, I believe. Perhaps the PS2 manual provided more backstory, but the PS3 collection has a thoroughly modern manual, which is to say it is basically a short leaflet with not much more than a diagram of the controls. The cutscenes at the beginning of the game only provide a basic context of why Ico finds himself stranded in the dark queen’s castle. Consequently, we are left wondering about the circumstances of his struggle and the reality of the world beyond the castle. Importantly, our imaginations are engaged in trying to develop these details. When I find myself high up in the dark castle and gaze at the sea and forest beyond its walls, I ponder what could be out there. This rarely happens with other games for me, where, like a theme park, I never consider what is beyond the game’s walls, because I know that the world is only constructed as far as it needs to be. Of course, I rationally realize this is true of Ico as well, but the game provides a creative stimulation that still causes me to wonder.

Thus, Ico is true escapism in a way, absorbing, refreshing, beautiful, and wholly unique.

Thomas Was Alone: A Lesson on the Importance of Storytelling in Games

I often get frustrated by a great deal of video game narrative these days. Particularly in big budget action games at retail, storytelling in games is often trite, shallow, staged with samey-characters and saturated with the same repeating tropes and plot twists. Considering how obsessed big developers are with giving claims to high quality storytelling, they are essentially all telling the same one: There is a guy on a mission which requires him to fight a lot of people. Maybe the details differ a little bit from game to game. Maybe it’s a woman instead of a guy, or maybe instead of a gun, it’s a sword, or maybe instead of fighting people, they’re fighting robots. But essentially it’s the same template of an ultraviolent quest, only framed with different motives and setting.

In no other storytelling medium are the narratives so singularly focused on chronicling the exploits of characters with huge body counts. In film, we have violent action movies like Terminator and Aliens, but we also have a large number of movies where not a single character ever dies or is involved in an act of violence (go look at most of the critically acclaimed movies from last year). But the vast majority of video games are about powerful protagonists at the center of violent conflicts.

I understand that there are practical reasons, both technical and commercial, for why this is the case, but that doesn’t change the fact that all these games are in overly-trodden territory. Of course, there are a few good examples of games that manage to get away from the action game template, to varying degrees of success. Most of these games are descendants of the old-school adventure genre (not Tomb Raider-style adventure games, but games like Monkey Island and Gabriel Knight), such as The Walking Dead and Beyond: Two Souls. But these games are the exception, not the rule, and I’ve become tired with the situation I see. I have become a big fan of games that just get to the point and don’t weigh me down with excessive cutscenes or scripted events. It’s one reason I’ve tilted so much to indie games lately.

And man have I just played a good one, one that actually reaffirms to me the reason why games are even given stories in the first place. Back when it was released in 2010, I completely disregarded Thomas Was Alone. The game’s extremely minimalist aesthetics and gameplay led me to believe that it was just another indie game trying to be over cleverly, and in truth it is totally that. But the game attempts to deliver a message of hopefulness and wonder, and it completely succeeds at that.

Thomas Was Alone is a game about a cast of quadrilaterals who have recently come into existence and are trying to cross a series of abstract landscapes. The gameplay is incredibly simple. You switch between the quadrilateral characters present on the level and guide them to their character-specific exits. Cooperation is key, as certain characters have special abilities that need to be exploited to get other characters closer to the goal. For example, there is a large blue square named Claire who can float on water which is lethal to the rest of the crew. You can position the other characters on top of her and ferry them across otherwise uncrossable expanses. Another example, John, is a tall skinny rectangle which other characters can jump on to reach higher ledges.

As you play the game, the narrator periodically speaks up to provide insight into what the rectangles and squares are feeling and thinking. There is a meta-story going on here in which we are told that Thomas and his friends are actually emergent AI that are awakening into existence for the first time. As they cross the cyber landscapes before them, they grow to question the nature of their existence, their relationships to each other, and most importantly, the purpose they serve in being alive. Each quadrilateral is given their own personality, which is often influenced by the circumstances of their births. Thomas is the first to come into being and he is curious, observant, and afraid of being alone. Chris is a short rectangle who is often jealous of Thomas for being taller and able to jump higher. James is different from the others in that he falls upwards against gravity, and consequently feels like an outsider to the group. And there’s so many more. As the group’s journey evolves and their understanding of their destiny deepens, their relationships grow in a believable, deeply sincere way. They fall in love, become uplifted, become humbled, become enlightened, and ultimately accept the truth of their situation. Basic shapes they may be, but they are in some ways more human than most human characters of other games.

The thing is, Thomas Was Alone is an incredibly minimalist game. It’s a very simple puzzle platformer with character designs that are nothing more than basic shapes. If I was to mute the audio and ignore the subtitles, the game could be confused with someone’s first attempt at a flash game. But with narration, suddenly the game becomes so much more. You begin to feel for Thomas and his friends as they face the world for the first time. Through their successes and struggles, these little rectangles come alive. It is a tale of innocence and selflessness, with violence completely absent.

And thus, I come to realize the importance of narrative in games. The context given by the narration contributes so much to my feelings toward the game. Without it, this simple game would have been completely forgettable. As visually abstract as the presentation is, I ultimately cared about the trials of these rectangles and was vested in seeing through the path their journey would take. And, as goofy as it sounds, their fateful endings will have a lasting impact on me. If Hotline Miami is a game about the irrelevance of game plots, Thomas Was Alone is its opposite, a demonstration of the impact these narratives can have on gameplay.

So in the end, I came out a little bit wiser about storytelling in gaming. I realize now that the context it can provide can enhance the experience, not merely distract from it. I only wish we could see game design branch out farther, and not simply be restrained to aggressive tales of walking personifications of power fantasies.