This thing is ALL SPOILERS.

Well I just played through Phantasmagoria for the first time. I got it from gog.com. I am majorly torqued off right now because when I quit the game in the final chapter, it appears to have deleted my savegame. Furthermore, I noticed when I used one item before dying, the poker, and it was removed from my inventory, it was missing from my inventory when I tried again.

The fact that you couldn't skip the repetitious cinematics, and how annoying it got to hear Don go "Aaadrian, oh Adriaannn," time and time again, has really gotten me all tense and annoyed. Now I will have to go on YouTube to see how the game ends. Plus, I am really upset that even though I pretty much played through the whole game, now I can't tell people I completed Phantasmagoria.

Setting that aside, and speaking of the idea of role playing another person, Phantasmagoria struck me as, well, a really womanly game. I don't say that as a negative thing. But a lot of the stuff in the game I see as clearly originating from female fantasy. For example, the homeless mom and son whom you befriend on the island. The sort of cutesy humor is the kind of thing I feel like I'm likely to stumble across in a female author's fantasy fiction, whereas I don't think a guy would write endearingly about a hobo woman stuck in a wooden floor in a barn, for example. Likewise, in the hallucination in a mirror where you see Carno kill one of his wives by force feeding her offal through a giant funnel until she chokes, that really strikes me as female fantasy. I think that's overintellectualized gross-out torture, and for some reason I see that as more likely to occur in female fiction. Maybe female authors are more likely to think things through on an emotional level than male authors, whereas male authors are more likely to focus on the logistics of the torture and would instead write torture that might be less emotionally gross but which might be more likely to, well, work logistically.

Additionally, the game seems more sensitive towards sexuality, with Adriene not liking the horny real estate agent, and not to mention the infamous rape scene.

Adriene mentally seems to see herself as a victim and reliant on others. When you make her try to attack Don the reason she usually gets disarmed and subdued is that she doesn't really have intent so it's easy for him to control her weapon. If I were hiding in the dressing room closet, my first move would be to attempt to throw a garment at Don's face, while at the same time executing some kind of low attack. The follow up would be a continual frenzied flurry with the claw hammer to the covered face. I think the poker is too long and the shard of glass would cut my hand.

I also note the existence of relationship-based horror, inherent in the transformation of Don from good to evil, and the game really stressing the horror inherent in that for Adriene.

None of this is bad or anything. It's just a different style of storytelling than I might do personally. But as I revisit and think through past topics on DSF concerning role playing different genders and stuff, this game seems to highlight for me, through the medium of fantasy or horror fiction, what can broadly be described as gender differences in storytelling and character identification.

Some of my thoughts playing through the game was stuff like, "If I were exploring a creepy old property, I'd wear gloves, and wear an N100 respirator. You never know if they used asbestos in the insulation! Hey, maybe there's squatters...if I had just bought this property and were exploring it, I'd bring an AR and sidearm with tactical lights...." So for me, being male, as I reflect on this, my mind was all on logistics of exploring a creepy old house, and not so much on, say, the relationship between Don and Adriene. This could be highlighting a difference in what different-gendered authors might find more or less interesting.

My overall critique of the game (I'm surprised that Williams says it's her best game) is that it's pretty cheesy. All the blood and gore looks ridiculous and borderline comical. I cannot believe it was all controversial in its day.

Well, I hope I didn't offend anyone with this post, but I've started to write a story of my own, and I guess the idea of what makes a story good or interesting to different people was just recently on my mind.

Yours would be set in Vietnam, and Adriene would be killing people with realistically simulated firearms.

To smooth 70s lyrical rock.

There's a reason why nobody makes FMV adventure games anymore. You can't exactly make a good movie on an adventure game budget.

On the other hand, it's like you need a huge graphic budget anyway nowadays. Heh, maybe FMV could be a niche for people who like both adventure games AND starving actors.

So according to the Pushing Up Roses review ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOOI0O69jCs ) Phantasmagoria cost $4.5 million because of all the editing work that needed to be done, since it was all blue screen. Originally it was planned at only $900,000.

However, it made like $12 million. I guess that was a lot in those days for a video game! Not bad for something that is the adventure game equivalent of a B movie. (Although I think $4.5 million is not a B movie budget, is it?)

Finally saw a picture of Roberta Williams, too, in that review.