Game review: Phantasmagoria - A Puzzle Of Flesh (1996) - Part 2
Studio: Sierra On-Line
Designer(s): Lorelei Shannon
Part of series: Phantasmagoria
Release: November 26, 1996
St. George’s Games: Complete playthrough (5 parts, 290 mins.)
[Continued over from Part 1].
Technical features
Graphics
Of all the Sierra games ever made, A Puzzle Of Flesh was probably the one that required the least amount of graphic artistry; this was because, in contrast to their two previous FMV efforts, most of the action was filmed in a real studio, rather than against a blue screen that would later be filled up with (at least partially) painted art. Like most innovative decisions, this one, too, had both its pluses and minuses — the inevitable negative side effect was that most of the backgrounds could only look as rich, detailed, and imaginative as they would arrange them in the studio, which ultimately meant not rich and imaginative at all. Compared to the cheesily opulent bedrooms of the Carnovasch Mansion in Phantasmagoria, or to the glamorous Bavarian scenery of Gabriel Knight 2, Curtis’ living room and cluttered work cubicle are not much to look at, nor are the interiors of Dr. Harburg’s cozy office or those of the grimy, nasty-looking Borderline club. The static backgrounds are largely perfunctory, and the game’s cutscenes place 99% of the emphasis squarely on character acting and nothing else (well, I’d say those chocolate shakes at the Dreaming Tree that the characters never seem able to finish look pretty appetizing, but that’s about it as far as possible distractions are concerned).
Only one small section of the game has no choice but to systematically integrate live action with CG art, and that is the alleged «Dimension X», of course, to which Curtis is forced to make his own proto-Gordon Freeman trip. Some credit has to be given for the artist who designed the place, and judging by the amount of detail and by the clearly visible struggle for imagination reflected in that work, they had to make really serious cuts to the segment — wasting all that effort on three or four screens worth of material would have been quite painful for the original artist. Oddly enough, «Dimension X» kind of fits in visually with the overall nasty look of the Earthly locations in the game: it is a weird and intriguing-looking place, but in a dangerous and disgusting sort of way, which makes the resemblance to Valve’s Xen all the more striking. With its odd shapes, sickly blue and green colors, creepy bio-engineering devices, and potentially lethal local life-forms, it does look a lot like what Xen could have looked like if it were represented by static 2D backgrounds rather than 3D polygons. Too bad that most of your time in that place will be spent trying to disentangle that doggone infernal machine (see the Puzzles section).
But let us now get back to the main bulk of the game and talk a little about its main visual lure — the acting. Now it is more or less a given that just about any review of the game, professional or amateur, will almost inevitably mention «bad acting» as one of its principal flaws. The tricky situation here, though, is that it is all but impossible to load up the game and not expect bad acting — because (a) FMV games are not supposed to have good acting, (b) Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman are not listed in the credits, in fact, nobody you know is listed in the credits, so they must be bad actors. Plus, it’s a game about gruesome murders, wild kinky sex, and aliens, so it’s gotta be bad acting.
Truth is, it’s not bad. Not a single performance here is genuinely outstanding on the level of Peter Lucas in Gabriel Knight 2, but cumulatively, I would say that A Puzzle Of Flesh is the best acted out of the three Sierra FMV games, and that out of all the actors who get more than three or so lines of dialog, not a single performance strikes me as particularly overwrought or cringeworthy. For some reason, the only actress to have been carried over from the original Phantasmagoria was its worst nightmare — the abysmally clownish V. Joy Lee — but this time, she only gets a tiny bit part, playing a mental patient in Curtis’ ward (a role she still manages to flub: just how bad an actor must one be to even fail to properly represent a lunatic?). As for the main cast, their chief problems are not so much in portraying believable or empathetic characters as in coping with the excesses of the dialog — which, as I have already mentioned, tries as much as possible to be more mature and realistic than in previous Sierra games, but still cannot help frequently borrowing from the pool of genre clichés (Jocilyn’s "right now, I just really need to feel you inside me" certainly takes the cake, but neither can we forgive the stereotypical Big Bad Corp Guy Paul Warner or the equally stereotypical Dumbass Cop Allie Powell — "I don’t have to listen to DICK, Craig!"). Even so, there is clearly a whole lot of commitment here, and if it feels as if sometimes the actors are hamming it up a bit too much, this can be excused by the nature of the medium — acting exaggeration was as much a given for FMV shoots as it was in the era of silent cinema, since the necessity of video compression for the CD format required the videos in question to be as «expressive» as possible (this also explains why there are so many close-up shots — the only way you could properly see the characters’ faces was if they occupied the entire screen).
Paul Morgan Stetler, the actor playing the main role of Curtis Craig, gives quite a believable performance — if you were a shy, nerdy, secretly bisexual bespectacled little guy with a history of mental illness, tormented by hallucinations and suspicions of schizophrenia, you would most certainly be able to empathize with the character. Again, it is not quite his fault if you get tired of all the times he has to take off and put back on his glasses, or freak out in front of the mirror, or go off his rocket before his psychotherapist: blame it on the script which often runs out of creative ideas. At least it gives Stetler many more opportunities to show various shades of emotion, from humor to terror, than poor Victoria Morsell received in the first Phantasmagoria.
Out of Craig’s two conflicting love interests, Paul Mitri as Trevor receives the top award: his performance even has a historical significance in that it was one of the first, if not the first, relatively non-clichéd portrayal of a gay character in a video game. Mitri’s Trevor is certainly flamboyant and theatrical, but the flamboyance is shown as more of a side effect of his sexuality than of his flaunting it, and he has a gift for exuding charm and friendliness even through the corniest or the most narcissistic of his dialog lines. I think he even manages to salvage Shannon’s «Bunny And Potato» story — every now and then, she gets the urge to prove to us how much she’s learned from Tarantino’s movies but never really gets it right all by herself (the side stories just lack the required kind of offbeat nature and humor), yet Mitri somehow turns this little bit into one of the game’s most endearing moments. (Considering that the best performance in Gabriel Knight 2 was given by Peter Lucas as the clearly homoerotic-minded Baron von Glower, I’d say Sierra’s producers had quite a solid sense of the LGBT spirit back in those out-of-the-closet Clinton years).
For Curtis’ other love interest, Jocilyn, they went out of their way to actually hire an established erotic movie starlet, Monique Parent (IMDB: «an American actress known for smoldering love scenes and intensely charismatic characters; she has been called The Thinking Man’s Sex Symbol» — yes, and she must have some really good PR agents). I suppose this was mostly necessary because Shannon and Andy Hoyos decided to step up their game after all and include some real nudity this time, instead of that measly sideboob flash nonsense in Phantasmagoria — yes, horny players all over the world rejoice, because we do get to see Monique’s tits in all their 640x480 pixel glory, if only for a couple seconds. Other than that, though, she has to play the role of sweet nice girl without a clue about what’s going on, which doesn’t exactly give her any opportunities to shine, but she pulls her functions off reasonably well, no serious complaints here.
Of course, bad girls always win next to good girls, so it is no wonder that the Best Actress spotlight here is stolen by Ragna Sigrun as Therese Banning, steady office worker by day, mighty BDSM queen by night — and, again, probably the first video game character of this type in the genre’s history. Here, it is supposedly the Basic Instinct influence prevailing over Reservoir Dogs, and although, like Jocilyn, the lady is given only one dimension to play around with — the opposite one — she does a good job of reminding us guys about the nature of temptation (just how many bored white collar office workers secretly wish they’d have a work partner just like that?). Ironically, her tits are never going on show in the game — apparently, the Devil prefers to entice her clients with sexy leather instead, whereas the Angel is more about taking it all off.
None of these guys ever went on to anything big — in fact, all of them seem to have left their acting days behind them, which could be interpreted as proof that they were really bad actors starring in a really bad video game, but... not really. If you play Sierra’s FMV games in their precise chronological order, from Phantasmagoria to Gabriel Knight 2 to A Puzzle Of Flesh, it is impossible not to notice how quickly the acting techniques, the angles, the cinematography, the dialog improves with each subsequent title, and it actually makes me a little sad about the demise of FMV as a viable artistic and commercial strategy — much like the text parser in adventure games, just when it was beginning to get a little better, new technologies came around and throttled further development along those lines. (I do realize that filming, say, The Witcher 3 in FMV would have required the gaming industry becoming ten times more financially powerful than the movie industry, but surely there could still be a viable market for smaller-scale stuff, no?).
Minor, but significant technical detail: like most of the games at the time, A Puzzle Of Flesh was made available in separate DOS and MS Windows versions, and the most commonly found digital version of the game today (the one sold on Steam and GOG, for instance) is the DOS version, because the lazy bums at Activision still have not found a proper way to make Sierra’s old Windows games run well on modern systems. This is particularly unfortunate for A Puzzle Of Flesh, since all the video files in the DOS version are only available at lower resolutions and with dreadful interlacing, making you feel as if watching every damn cutscene through a French blind — and, unlike Sierra’s other two FMV games, A Puzzle Of Flesh seems to have never had a properly working patch to get rid of this nonsense. The Windows version, in comparison, is far superior, with higher graphic resolution and no interlacing — but you have to hunt for it (I ended up downloading a pirated copy, and feel no shame whatsoever about this), and then use a custom-made installer to play the game. No pain, no gain, right?
Sound
Okay, so, apparently, Gary Spinrad, the composer of the musical soundtrack for A Puzzle Of Flesh, has in more recent years become known as a live impersonator of Elvis Presley and Gene Simmons... at the same time. If this does not exactly get your goat, I don’t know what else will, but really, this is one thing I like about these brief stints people would pull off at classic video game companies in the 1990s — you can never tell where they would end up in the future, but you can almost always tell it’s going to be one or another strain of really, really weird shit. Those were crazy times, and people would take bits and pieces of that craziness away with them as souvenirs for the (comparably) less crazy and more regimented 21st century.
The actual soundtrack has pretty little to do with Elvis or KISS, though. It is very 1990s — so 1990s it almost hurts — and mostly electronic, ranging from dark ambient to industrial to beat-heavy early synthwave or whatever that stuff is called (I should really brush up on all those electronic subgenre names from the decade, but I figure it’s always fun to offend somebody when you forget the difference between house and trance), in keeping up with the game’s far more modernistic setting and sci-fi overtones as compared to Roberta Williams’ retro-oriented Gothic flavor of Phantasmagoria. Inevitably, its MIDI synths and gated drums will sound dated to modern ears, but if the entire game is essentially a time capsule from 1996, why shouldn’t the music be any different, as long as it suits the game’s purpose?
I think that Spinrad is really at his best here with the slow, atmospheric parts. As soon as you get control over your character, the minimalistic minor key piano theme over a haunting bedrock of woodwind synths generates a mournful, melancholic aura which does far more to make you believe in Curtis’ haunting emotional traumas from his past than the game’s aggressive introduction (Curtis receiving shock therapy in the hospital). Then, once you get to Wyntech, the cavernous echo of the slowly unfurling bass synth notes suggests that this is not exactly a safe or welcoming place to be before you even get to settle down in your cubicle. There are few, if any, «optimistic» themes — in fact, the safest places in the game are usually distinguished by the relative lack of musical themes, e.g. the Dreaming Tree diner or Dr. Harburg’s office, where the synthesizers are silent by default and only strike up their grim march when Curtis experiences another hallucination or something.
The action-packed sequences, when shit hits the fan and somebody gets murdered, predictably kick the soundtrack into overdrive, which is not too much to my taste — I think that this kind of percussion-heavy madness is more appropriate for the likes of Half-Life or other shooters; but I guess this is the price we have to pay if we want us a proper 1996 time capsule. What makes it worse is that the musical soundtrack is poorly synced with the voice acting, so whenever the music is loud and fast I always have a really hard time making out whatever the actors are saying (a situation exacerbated by the lack of subtitles). If ever the game stands a chance of a remaster (highly unlikely, but...), this lo-fi shit needs to be taken as much care of as the resolution upscale for all the cutscenes.
Finally, as is usual for Sierra, the game finishes with a really crappy, cheesy, totally out-of-touch industrial-synth-rock tune (‘Rage’) with viciously murderous lyrics, probably sung by Spinrad himself — too pathetic, probably, even for the likes of Nine Inch Nails, whose style it somewhat approaches. I honestly have no idea why all of Sierra’s game music, often fine on its own, immediately began to suck as soon as they’d add vocals to it — be it ‘Girl In The Tower’ from King’s Quest VI, ‘Take A Stand’ from Phantasmagoria, or this particular piece of tripe (the only exception is Robert Holmes’ pseudo-Wagner opera in Gabriel Knight 2, but that was obviously a very special case of do or die). At least with ‘Girl In The Tower’, Ken Williams had a genuine ambition to hit the charts, which explains why it had to sound like Michael Bolton; but these Phantasmagoria numbers, to the best of my knowledge, were not exactly marketed as potentially commercial singles. Oh well. Who the heck watches the credit rolls at the end of video games anyway?
Interface
Although in general the interface of the first Phantasmagoria was retained, A Puzzle Of Flesh did have a few subtle changes for the better. Obligatory, ever-present on-screen hubs were removed, to appear only when triggered by moving the mouse across the screen. The ridiculously superfluous hint system (Phantasmagoria’s rather moronic red skull) was gone for good as well. The overall area of the screen covered by static backgrounds and video cutscenes was much larger than before. Perhaps most importantly, you could now properly save your game in different slots and restore it at any time, instead of being limited to exactly one save slot per game (Shannon followed here the example of Jane Jensen, who also wisely opted for a traditional system of save slots when adapting Roberta’s new interface for Gabriel Knight 2).
Movement from point A to point B was completely eliminated from the game — unlike the other two FMV titles, A Puzzle Of Flesh does not allow you to move Curtis (or any NPC to move on his or her own) across the static background, since the filming process limited blue screen usage to an absolute minimum. In order to move from one room to another, you simply click on an arrow and get automatically transferred to a new screen; in order to move into a completely different area, you open an in-game map and select your destination (like in Broken Sword or other older games). This was a good thing to do, not just because it saved you time and effort, but mainly because it made the game suffer a little less from the «oh look how cool we are, now that we can move a live actor across the screen!» bravado of Phantasmagoria — the same bravado that made you spend a whole minute of your time watching Adrianne slowly sit down on a sofa, fidget around for a while, then just as slowly rise up again, for absolutely no other reason than «because-we-can» (a.k.a. «immersive realism»). It is still possible for Curtis to waste time on useless actions, but this has more to do with solving puzzles than with pointless dicking around.
In general, A Puzzle Of Flesh gives the impression of a game whose creators have finally learned their lessons and no longer feel as uncomfortable with the new format as their predecessors. Unfortunately, the major problem — a jarring discrepancy in the visual, sonic, and atmospheric properties of the cutscenes and the static interface — remained as unsolved as it was in the earlier games. Transitions into and from cutscenes are anything but smooth (the game can temporarily freeze before throwing you in or out of the scene), music flow will be interrupted and roughly shifted, graphic resolution change might wreak havoc on your brain, etc. On the other hand, this is a problem which, in its final form, has not been resolved even today — look at the Witcher games, for instance, whose cutscenes remain firmly segregated from the main game flow, despite no use of FMV; so let us not give the poor old title from 1996 too much flack just because its creators were unable to move mountains.
Verdict: A deeply flawed, dated title which still preserves a whiff of its own, creepy brand of «at-least-they-tried» fascination.
Other than unsubstantiated accusations of persistently «bad acting», I think that I can get behind every single accusation ever thrown at Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle Of Flesh. It is a pretty poor «game», it is a pretty corny «interactive novel», it tries to bite off far more than it can chew in one go, it is visually and sonically dated, and it has a terribly cheesy song at the end of it. And yet, none of these arguments will ever make me forget it.
One extremely important thing is undeniable: A Puzzle Of Flesh was one of the strongest, if not the strongest, efforts by Sierra On-Line, a firmly established, mainstream mammoth of the mid-1990s gaming industry, to get out of its «comfort zone». One might grumble that they did not go far enough (especially when compared to such truly discomforting titles as I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream), or, vice versa, complain that they took it way too far with all the gratuitous sex and violence stuff, but the fact remains that the game tried to take the adventure genre to the next level of seriousness, and for all of its flaws, the atmosphere of crazyass enthusiasm and audacity is more than enough for me to forgive the game most of its sins.
Given how common it has always been for underage teenagers to be entertained by stuff targeted at higher age groups (just how many kids greeted their entry into pubescence with a swiped copy of Leisure Suit Larry?), I am pretty sure that plenty of today’s 40-year olds still vividly remember the nightmares this game would give them when they first laid their hands on it, expecting, at best, another Gabriel Knight. Today’s largely sanitized gaming market would never accept this kind of title, preferring to spook you out with far safer topics, such as the zombies of Resident Evil or other survival horror. It is true that the promise of A Puzzle Of Flesh is never properly fulfilled — at the end of the game, we are not really too sure what these atrocities were all about, or what Lorelei Shannon really thinks about the moral (and sanitary) aspects of BDSM clubs. But we can, and will, remember that we have just been virtually plunged in a strange, creepy, dangerous universe which we shall (hopefully) never encounter that directly in real life, even if you don’t really need to be a shape-shifting alien from Dimension X in order to inflict that kind of bad shit on real people.
In the end, I would say that A Puzzle Of Flesh is the video game equivalent of movies like Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs or Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange — the kind of stuff that requires a good combination of strong stomach, curious brain, and firm moral standards to get off on (not that I’d ever compare the rudimentary artistic philosophy of Lorelei Shannon to the visions of Peckinpah or Kubrick, but then I’m never, ever directly comparing good video games with good movies in general, either). And, for that matter, out of all video game genres, this particular sort of experience, even in pure theory, can only come from the adventure game — or, at best, an RPG which places much more emphasis on plot than combat or character leveling. Of course, whether that’s a good or a bad thing is up to you to decide for yourself.