Fascination is the conclusion of Muriel Tramis' erotic trilogy that started with Emmanuelle and continued with Geisha. Though all three of them are labeled adventures, they are actually quite different. Emmanuelle featured an almost RPG-style open ended gameplay with unrestricted movement, money and status bars. Geisha was mainly a set of arcade and puzzle games wrapped into a story. Fascination however, Fascination is a classic adventure game: a murder mystery, to be exact.
For starter, you play a woman in this game—a fact that won't make any Roberta Williams fans raise eyebrows, but in this case it seems as if the designer made the choice only as an excuse to flaunt mildly erotic, useless scenes such as you taking a shower. Another big problem is that you can't do much that's not related to the story, and there's no going back, so if you forget to snap a paper in the hotel, you have to restore an old save. This is made worse by the fact that some puzzles are not very logical, and it can takes hours to find the solutions. Apart from these gripes, Fascination is a good murder mystery, with interesting plot and some good puzzles. Beware of pixel-hunting, and save your game often if you want to finish this quirky game.
As you progress through the game, you realise that it isn't very flexible. The route you're supposed to take is pretty clearly defined. The very nature of interactive games is such that you can't go wandering off where you please. There just isn't room for all that extraneous data. This means that all you need to do is to be persistent. Collect everything you can, try using everything you can and make the odd logical leap. For example, there's a wall-socket, an adaptor and a toothbrush with different voltage settings. How much lateral thinking is required to bring these three items together? And when you do, lo!—another item is discovered, which interacts with several other items later in the game. This is pretty much how you progress through the game that is Fascination.
A little sexy game with not much of a story or gameplay, but since it's easily digested and disposed of, it doesn't hurt much. Uneven graphic and sound quality doesn't help matters much, as you don't get to appreciate the quality art that made other Coktel Vision games so amazing so…your call. This is game is flawed, but not to the point I would call it a bad game. It's just not a good game.
