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You play Adrienne, who had just moved into a new mansion with her hubby Donald. The house is changing him and you must discover its secret before he or the house kills you.
In general, Phantasmagoria found only lukewarm reviews, which maybe the reason that Roberta Williams retired from game design. Most reviewers recommend playing Gabriel Knight II instead, but some nevertheless have fond memories of this game.
As far as I know, the 7 CD record that this game set has never been broken. It should be noted that the high number of CDs was in part not due to technical reasons, but convenience for the player. Each CD represents one of the seven days; if data are needed on more than one day, they will be found on all the relevant CDs, thus completely avoiding the dreaded disk-swapping. At the time of release, the game could have been packed on five CDs; with the video compression available a decade later, on two.
This is interesting in connection with a detail that was often the object of criticism or scorn: that Adrienne (played by Victoria Morsell) wears the same clothes all the time. Roberta Williams said in an interview that this was necessary given the freedom of action the game offers:
The reason she wears the same clothes for several days is because this is an adventure game rather than a movie. In a movie, the script writer can control the action, the days, wardrobe, etc. In an adventure game, the player is much more in control than the script writer. The player can have Adrienne do whatever he or she wants (to a great extent) throughout the game. Therefore, I, as the script writer, have no idea when the player may want Adrienne to enter the carriage house and look into one of the stalls, for instance, or go into the Antiques Store and ask Lou about buying the crucifix. She can do things like this in various chapters of the game. There are many instances where the player can decide when to have Adrienne do something and I, as the script writer, couldn't possibly know when the player would make these decisions.
As the designer of the game, I have two ways of going about the problem of costume changes. I could put a tighter reign on gameplay (read: interactivity) and not allow much decision on the part of the player to have Adrienne do things, thereby allowing many more costume changes on the part of Adrienne; or I could allow more decision making on the part of the player in regards to Adrienne, but not allow any costume changes. Therefore, we can shoot many more things for Adrienne to do, but in order not to become a nightmare of shooting many different scenes in all kinds of costume changes, we hope that the player will understand the tradeoff: less costume changes, but more control of Adrienne's actions on the part of the player.
In the light of the fact that there was a CD for each day this is not entirely true. The animations, in different costumes, could well have been put on the relevant CDs. Not that I think it's important: I always thought this argument kinda silly, maybe because I'm mainly used to playing RPGs, where costume changes, unless they are part of the gameplay, are unheard-of, just as comic book characters tend to wear the same things all the time. It is however an interesting example of the additional challenges that a game designer faces as graphic capabilities increase.
Phantasmagoria was one of the last game Roberta Williams designed (she was, by the way, not involved in the 1996 non-sequel Phantasmagoria II). In one interview (linked below) she has declared that if she had to pick a single game that best represents her achievement and her career as a game designer, it would be Phantasmagoria.
