Working on my recent video article left me with a taste for FMV in my mouth, and I realized it had been months since I'd played a game in this format. So I reached waaaaay up on my shelf and grabbed my copy of one of the games that helped kill the genre, Sierra's big-budget follow-up to their hugely successful Phantasmagoria. Luridly subtitled A Puzzle of Flesh, this is not by any means a real sequel to the first game.

Don't get me wrong; it's got lots in common with Phantasmagoria--it's trashy, it's tacky, it's badly acted, it's badly cast, it's ugly, and it's short.

Also, like Phantasmagoria, it's lots of fun.

Playing Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh is like watching a very tacky low-budget horror movie. It's a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless.

The story involves a computer nerd named Curtis (Paul Morgan Stetler) with a history of mental illness. He lives alone with his pet rat Blob. He's dating a pretty co-worker (Monique Parent), and his best friend is Trevor, another co-worker. One of the things I appreciated about this story was that Trevor happens to be gay, and the fact that a straight man and a gay man could be best friends is presented as no big deal. Thank you, Sierra! (Shameless political aside: It is worth ruefully noting that right now a certain major new adventure game is having trouble finding a North American distributor because it contains a lesbian character.)

All of these characters work at a creepy, odd company that seems to have a lot to hide. Curtis has many confusing and troubled memories about his childhood, and these memories are tied up with the company as well. When he was a boy, his mother regularly tortured him and eventually committed suicide, and his father (an employee at the same firm) died mysteriously.

As if all this wasn't bad enough, Curtis is starting to hear things ... and see things. From his computer screen, from his telephone, even from his dear little pet rat! Obviously something's afoot. Then his co-workers start getting horribly murdered one by one, and there's mounting suspicion that Curtis could be the murderer. Even Curtis thinks it may be true.

He goes to visit the Obligatory Helpful Psychiatrist, who aids him in his quest to delve into his puzzling past.

The story gets wilder and wilder as Curtis gets closer and closer to the Obligatory Hideous Truth about himself and the company.

All pretty standard stuff, I agree. But I didn't load a game called Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh onto my hard drive expecting The Brothers Karamazov. Or even Riven, for that matter.

So how's the game play? Well, suffice it to say from a puzzle point of view this game doesn't have a shred of the ambition of Sierra's masterpiece The Beast Within. There are puzzles, to be sure, but they mostly consist of stumbling over a few passwords and clicking on everything possible to trip new video sequences. In this manner the game really feels more like an interactive movie than a game. And the weird thing is, I didn't mind that at all. It was fun slogging through this tacky story without having to get too bogged down in mind-spraining puzzles. Gameplay gets a harmless B.

The cast is not half bad, with one unfortunate exception. Stetler is simply inadequate as the lead. This is just more clueless Sierra moviemaking. They have this lead character who spends most of the story being wooed and bedded by hot blonde females, and they cast this totally unattractive dork with no body. Get with it, Sierra Casting! Don't make me stare at this guy's substandard face and torso for four disks and ask me to believe every hot chick he meets wants to have sex with him. Please. Because of this one person, acting gets downgraded to a C.

Visually, the game is just like the other two major Sierra video releases: adequate but flat and ugly. I give the graphics a C.

Even though as I was installing game I was offered an automatic Internet download of upgrades to the software, I still had some problems running A Puzzle of Flesh. There was a particularly problematic bug with the "Try Again" feature. When your character dies, you are given the option of starting over, restoring a saved game, or "Try Again." The Try Again option returns you to the point right before you made your fatal mistake.

Unfortunately, whenever I chose the Try Again feature, the game crashed. Not only crashed, but crashed permanently! I would get persistent "internal game error" messages until I completely re-installed the game! I finally learned that if I ignored the Try Again feature and simply restored a saved game after dying, I could avoid the problem. Still, it wasted a lot of my time.

If you're in the mood for something short and nasty and tacky, if you like video, and if you like the concept of an interactive movie, I can heartily recommend Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh. Other players may simply believe that I need therapy.

Final Grade: B-

System Requirements:
486/100
12 MB RAM
4X CD-ROM
Mouse
Sound board
Windows 95