Phantasmagoria (1995)
Phantasmagoria is a 1995 point-and-click video game made by Kronos Digital Entertainment and Infini Entertainment Technology.
It wants to unsettle you, and it takes its time getting there. Adrienne Delaney, a horror novelist, buys a sprawling coastal mansion with her photographer husband Don and starts poking through the rooms a previous owner left behind. That owner was a stage magician with a taste for the occult. Roberta Williams shot the whole thing with live actors composited into rendered sets, so every corridor feels like a haunted-house film you are clicking through. The pace is slow, the dread is patient, and the house keeps handing you reasons to wish you had stayed outside.
Quick answers
What is Phantasmagoria about?
It wants to unsettle you, and it takes its time getting there. Adrienne Delaney, a horror novelist, buys a sprawling coastal mansion with her photographer husband Don and starts poking through the rooms a previous owner left behind. That owner was a stage magician with a taste for the occult. Roberta Williams shot the whole thing with live actors composited into rendered sets, so every corridor feels like a haunted-house film you are clicking through. The pace is slow, the dread is patient, and the house keeps handing you reasons to wish you had stayed outside.
When was Phantasmagoria released?
Phantasmagoria was released on 1 August 1995.
Who made Phantasmagoria?
Phantasmagoria was made by Kronos Digital Entertainment, Infini Entertainment Technology and Sierra On-Line.
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Phantasmagoria in our writing
- Companion guide: Sierra On-Line: The Golden Age of the Quest
A few thoughts on Phantasmagoria
For more slow-burn horror where an ordinary space turns wrong, try We're All Going to the World's Fair, a quiet film about a girl who falls into an online horror ritual and cannot climb back out. Hellraiser: Hellworld plays louder and gorier, but shares the idea of a game that bleeds into real dread.
Haunted-mansion horror
Adrienne buys a sprawling coastal mansion once owned by an occult stage magician, and the house does not want to let go. If haunted-house dread is your thing, these cross into film and game with the same trapped-in-a-cursed-place unease, from a hellish theme-park nightmare to a survival-horror descent through rooms that hide worse things.