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Studio: |
Sierra
On-Line |
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Designer(s): |
Lorelei
Shannon |
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Part of series: |
Phantasmagoria |
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Release: |
November 26, 1996 |
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Main credits: |
Director: Andy Hoyos Music: Gary Spinrad |
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Useful links: |
Complete
playthrough (5 parts, 290 mins.) |
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Basic Overview The market law is harsh,
but it is law: the massive commercial success of Phantasmagoria
more or less put an imperative to Sierra that a sequel should be produced as
soon as possible. There was one problem, though: Roberta Williams was not
interested. She had already endured the hardships of working on two equally
challenging and innovative games at the same time (King’s Quest VII and the first Phantasmagoria), and quickly understood that she could succeed
only if she’d hand the creative reins over to another designer for at least
one of them — thus most of the work on King’s
Quest VII ended up in the hands of Lorelei Shannon, a former writer of
guides and hintbooks for Sierra. For the next King’s Quest game Roberta was determined to take back control —
the Great Mother of the Kingdom of Daventry simply could not bear the idea of
abandoning her child for good. This meant that the sequel to Phantasmagoria would have to go to
somebody else. Who? Why — Lorelei Shannon, of course! The most important twist that Shannon
introduced to the Phantasmagoria
franchise was that the second game in the series would not be a sequel, or a
prequel, or, in fact, in any way
related to the first title other than through a general theme of horror and
the supernatural (as well as a brief Easter Egg reference). In this way, Phantasmagoria could become Sierra’s
own equivalent of The Twilight Zone
— the first such «thematic series» in the company’s history, presenting
players with story after story that would simultaneously challenge your brain
and creep out your senses. That said, I do not know if there were any serious
plans to make Phantasmagoria 3, and
this is largely irrelevant because Sierra’s former owners and employees would
lose the possibility to make any serious plans whatsoever pretty soon after
the shipping of A Puzzle Of Flesh. What is relevant is that, upon release, Shannon’s game made nowhere
near as impressive a mark on the gaming world as the original Phantasmagoria. Most of the reviews
were starkly negative, and sales figures are hard to locate — clearly, they
were nowhere near the level of Roberta’s brainchild. The main reason for this
was that the game already seemed to drag behind the times: FMV may have been
all the rage in mid-1995, but by late 1996, the format was entering its death
phase, as players who were formerly intrigued by gaining control over live
actors eventually became disillusioned by the cumbersome nature of the format
and the lack of genuine challenge. To smash the all-pervasive cynicism, a new
FMV game had to be damn, damn good,
and A Puzzle Of Flesh... just
wasn’t. Critics ripped it to pieces on all fronts — stupid, hole-ridden plot;
piss-poor acting; clumsy control schemes and stinted gameplay; frustratingly
trivial puzzles, other than a few frustratingly difficult ones. In short, all
the flaws of the original Phantasmagoria
multiplied by the lack of a novelty effect. At least Roberta Williams was
taking the first steps in a new, uncharted medium; Shannon, insisted the
critics, was merely repeating her predecessor’s mistakes. This judgement is only partially true.
As we shall see below, A Puzzle Of
Flesh does take home plenty of lessons, and it does improve in a whole
variety of ways on the flaws of Phantasmagoria
— even if these improvements were insufficient in their own time to redeem
the fate of FMV-based games in the eyes of consumers and critics. Most
importantly, though, Shannon’s game is simply a whole other beast. Where
Roberta’s fantasy, as it had always been in all her games, was fixated
squarely on the past (Phantasmagoria
is essentially Victorian Gothic horror stupidly placed in purely nominally
modern times), Lorelei instead conceived and produced a distinctly modern
game, not so much because of its sci-fi elements but mostly because of its
emphasis on relations, sexuality, and psychotherapy — all of these elements
still relatively novel for videogames (particularly the gay / bisexual
features of the characters). In some ways at least, it was a stab at making the single most serious and mature
game in Sierra’s history up to that point; certainly nothing even remotely
close to it could ever have been produced at LucasArts or, in fact, by any
other game studio in 1996. If you take a look through the user
reviews of A Puzzle Of Flesh on the
Steam, GOG, or other websites, a fairly frequent judgement, well visible
above the foundation of squarely negative assessments, will go something like
this: «Objectively, it’s quite a bad game that cannot be successfully
defended... but there’s something really special about it that makes me love
it in spite of all its awfulness». «Demented masterpiece», «something you
have to see to believe» — such phrasings are found commonly even in reviews
whose authors dish out one star out of five (then probably run back to
rewatch all the juicy scenes with sex and gore). My own position is even more
sympathetic: since I prize plot-based video games more for the effort
invested in world-building and immersing the player in the atmosphere than
for the actual «gaming» elements, I can easily forgive A Puzzle Of Flesh some of its more egregious flaws — and
wholeheartedly embrace and even fetishize the idea that no other PC game I
have ever played managed to be more disturbing and visceral. Well, there’s
always survival horror, of course, but that’s creepy feelings of a whole
other nature. Over the years, the game has managed to
accumulate a small, but loyal cult following, which has even prompted the
original lead actor, Paul Morgan Stetler, to set up a special channel in its
memory (‘Conversations
with Curtis’) — it ran out of steam fairly quickly after a set of curious
interviews with most of the other actors, but it does offer quite a few
goodies for those who are steadfast and true (the best gift is probably 25
minutes worth of terrific
quality uncompressed video from the game). That said, it would be useless
to ascribe this mini-phenomenon to anything other than sheer nostalgia, or to
deny that A Puzzle Of Flesh is,
first and foremost, a cultural artefact tightly restricted to its own epoch.
Our task, then, is to determine if there is any reason whatsoever to revive
that relic for modern or future players, other than purely historical, so
let’s get to it. |
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Content evaluation |
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One thing you can say for
sure is that Lorelei Shannon operates on a seriously broader scale than
Roberta Williams. If the
original Phantasmagoria was more or
less structured as a short story, with all of the game’s content packed into
one cohesive storyline, Shannon’s oeuvre feels more like a short novel, with
several connected, but distinct threads running through it — threads that
never really manage to smoothly connect at the end, but for a while,
intertwine fairly intensely for us to really notice that putting them all
together does not make too much sense. The main narrative concerns you playing
as one Curtis Craig, a young, nerdy, neurotic employee at a large
pharmaceutical company called Wyntech, where you typicall spend your days
confined to a tiny cubicle in which you mechanically write up assorted
documentation for various drugs and stuff. Apparently, this is an inherited
job, since your father used to work at the same place — that is, before he
was gunned down in cold blood right in front of his house, for reasons
unknown. This troubled past may or may not underlie the various illusions,
nightmares, and hallucinations that Curtis begins to experience on a regular
basis everywhere he goes or stays, be it at home, at work, or at either one
of the remaining two or three places in which the game generously allows you
to hang out. So it is Curtis’, or, rather, your sacred duty to get to the bottom of this situation, take a
little psychotherapy, unravel your twisted path, and find a suitably Freudian
cure for all the shit you have to endure. So far, this is all mostly Hitchcock’s Spellbound. Unfortunately, after a
short while Curtis’ surreal visions start to become supplemented with fairly
realistic — and gruesome — murders of his co-workers, one after another, at
which point it all shifts to Fincher’s Se7en.
There will be staplers, sledgehammers, electrocution, and other delightful
little inventions which certainly rival the almost equally inventive ways of
murdering people as seen in the original Phantasmagoria
— in fact, they almost rival the fatalities of Mortal Kombat, with the exception that everything here is taken deadly
serious. It will take Curtis some time to realize if it was really he who did away with all these
people... and the realization will be far from obvious. If Hitchcock and Fincher are too
lightweight for you, welcome to Venus
In Furs as the game throws yet another, almost entirely autonomous, line
at you. It is not enough that Curtis is having an affair with his pretty
straight work partner, Jocilyn, while at the same time experiencing a clear
pull toward his pretty gay work partner, Trevor; in addition to that, another of his co-workers, the
audacious Therese, insists on having him as her BDSM partner, because few
things in life are more fun than getting to whip the shit out of a skinny
nerdy guy with glasses. On the other hand, what’s better than a little
distraction at the local BDSM club when you keep getting hallucinations of
yourself as an axe murderer all day long? Throw that one in, too, with a
navel piercing on top. Finally, about halfway into the game it
becomes clear that there is going to be a major sci-fi twist to all of that —
involving no less than an alternate universe, an illegal barter system with
mysterious aliens, a substitution of identity, and a bizarre, messy finale in
which Freud, Stephen King, and, uh, Ed Wood are all invited on the
development team. This is where we fly out into yet another dimension, well
beyond The Twilight Zone, and begin
wondering about just how much Lorelei Shannon really wanted to bite off,
before the team went off the budget and was forced to cut more content than
Orson Welles on The Magnificent
Ambersons, ultimately reducing the last stretch of the game to a
senseless, barely comprehensible mess. I am not saying that, had A Puzzle Of Flesh been an actual novel
(and it is strange that Shannon, who would go on to become a professional and
frequently published writer, never attempted a novelization), it would have
become a genre-blending masterpiece of sci-fi horror. At best, it might have
enjoyed the popularity of a second-rate Stephen King work. But given that
there were actual movies that managed to eclipse whatever literary
significance there might have been in King’s oeuvres (such as Carrie or The Shining), an FMV video game based on that kind of subject could have been a success — at least,
in theory, what with the medium’s special advantages helping take the focus
away from the inane elements of the plot. However, the major problem is that the
plot of this game seems to be totally
subdued to the very fact of its being a game. When you put all of it together,
you do not get an impression of a cohesive story, whose separate elements all
serve any global, general purpose. The basic line of thinking here is more
like «okay, what should a modern,
progressively-oriented, innovative adventure game about the supernatural have
in it?» At least Roberta’s project followed some sort of unified, if
extremely naïve and shallow vision; Lorelei’s is just all over the
place. Need a bit of really brutal gore — check. Need us some rough and kinky
sex — check. Need aliens from another dimension — check. Need to expose
greedy, sinister, man-eating corporations — check. Need to promote
psychotherapy — check. Need a sympathetic gay buddy — check. Everything is
thrown at the walls with the primary purpose of Featuring Mature and Disturbing
Themes in a Video Game; the purpose of making you sit back and think on what
the hell it is all supposed to mean is distinctly secondary. When the ultimate truth is finally
revealed, it’s not even as if it does not make sense (because it does), or as
if it does not have any moral points to it (because it does — the moral of
the game is that everybody is an asshole). The worst thing is that it feels
like a barely believable copout. For about three quarters of the game’s time,
it is possible to keep an open tab on Shannon and even tolerate some of the
painfully generic psychotherapeutic clichés she flings at you from
inside the doctor’s office — since there is a genuine element of intrigue
involved. Once that intrigue gets murdered in a ridiculous gust of sci-fi
melodrama, the entire house of cards comes crumbling down. Could it have been
handled better if the game’s ending was not so rushed? If we were given an
extended chance to wander around the four corners of «Dimension X»? If we
were let in on more details from the early life of the «real Curtis» and the
«imitation Curtis»? If we actually got to understand how Jocilyn, the love of
Curtis’ life, got wind of the Project? If we got a better notion of the
significance of the entire BDSM angle to the story? I don’t really know the answer to these
questions; all I know is that, whenever I replay the game, I usually lose
interest right after the final murders, and absolutely hate to go through
Curtis’ final adventure in Dimension X (though, to be fair, the illusionary
sequence in which he is chased around the facility’s wreckage by his
zombiefied colleagues is creepy fun). But to me, that does not immediately
negate the impact of the main bulk of the game — and given how well
accustomed we are these days, for instance, to TV shows that start out great
and end on some ridiculous note of shame (just because the principal writer
never bothered to properly think out the ending when pitching the proposal),
there is no reason why the same kind of TV logic could not be applied to a
video game as well. If your ending seems to be taking a dump on everything
that made the game intriguing, just erase it from memory — and invent your
own, if it’s that important to you. To me, it is more important that out of
the three FMV games produced by Sierra, A
Puzzle Of Flesh is the one featuring the most realistic dialogue and
action sequences from its live actors. Gabriel
Knight: A Beast Within unquestionably had a far superior plot and far
stronger emotional highs, but Shannon really made a strong emphasis on her
FMV heroes behaving like real people in a real environment — for which
purpose she wrote tons of realistic, often (though not always) intelligent
and occasionally funny dialogue. Possibly my favorite parts of the game are
the ones in which you are allowed to simply cruise around your office,
phoning or directly hitting on your various co-workers — particularly Trevor
— and chatting them up on various topics, either related to your trials or just
completely off-the-wall. Naturally, Shannon ain’t no Tarantino when it comes
to disclosing the transcendental aspects of the mundane, but this here is
still a kind of dialogue that you will never, ever witness in any other
adventure game from Sierra On-Line: Curtis: Hey,
bud. How was your second date with the mysterious Jay, huh? Trevor: A dud.
Big time. I mean, once I got past the sexy eyes, the gorgeous cheekbones, I
saw the squid beneath the skin... Curtis: Oh,
what a drag. Trevor: You’re
telling me! He spent half the evening picking apart Bela Lugosi’s acting, and
the other half staring at his own bad self in the bathroom mirror! Curtis: He
doesn’t like Bela? Trevor: Mmm-hmm. Curtis: Well
piss on him, then! Is this great off-the-wall dialogue?
Not in the slightest. Is this the kind of dialogue you’d ever expect to see
in a 1996 adventure game? Certainly not. Is this the kind of dialogue that
two real people in 1996 could have been having between themselves? You bet.
Especially if both were fans of Bela Lugosi... and, maybe, a little Pulp Fiction. For all the corny sci-fi
shit that Shannon throws at us, A
Puzzle Of Flesh is surprisingly gritty and realistic in its smaller-scale
moments: the business stuff, the police procedure details, the swinging gay
attitude of the adorable Trevor, and even the portrayal of the BDSM community
(in which Shannon was seemingly quite invested herself, but I really don’t want to know). As long as
you never forget to apply the usual disclaimer — that you have to judge all
of this stuff against other video games, not against great cinema or
literature — the story and the overall everyday world of A Puzzle Of Flesh emerge as true accomplishments for their
specific era. It is just that, unfortunately, the flaws of the production are
so much in your face that they are often easier to concentrate on than the
virtues — probably a typical situation for each FMV game ever made. |
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This, alas, is an area
where kind words are hard to come by — which automatically means that, since A Puzzle Of Flesh is after all a
puzzle-solving adventure game, it is just as much a bad game as its predecessor in the series, which is not the same
as saying it is a bad experience, but still results in lots of merciless
one-star ratings from amateur reviewers. Fact of the matter is that, while
Lorelei Shannon did have her own vision for the universe, atmosphere, and
storyline of the game, she had relatively little interest in envisioning it
as a set of actual challenges. In fact, something tells me that she might
have thought any serious challenges would only confuse and irritate the
players by unnecessarily hindering them from learning what happens next.
Consequently, not only does the game fully embrace the simplistic mechanics
of Phantasmagoria, but it generally
makes things even easier for you, as if that was possible. Consider this: 1. Phantasmagoria
at least took place inside a huge mansion with many rooms, specific details
and objects within which could change from chapter to chapter, stimulating
exploration — furthermore, most of the time you could also make excourses
into the small, but important outside world, just to check if the solution to
your current puzzle lay anywhere within its boundaries. In contrast, the
world of A Puzzle Of Flesh is most
of the time limited to two measly rooms of Curtis’ apartment and the tiny
space of his work office — all the other areas open up only at specific time
intervals when they are truly needed. How hard can it be to do whatever it is
you’re supposed to do if your choices are that
limited? 2. While we may all generally hate
pixel-hunting for hotspots on the screen, A
Puzzle Of Flesh goes way too far in trying to eliminate that hassle. Your
cursor, an enlarged logo of the Wyntech corp, is absolutely frickin’ huge, and finding the right hotspot on
the screen is every bit as difficult as clicking on a blazing neon sign that
says CLICK HERE. In addition, the
number of such hotspots is extremely small, since, just as in Phantasmagoria, 90% of them serve
important pragmatic purposes — you will never have Curtis just
absent-mindedly comment on some insignificant detail for a bit of trivia or a
light joke (as could still be the case in Gabriel
Knight: The Beast Within). 3. Inventory objects can usually be
acquired only at the precise time moment when they are actually useful, never
earlier than that, so you won’t waste any time trying to fruitlessly apply
them to everyone and everything in sight. For instance, there is a table in
an auxiliary room at Wyntech which you can look at but can do nothing with.
On a certain day, a hammer appears there that you can pick up and use. Why
wasn’t it there from the very beginning? Because you’d have no need for it
(actually, not quite: the correct answer is that because you would have been
able to solve a particular puzzle earlier than necessary for Shannon to
progress the story). Other than that, «puzzles» are usually
of the same variety as in Phantasmagoria:
find the right object X, use it on the right object Y. The very first of
these was a methodological disaster that has since figured in nearly all reviews of the game, since (a) it
looks extremely silly and (b) it is encountered so early on that it is
encountered even by those reviewers who never go further than the first half
hour of the game in question. It is, in fact, so silly and so easy that
talking about it hardly counts as a spoiler: in order to retrieve your wallet
from under your couch, you have to send in your pet rat Blob after it — then
get her to come out by enticing her with a candy bar. Naturally, this is a
great opportunity for writing stuff like «yeah, that’s totally me starting my every morning» and such — but, in
Lorelei’s defense, this bit of nonsense was most likely put up there just to
give newcomers to the adventure game genre a bit of early training with the
inventory system; none of the subsequent puzzles dare to be that defiant about common sense. As in Phantasmagoria, progress in the game will typically depend upon
your exhausting your options — such as talking to all of your co-workers,
which is also a bit clumsy because there are no specific dialogue options,
you just have to click and click on them continuously until y’all run out of
things to say. One logistic decision is particularly questionable: during
Curtis’ therapy sessions, he can discuss various topics with his doctor by
presenting her with select inventory items out of his pocket — so, instead of
an actual verbal menu with options like «talk about parents», «talk about the
murders», «talk about BDSM», etc., you have to symbolically «give» the good
doctor bits of your mother’s lace, a button off a victim’s shirt, an
invitation to the club from Therese, etc. This seems to be less of an
artistic design decision and more of a last minute workaround in a situation
where you need a dialogue menu but
cannot have one just because the previous designer left you with a crappy
game engine. (Jane Jensen was able to overcome that obstacle by showing that
dialogue menus are by no means incompatible with the FMV system; Shannon,
apparently, did not care). All puzzles have completely
straightforward solutions; the option of choice is limited to the possibility
of answering in several different ways to E-mails from your friends (as usual
in such cases, I always recommend «sarcastic» or «funny» answers over
«straight» — there are no consequences anyway, other than receiving
correspondingly varying mini-answers). The only «big» choice you are allowed
to make comes at the very end of the game, triggering one of two possible
endgame videos — again, if you are too lazy to go back and replay the
sequence, I wholeheartedly recommend staying on Earth with Jocilyn, since the
corresponding mini-video is a tiny bit less «vanilla» than the other...
essentially, it does not matter, though. Most of the «non-standard» puzzles in
the game are every bit as trivial as the regular ones — typically, they
involve guessing computer passwords (which usually stare you right in the
face from less than two meters away), and at one point you are supposed to
gain entry into «The Pit» at the BDSM club by solving a construction puzzle
requiring the mighty intellectual level of a 2-year old (maybe it was
Lorelei’s subtle hint at the average IQ of the average visitor to a BDSM
club, but such offensiveness would sort of negate the entire point of
including that part, wouldn’t it?). There were, in fact, only two times in
the entire game where I got hopelessly stuck and had to submit to a
walkthrough. The first one required me to combine two objects in the
inventory in a pretty specific way to unlock a secret compartment — which was
pretty mean, considering that this was the very first time that the game
required you to combine anything and
that using both objects separately led to failure and not the slightest hint
that they should have been combined. The second one you have most certainly
guessed if you already played the game — and yes, it is yet another reason to
abhor the final section, taking place in «Dimension X». In order to get back
to Earth, you have to start up some sort of infernal engine by performing a
lengthy and tedious series of operations without an instruction manual,
essentially getting on by trial and error alone. This Incredible Machine-style monstrosity appears totally out of the
blue, feels more complicated than all of the game’s other puzzles combined, irrepairably ruins the
immersive effect, and seems to act as a time-wasting substitute for the lack
of a properly filmed ending. Imagine being able to take a day trip to London,
except you’ve been taken directly to Big Ben and have to spend the entire day
studying the mechanics of its cogwheels — this is the direct equivalent of
Curtis Craig’s adventure in Dimension X, no more and no less. If not for situations like these, one
might simply want to take it easy and accept that A Puzzle Of Flesh is the closest Sierra ever got to a simple
interactive movie, an experience that merely wants to put you in the shoes of
the protagonist, gently take you by the hand and guide you through a set of
easily openable doors, rather than make you wrack your brain. Unfortunately,
every once in a while this nice, perfectly enjoyable interactive movie just has to remind you that it is also a
piss-poor adventure game. It is entirely up to us, then, if we prefer to
dwell on this, venting our frustration in the form of one-star reviews, or try
to put the torture out of our minds as soon as possible and just move on to
discuss the juicy part of the experience — its atmosphere. Personally, I prefer
to take the positive route and vouch for the latter. |
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Every now and then, I come
across an assessment of A Puzzle Of
Flesh that goes something like, «this is the videogame equivalent of a
decent / tolerable / crappy B-movie», and for some reason, these comparisons,
understandable and justified as they are, irritate the heck out of me. Maybe
it is because, from this perspective, 99% of videogames ever made, even some
of the very best ones, are really equivalents of B-movies — after all, where
is that special videogame whose level of writing would be on par with Woody
Allen or David Mamet? In reality, videogames can allow themselves to be way
below the level of creative standards acceptable in more «noble» media when
this is compensated by the advantage of making you an active part of the experience. A Roger Corman movie is
certainly «B» when it is a movie; but make it into a good interactive movie, and presto, you’re
eligible for an upgrade. Let’s face it — would you rather be willing to play
a game based on The House Of Usher
or, uh, I don’t know, The Seventh Seal?
(And please do not rush to answer
even if you happen to be an intellectual snob...). In terms of sheer
atmospheric pressure, A Puzzle Of Flesh
is perhaps the single most unique, if not to say manipulative, game in the
Sierra canon — and much of this pressure is achieved almost by accident. One
thing that Shannon and her filming crew did not want to do was rely upon the
blue screen approach: apparently, they saw the results of the original Phantasmagoria as well as the second Gabriel Knight game and decided that
it all looked way too artificial and clumsy (in which they were absolutely
right). So most of the game was actually filmed in a real studio — and since,
obviously, Sierra lacked the budget to construct a large set, everything had
to be shot indoors. There are practically no outside shots in the game at
all. You have Curtis’ tiny two-room apartment, Curtis’ cramped working space,
some narrow corridors from Curtis’ hospital and Wyntech’s evil basement, Dr.
Harburg’s office, and a few other spots, movement between all of which is
automatic (you never see Curtis taking any form of public transport). Above everything else, this
makes A Puzzle Of Flesh
excruciatingly claustrophobic. The apartment is bad enough, but the sight of
Wyntech’s working space — a set of tiny cubicles separated from each other
with green panels, without a single window in the room — is enough to get you
thinking that one could so easily
go nuts in this kind of environment, even without a troubled alien past or a
psychotic mother hunting after you with a pair of garden scissors. Whenever I
had to spend any amount of time in that place, sorting out the E-mails and
recovering lost passwords, I eventually caught myself walking over to the
center of the room to take a drink from the water cooler just to escape that
painful feeling of being locked up — and that’s coming from a pretty
introverted person. A stark contrast is found
between Wyntech and the scenes in Dr. Harburg’s office, which were filmed in
broad daylight with the windows partially open and letting in natural
sunlight (at least, I think it’s
natural — it is hard to tell with all that video compression going on). Even
then, with the curtains partially drawn and electric lights providing their
own counterpoint from inside, the produced effect is odd rather than
optimistic: it’s as if we are being relocated from the hell of Wyntech into a
virtual «twilight zone», a limbo of sort from where there is a fifty-fifty
chance of things getting better or worse. In any case, heading off to those
sessions does provide the sense of temporarily stepping into a relatively
safe zone, and so do the occasional bits of relaxation with your friends
Jocilyn and Trevor in the Dreaming Tree
diner. Unfortunately, both locations are only available at specific times,
whereas the hell of Wyntech is pretty much always open — except for a few
times when the police are busy scraping off evidence from the latest murder. «Claustrophobic» is, of
course, only one of the associations; a far more intentional one was that of
«nastiness». Apparently, David Fincher’s Se7en,
which I already mentioned above, was a real influence on Shannon; and even if
she only borrowed the very idea of a sequence of exotically arranged killings
from the movie, without bothering to copy the idea of their symbolism, the
seemingly gratuitous violence is still unnerving when it is you who get to walk around the
premises and keep receiving hints that this might all be a result of your doings. (The first murder, for
instance, is not actually shown in its own timeframe, but only as a series of
flashbacks when Curtis arrives upon the crime scene). In any case, the claustrophobia
and the nastiness, like the weak force and electromagnetism, eventually turn
out to be two sides of the same coin — make you, the player, as uncomfortable
as possible. While I won’t go as far as to say that A Puzzle Of Flesh is capable of driving a sane person crazy, I
would certainly recommend you to stay away if you already have plenty of
psychological problems as such. As to what concerns the
BDSM angle... well, the entire thing is fairly clichéd and probably
not even up to the level of Fifty
Shades Of Grey, let alone anything more serious, but visually and
sensually it does fit in with the «nasty» feel of the game. There is no
attempt to somehow sugarcoat or romanticize the whole business — from the
unsavory types inhabiting Therese’s favorite club to the grossly grotesque
scene of Curtis getting his navel piercing to Therese’s own stalking behaviour,
it’s all about wallowing in delightful depravity, and when Therese herself
finally gets what’s been coming to her, it is probably the single most Se7en-like moment in the game — as in,
isn’t getting electrocuted in your own blood the highest possible BDSM
experience there is? It is highly likely that
you will walk away from the game feeling filthy; it is almost as likely,
especially in our deeply sensitive age, that you will walk away feeling
offended, one way or the other. If anything, it might not so much be the
equivalent of a B-movie as it could be the equivalent of listening to a G. G.
Allin record — okay, that might be going too
far by way of analogies, maybe swap that with The Birthday Party. It’s heavy,
really heavy shit, and certainly
totally un-fuckin’-believably heavy shit for Sierra On-Line: I am not even
certain that Ken or Roberta Williams actually saw the final product, or they and
their family values might have pulled the plug on it (then again, Ken was
probably way too busy selling Sierra’s ass out in 1996 to pay much attention
to the creative side of the business anyway). Oh, and yes, the less said
about the atmosphere of the game’s final segment, the better. «Dimension X»
was the one part of the game where they had no choice but to use the blue
screen approach, with Curtis’ sorry sprite lost and bewildered against an
alien landscape — which is not that badly portrayed, but can at best count as
a tiny appetizer for the real thing. (It’s a bit amusing to think that
precisely at the same moment when A
Puzzle Of Flesh was being released, Ken Williams was negotiating with
Valve over the publishing rights to Half-Life,
given how Curtis’ teleportation jump into «Dimension X» resembles, in more
ways than one, Gordon Freeman’s journey to Xen — and not only that, but both
protagonists have to carry out a brief mission of neutralizing the big baddie
and going back!). The imagery is not bad, the little alien amoebas are cute,
and the music is appropriately sinister, but you will be spending most of your
time dealing with the infernal engine machine anyway. In a perfect world,
Shannon and crew might have been able to properly depict «Dimension X» as a
wond’rous and desirable alternative to Curtis’ sorry existence in his Wyntech
cubicle, but... budget is budget. |
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Technical features |
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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? |
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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? |
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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. |
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|
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. |
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