Return of the Phantom

I was so excited when I heard this classic adventure game was coming to Steam and am so glad to finally get it. It is a classic from the early to mid nineties. You play a French detective trying to track down the Phantom of the Opera as he strikes again a century after he committed his infamous attack on the Paris Opera House. After some sleuthing and cluefinding, he knocks you out and sends you back in time to 1881! I think I played this as a kid, but barely got very far.

Отличная, детективная игра.

Mediocre little adventure game with cool setting, easy puzzles, cliche story, terrible ending. I recommend it only because its so short that it's worth at least experiencing. Also because its the same engine and developer as Colonization, one of my favorite games ever. Otherwise it does not really stand up. + Cool setting + Interesting villain - Cliche story - Easy puzzles except for... - Horrible maze puzzle where sometimes backtracking leads you to entirely different rooms - There is FMV but even though the clips are mere seconds in length they are still so badly acted as to be more humorous than anything else - There are so few puzzles that the vast majority of the gameplay is literally waiting for your character to slowly walk from one side of the screen to another - One of the shortest games by a major studio I've ever played **SPOILERS** - Terrible ending - "it was just a dream" - Really lazy time-travel mechanic where, to save development money, almost nothing about any of the locations changes - Game can't decide if the villain is an evil genius or a paranormal entity. Really muddles the story even further

MicroProse <3 NightDive

Return of the Phantom debe ser de lo peor que salió en lo que fue época dorada de las aventuras gráficas. Lo único rescatable son sus animaciones que en algunas partes alcanzan un realismo muy bueno para el pixel art. Pero lamentablemente se debieron haber gastado todo el dinero en eso porque prácticamente no hay puzzles. La mayoría de las cosas se activan simplemente porque terminamos un diálogo y no por una clara relación causa-consecuencia. El juego tiene un laberinto en el cual, hasta donde yo se, no hay pistas sino que hay construir un mapa lo cual me parece un delirio y un intento burdo por alargar el juego. Obviamente al darme cuenta de eso busqué una guía para pasarlo. De esa forma el juego dura unas 3hs y creo que si le hubiesen puesto que con doble-click cambiabas de pantalla de inmediato duraba la mitad. El trabajo de voces termina siendo raro para los parámetros actuales pero eso no me terminó restando puntos. La historia es correcta. Puntaje: 5/10

So one of my obsessions is bad musicals. I'm really fascinated by musical theater in general, as song and dance are things I am very very bad at and as such enjoy very much when people are good at it. But I also love musicals as language and the wordsmithery of a Sondheim, for example, is very appealing to me. But lowbrow musicals are also fun. I just like them! In fact, musical theory youtube makes up the bulk of my video essay consumption, and one of my favorites is Lindsay Ellis' video about Love Never Dies, the insane sequel to Phantom of the Opera. I have both watched Love Never Dies AND read the equally insane book The Phantom of Manhattan that Andrew Lloyd Webber commissioned, and they are some of the most entertaining pieces of bad media I've ever consumed; I highly recommend both. So when I found out there was a 1993 DOS game called "Return of the Phantom" that was also a detective game I was very excited. Either it was good fanfic and thus entertaining, or bad fanfic and thus entertaining, and possibly it would be REALLY bad fanfic and it would join its brethren in the Bad Media Hall of Fame. Unfortunately the game is the more rote kind of bad, and I'd really only rec it if you, like myself, hold a strange fascination for bad sequels to Phantom of the Opera. It's a very for-its-time game and as such not much fun, and the story is bizarre but largely because it makes the most boring choices possible. [url=https://www.dragon-quill.net/17403-2/]It does have its moments, though.[/url] Honestly this sequence with this image and the actor playing Raoul in like a vaudeville mustache made the experience completely worth it, and if the game had sustained this level of ham the entire time it would have been a masterpiece. The game starts really well, with you playing an investigator called to find out who sabotaged the chandelier in the modern-day Paris Operahouse. It becomes apparent that someone is going around dressed as the old Phantom doing Phantomy things, and it appears he murders a young ballerina. This is good stuff! Unfortunately it then decides to become a weird time loop story (what is it with this ♥♥♥♥♥♥-ass twist showing up all the time???), and you go back in time as the original Raoul and then second half of the game is just you playing out the plot of the original Phantom book/musical to a tee, except for the very end where you kill the Phantom instead of letting him go, destroying him in the future and preventing anything bad from happening again. It's stupid, misunderstands why the original ending worked, and the most boring route they could have taken. But yeah the big problem is that it goes from being a sequel to just being a beat-for-beat recreation, which is deeply weird. I wondering if they wanted to do a straight adaptation but thought the 'sequel' thing was better for PR? The other problem is there's basically no gameplay. You walk extremely slowly across big rooms to talk to a few people, and then at the very end there are two small puzzles, but that's it -- most of the time is dead time waiting for the characters to walk. This is all extremely 1993, but nonetheless not a great gameplay experience. Also this is a nitpick, but the rotoscoped animation was super bad looking. In Last Express it was part of a visual style that was about high contrast and constant movement, but here it's just out of place, looking weird and uncanny on normal pixel-art backgrounds. So sadly this isn't as entertaining as I was hoping and has little to recommend it. Also, what is it with mediocre dudes trying to de-musical-ize their musical theater adaptations? Literally no one wants Phantom of the Opera to be gory and grimdark. It's a gothic romance and that's why it's successful. Read the room!

Took me 3 hours to complete. Enjoyable and fun. The only thing I didn't care for was you can only walk and it is slow.