Return of the Phantom

I was a silly little kid playing this on windows 97. Our first pc :) I think the game had 14 floppy disks to install it with originally. It was a pretty big box. I was worried originally as the original game REQUIRED a manual to load your saves or I think start a new game. it would pop up with a password box that had one letter filled in. "go to page 23, second paragraph, 3rd line second word." or something like that. We originally lost the manual so we would released the game until we saw an 'o' because the pass was opera then lol. No idea what the original devs were thinking back then when they implemented that. Glad its not in this version of the game :) Return of the Phantom was scary to me back then, so me and my sibling never beat or progressed the game. Back then these were crazy graphics, today the graphics of the game still look great! The game is a classic click and point puzzle. I'll update this review when I finish the game.

A classic... worth replaying for nostalgia's sake. Incredible how the mind still remembers what to do even after some 29 years

Um jogo surpreendentemente legal, e EXTREMAMENTE obscuro. Descobri por sorte e gostei muito.

I played this game in the 90s but never finished it. Now I've finally played it through to the end. Great game. Holds up well for any fan of point-and-click adventures. Works perfectly on Steam Deck.

Un bon petit point'n'click. Les animations en FMV ajoutent au charme rétro du jeu. Le fait que le personnage principal ne court jamais, même lors de scène se d'action ou stressante, est très comique même si cela ralentit grandement le gameplay.

This is by far one of the best and underrated games from the 90s. It's fully voice acted, you can die by jumping into the orchestra pit, the art while pixelated is beautiful and over all the game is VERY well made for a indie game. Don't even wait for a sale- this game is perfect. If you love mystery games or just are a phantom of the opera fanatic GET THIS GAME.

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.

MicroProse <3 NightDive

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!

Um Point & Click esquecido por todos. É interessante, gostei muito dos gráficos e da ambientação, as músicas e dublagens são bem feitas, só achei que os diálogos poderiam ter sido bem melhores, são 100% expositivos e óbvios. Eu recomendaria para quem curte P&Cs raros e mais lineares, com aquela pegada bem cinematográfica e pouco interativa.