The only thing worse than a bad game is a mediocre game that couldâ€™ve been really good. So many questions are left unanswered, you may find yourself watching the endgame again to see if you missed some crucial video sequence. It feels distinctly tacked-on, as if some office bean-counter in Sierraâ€™s accounting offices suddenly realized they couldnâ€™t afford to ship an eight-CD game, so the remaining content was crammed into 5 discs and sent out the door. Veteran adventure gamers will reach the end of A Puzzle of Flesh before they know it (possibly at around ten hours of gameplay / video footage) and even the finale will be an incomprehensible letdown. Most of the game consists of moving the mouse cursor around until it changes color, indicating a hot-spot you can click on to see another segment of full-motion video. And what little gameplay Phantasmagoria 2 offers is hardly challenging. But at the same time it’s a horribly campy and not that well-acted B-movie horror, as was the original, and you’ll quickly realize it’s even more movie than game this time around.

In its best moments, A Puzzle of Flesh owes to the deeply weird visions of filmmaker David Cronenberg. Itâ€™s definitely not the usual horror clichÃ©. All was going well until one of Curtis’ coworkers gets killed and crucified, leaving poor Curtis in a deranged state as the cops tie him to the murder (he remembers nothing of the event). As the story begins, Curtis has just ended his stay in an asylum, and heâ€™s started working at Wyntech.

The game casts you as Curtis Craig, a young man who remembers very little of his extremely troubled past. Phantasmagoria 2 has a more original and complex premise than any of Sierraâ€™s previous forays into the horror genre.

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