Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh/YMMV

• Main
• Trivia
• YMMV
• Fridge
• Haiku
• Crowners
  • Awesome
  • Nightmare Fuel
• Wikipedia
• All Subpages
• Create New

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Although Marek is excessively creepy, he did succesfully save Curtis from having his mind taken over by the Hecatomb at the asylum. Then again, he was responsible for sending all the test subjects that Paul Warner got killed. Even if he didn't know what happened to them, he'd have to cover up the disappearances
  • Bob Arnold, according to Don Berg, the actor who played him. While he appears to be a know-it-all jerk, he's actually incredibly insecure and jealous of Curtis's seemingly perfect life, and may even harbor latent homosexual feelings for Curtis, which he hides by being a dick.
• Big Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The line dancing gangstas passing by when Curtis first visits the S&M club.
  • Trevor's story about his grandma, the rabbit and the potato.
  • Let's be honest. A lot of email jokes in real life can be qualified as this trope.
• Complete Monster:
  • Doctor Marek, for torturing Curtis Craig, for treating his patients like their lives mean nothing, for using Doctor Harburg as a pawn, and for sending his own patients to their deaths as guinea pigs for Paul Allen Warner's experiment.
  • Paul Allen Warner, for murdering Curtis's father because he objected to the direction the experiment went in, for making his employees come to work the next day after one of their own was murdered, for treating Curtis like a guinea pig and not a human being, for sending Curtis through the dimensional portal, for using the dimension to create illegal drugs through his own pharmaceutical company, for bragging to Curtis about what he had done with smug satisfaction and not a flicker of remorse, and so on. Paul Allen Warner is simply so vile and repulsive that he totally deserved his ultimate fate (see the Body Horror entry above).
  • Finally, the Hecatomb, for murdering five people (that is shown; it is strongly implied that there were more), and for traumatizing Curtis Craig in ways that Doctor Marek and Paul Allen Warner did not. However, the Hecatomb also has Tragic Monster mixed in there, due to events described in the Tomato in The Mirror entry in the main article.
• Crowning Moment of Awesome: Curtis manages to pull off two of these at the very end of the game. The first was to rip off the real Curtis Craig's organic oxygen mask and leave him to suffocate. Doubly impressive because it might actually be considered an act of euthanasia, and after all the stuff the Hecatomb and Real-Curtis pulled, you would not have thought geeky Curtis would have the guts to pull off that one. Go geek! The second was to throw Paul Allen Warner into the dimensional portal. Sadly, they do not show this, but it is strongly implied. The aliens had said that the portal was becoming unstable. When you consider all the stuff PAW pulled, he totally deserved being thrown into that unstable portal by Curtis and coming out a-head. Way to go, geek!
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Trevor Barnes - Wiseass, computer hacker, born potato-related story-teller: What's not to love? Compared to the other characters including Curtis who are varying shades of incompetent Jerkasses, Trever is a great guy with a working brain. In fact, when Something Awful did an LP on the game, the goons actually contacted the actor himself for an interview.
• Family Unfriendly Aesop: If you think you're going crazy, the last thing you should do is to go to a mental hospital!
  • Could also be a Space Whale Aesop, because if you go to a mental hospital, a human-turned-monster will try to drive you insane and take over your mind and body! Also, if you conduct experiments with a portal between dimensions, a guinea pig will develop psychic powers and tear apart everyone it can get at!
• Fridge Logic: You know what, the game is full of instances of this trope. You can find a nice list containing some of them right here.
  • Let's try this one: Bob gets murdered, and Curtis sneaks quietly into Paul Allen Warner's office - while a police officer is talking onto the phone. Curtis sees a piece of with three words on it. Curtis takes the paper and quietly sneaks out of the office. A question could be raised on how this piece of paper ended up on the floor at that time, to say nothing to why the cops did not notice it or take it. Another question could be raised on why Curtis should take the piece of paper. Paul Allen Warner oddly enough does not seem to notice its absence, and he should, because Curtis discovers that the three words are passwords to decrypting three confidential emails in Paul Allen Warner's account. One of the emails has Paul Allen Warner saying that security to the lower parts of WynTech needs to be increased and to kill any intruders they catch in there. Except for Curtis Craig - he is a special case, and if he gets caught down there, then he should be taken somewhere where he cannot hurt himself or anyone else. All that would be fine, except when Curtis finally gets to go down to the lower levels of WynTech, there is absolutely no one down there. He even finds a toy that he supposedly played with as a child in one of the hallways. This raises a question on why no one seems to notice the toy down there for all these years, as well as why anyone would let a child play with a toy in the hallways and right next to a room where a very illegal, immoral, secret science project is taking place. This should demonstrate a number of the numerous instances of Fridge Logic in this game. Whoever wrote the script should have consulted with a professional analyzer of storylines.
  • Here's another one: sometime after Bob's murder, you get to look into his cubicle and discover a button that had apparently fallen off his coat. Not only can you take the button, but you actually need to take it so you can show it to Dr. Harburg, open up a new branch of conversation, and move the game forward. This raises a question of how the police missed that button and why they did not take it into evidence. It also raises of question of why Curtis would check into Bob's cubicle and take a button that fell off of the guy's coat. Another question raised is why he would need to show a coat button to his therapist just to open uo a new topic of discussion and make the game progress forward.
  • Of all the people killed in the game why didn't the Hecatomb ever go after Paul Allen Warner? AKA the guy who is actually responsible for shoving him through the portal as a little boy, condemning him to a Fate Worse Than Death. I get that it probably is only growing in power in our world now that the Threshold Project is back online, and it probably needed PAW for that. But now that it is functional, and the Hecatomb is motivated by petty revenge (it hates "Curtis" for replacing it), wouldn't Warner be on The List? Killing Warner would even play into its goal of convincing Curtis he's insane, as Curtis dislikes PAW at least as much as Bob, and would certainly believe that he might have killed him.
• High Octane Nightmare Fuel: Despite its excessive amounts of Narm, the game still delivers a few honestly scary moments. Ironically for a game/film with such slick-looking gore effects, the game is at its best when it does subtle atmospheric horror.
  • Well, that's the problem with this game. It tries too hard to be scary, and simply comes off as disgusting most of the time. Disgusting and scary are entirely different concepts. Why, this troper could think of ways to make the game scarier.
  • One example of this is in the asylum. One patient is an old woman who keeps calling Curtis a freak and claims that she saw him and knows what he did. She actually bites her wrists, causing some bleeding, and holds her hands up high, saying a prayer to God. Curtis shows an appropriate demonstration of Squick towards that. That alone was nasty, but here comes another interesting detail. There are indications that the Hecatomb may have been acting through her (and maybe some other people there), as part of an attempt to drive Curtis insane. That scene certainly contained this trope.
• Narm:
  • Maybe it's just the way emails are written in excessively excited punctuation, but the supposedly disturbing emails Curtis receives come off as kind of overblown and ridiculous. One of them tells Curtis that with practice, he could be the next Ed Gein or Jack the Ripper, "who knows, maybe even a Hitler or a Stalin!"
  • After Bob dies, it's possible to call his cubicle. If you do, Curtis will hear his voice calling him a murderer and hang up...and then the phone starts ringing. If you pick it up, it's Bob again telling Curtis "Don't hang up on me!" It's meant to be creepy but sounds more like a joke than anything, and it's made funnier by the fact that music playing over the phone is a tinny 1992-quality midi version of what COULD be scary, but really really isn't.
  • Detective Powell comes off this way, hilariously overreacting to Curtis being a little out-of-sorts when being questioned while Bob's blood and guts are splattered all over the wall in plain view of Curtis, and harassing him to the point of stalking just to yell at him.
• Nightmare Retardant: Many of the scenes that were intended to be scary or disturbing just come off as incredibly goofy. For example, there's a scene where Curtis finds himself trapped in an insane asylum, tied up in a straitjacket...and it would be really creepy if not for the mental patient right next to Curtis, muttering lines like 'Disco dance! Disco dance!' and 'Everybody in the pool!'.
  • The same thing happens with the reoccurring monster hands popping out - They could be scary, but they look like cheap dollar store versions of Goosebumps props.
• Paranoia Fuel: Okay, imagine this. Someone or something existing in a dimension that is connected to ours. Few people even know that the other dimension exists, but even they do not know about the someone or something existing in the other dimension. This someone or something has telepathic and telekinetic powers. It can cause Mind Rape on people, it can manipulate objects and people, it can make projections of itself, and it can kill people. People who live in our dimension. It can kill people anytime and anywhere. That is what the Hecatomb can do. Serial killers do not have the abilities the Hecatomb has, but some forms of these abilities can be applied to them. Have fun falling asleep tonight!
• Player Punch: The death of Trevor, one of the few actually sympathetic people in the entire game and Curtis' minor crush. It's also the only murder which the player witnesses completely, instead of being hidden by blurry camera shots, adding to the punch.
• Rooting for The Empire: Okay, let's be frank here. The Hecatomb is an evil, psychic, demented, mass murdering monster who's trying to hijack Curtis's mind by driving him to insanity. But let's take a look at our other characters: Curtis is incompetent to the point of absurdity, Paul Allen Warner is remarkably unsubtle and his evil plan is not even remotely thought through, none of Curtis's cubemates are even remotely important until they're already getting killed, the psychiatrist has no idea how to do her job, and the cop is a terrible, terrible actor. It comes to a point where you realize that the Big Bad is the only one here who knows what the hell he's doing: At least the scenes where he's around are marginally interesting!
• The Scrappy: Even among the parade of unlikable and/or uninteresting characters that is Phantasmagoria 2, Detective Powell stands out. Some of the stuff she does when it comes to Curtis Craig is so stupid that it would make any real cop vomit.

"MY ASS!"

• • Spoony was quite disappointed upon realizing that she's one of the very few characters who survives.
• So Bad Its Good: The acting approaches this level at many points.
• That One Puzzle: The final puzzle of the game which is a Template:Media- alien panel to activate the portal back home, especially considering what passed for a "puzzle" up until that point.
• What an Idiot: A large number of characters in this game fall under this category, and some of them go into Too Dumb to Live territory. Curtis Craig is the worst offender. He tries to act like a private investigator, but he clearly has no concept of how to be one. He never tries to record or make notes of the various things he witnesses. He finds evidence, but he fails to show it to the police or the media. His idea of investigating boils down to wandering into areas blindly. He makes all the wrong moves with the police and other individuals. He is very lucky to even be alive by the end of the game. If only the horror genre would feature characters who behave intelligently and have some common sense.