Phantasmagoria

Short Choicescript game with eight possible achievements (I managed six). A dream-deity from Greek mythology (I guess Phantasos judging by the title) has captured you, and puts you through a gauntlet of challenges to secure your freedom. You're time-limited, with a candle-wax meter counting down how close to doom you are. The choices are somewhat arbitrary, so there is no real way to strategize, and role-playing is also limited to a handful of flavour choices. But the game is short enough that it doesn't matter, it's classic choose-your-own-adventure: play it over and over until you find the one winning path. Fans of Fighting Fantasy, especially, should enjoy.

I debated back and forth on what score to give this game, so I'm going to break it down by points.

This is a short choicescript game where you have to defeat an evil spirit in a test involving an ever-shortening candle.

It has a cool yellow bar representing the candle, and its structure allows for quick replay.

When I saw the timer, I felt nervous, so the game was able to impact me emotionally. I played through to two different endings.

Very impressive for four hours. I know its silly, but I think the yellow bar is what bumped it up from 3 stars to 4 for me, it's just cool to me as a Choicescript author.

A very short Choicescript game, Phantasmagoria provides a single puzzle of escape, with several endings available. As a puzzle, however, it is fairly easy; it took me two playthroughs in five minutes to emerge victorious. The writing seems to be more essential here, but though it was horrific enough, I found it a bit too chaotic to properly enter the story. It has bits of Lovecraft, touches of Shakespeare, and references to both christian and pagan occultism, but all this was disjointed and lacked a certain coherence. It certainly has its scary elements, but it would have been more terrifying with a more solid foundation that could have suspended my disbelief.