YMMV / Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • 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.
  • Curtis's mom. There is the possibility that the Hecatomb committed Mind Rape on Curtis' mother - the same way it did to Curtis, and that the Hecatomb was acting through her and eventually had her kill herself to traumatize Curtis.
• Awesome Music: "Rage", the song that plays in the credits. Catchy techno beat, impressively angsty lyrics, the singer's voice and "raaaaaaaaaaage" screams make it quite badass and cool to listen to.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The line dancing gangstas passing by when Curtis first visits the S&M club.
  • Trevor's story about his aunt, 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: Paul Allen Warner is the corrupt head of the pharmaceutical company WynTech. In the past, Warner discovered an interdimensional portal and began experimenting by sacrificing mental patients to the portal, throwing a young Curtis Craig through the portal when he couldn't find another subject in time. Warner also murdered Curtis' father when he objected to the experiments. Warner eventually discovered a way to use the portal to create a highly addictive drug which he planned to distribute through WynTech and get the entire populace hopelessly addicted and in his thrall, bragging to Curtis about what he has done with smug satisfaction and not a flicker of remorse.

• Cult Classic: Received poorly at its release, the game now has a relatively sizable fanbase, helped by Spoony. In 2021, Paul Morgan Stetler launched the "Conversations With Curtis" series, in which he interviewed other members of the cast and development team.
• Die for Our Ship: An In-Universe occurrence. You ever get the feeling Therese and Trevor's death were intentional in order to make Curtis/Jocelyn work?
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Trevor Barnes - Wiseass, computer hacker, born potato-related story-teller: What's not to love? In fact, when Something Awful did an LP on the game, the goons actually contacted the actor himself for an interview.
  • One character in one of Curtis' flashbacks is pretty popular; a fidgety asylum inmate fiddling with another inmate's hair that, when clicked on, convulses and blurts out nonsensical word salad phrases like "DISCO DANCE DISCO DANCE" or "THAT'S MAH BARBIE DOLL!" in a Bobcat Goldthwait-esque voice. Helps that the game's director played this guy.
• Ho Yay Shipping: The majority of this game's fanbase is built upon the seldom wishes and desires of Curtis/Trevor and the painful reality of it never happening.
• LGBT Fanbase:
  • Has garnered one due to featuring what's believed to be the first playable LGBTQ+ character in a video game ever in the form of Curtis — especially noteworthy since bisexual men were still underrepresented in media well into The New '10s, and arguably still are compared to other LGBTQ+ identities (especially jarring since some surveys suggest they might make up the largest individual group by self-identification). By the 2020s, it's not unheard of for Curtis to be called gaming's original "bicon".
  • The fact that Trevor is a gay man who's treated sympathetically by the narrative and who may be the most genuinely caring toward Curtis of all three of his potential love interests also earns a lot of respect from LGBTQ+ fans for being exceptionally Fair for Its Day, even if Bury Your Gays still regrettably kicks in by the end.
• Memetic Mutation: Spoony helped spawn quite a few for the game with his LP.
  • I heard that, Curtis! ^Explanation At one point Curtis badmouths Warner right in front of his office. It soon became a Running Gag for Spoony to say that every time Curtis does it again, no matter where he is.
  • Yelling "PHANTASMAGORIA!" in a dramatic voice during the game's more mundane and boring sections.
  • DISCO DANCE DISCO DANCE ^Explanation Yelled by a nonsense-spewing asylum inmate in one of Curtis' hallucinations.
  • My ass! ^Explanation Said twice by Detective Powell to dismiss one of Curtis' claims. Spoony turns it into her Catchphrase.
• 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' behavior and generally being too over-the-top and silly to take serious.
    Curtis: Detective, you have to listen to me—
    Detective Powell: I don't have to listen to dick!
  • The Hecatomb loses a lot of his scariness factor when he decides to engage in snark.
    Curtis: I didn't do this to you! I'm a victim, too!
    The Hecatomb: Poor baby.
• Nightmare Retardant: Many of the scenes that were intended to be scary or disturbing just come off as incredibly goofy.
  • 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.
  • The Hecatomb holding up the severed head of Curtis's mom? Scary. Using it to fire a laser beam at Curtis? Not as much.
• Padding:
  • There's a lot of this in the office scenes, with characters regurgitating similar info over and over. If you shaved down all the pointless scenes, the game could probably fit on 3 discs instead of 5.
  • There's also the odd moment of having pointless FMVs; for example: when you click on Curtis' bedside cabinet, you get a really quick FMV of him opening it. Like every other FMV, they're completely skippable with a simple click, so it's not too annoying though.
• 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 and a Jerkass to boot. 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. The cop is completely terrible about doing actual police work. 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. Spoony was quite disappointed upon realizing that she's one of the very few characters who survives.
  Detective Powell: MY ASS!
• So Bad, It's Good: The acting approaches this level at many points.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: As Spoony pointed out, one of the songs in the Borderline club sounds suspiciously like the theme to Mortal Kombat.
• That One Puzzle: The final puzzle of the game which is a confusing-as-hell◊ alien panel to activate the portal back home, especially considering what passed for a "puzzle" up until that point.
• Throw It In!: According to the director, the line dancers outside the bondage club were just a bunch of random street performers who happened to be in that alley that day so he asked them to stroll past the camera in one shot for a quick gag.
• Too Cool to Live: Of all the characters that could get killed, why did Trevor, the single most likeable character in the game have to be one of them?
• Values Resonance: Even compared to today's stories, Trevor is a positive, well-done, realistic gay character, who isn't solely defined by his sexuality. Paul Mitri (the actor who portrayed) got a lot of praise from the fanbase because of this.

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