Phantom

(some spoilers)

Phantom is a choice-based work that revisits the tale of the Phantom of the Opera. As the game’s opening text reminds us, this story has taken on many forms — from Gaston Leroux’s original novel from the early 1900s to the classic silent film version to several other movie versions to the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (currently the longest-running show ever on Broadway).

At its beginning Phantom asks us to reconsider the character of the Phantom. We even get to choose our preferred version — the psychopath, the wronged man out for retribution, or the romantic. I interpreted this as the game giving me a choice of which Phantom would appear in the story. I wasn’t sure how much I liked this choice, though, as much of what makes the Phantom compelling is that he is all of these things. As the game’s intro text says, the Phantom is a “singular paradox: a monster with pathos, a being who evokes both sympathy and horror. He is a person we simultaneously pity, admire, and despise.” I wouldn’t say the Phantom is the first such character in the horror genre, though; the monster in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein probably earns that nod.

However, the choice of my favorite version of the Phantom doesn’t turn out to affect Phantom that much. I played through the game three times and got essentially the same story each time; it only differed in minor details here and there, especially near the end. Despite its semblance of choice, then, Phantom is not interactive so much as it is yet another version of the Phantom’s story.

And this story is, curiously-enough, focused more on Christine Daae, the young woman who accepts the Phantom’s offer of music lessons. Over the course of the game she manipulates and backstabs the other characters in the story in order to advance her music career, including (perhaps, depending on your interpretation) the Phantom himself. As the player, you don’t have the choice to change Christine’s actions or character. She becomes, in effect, the monster in Phantom.

I like the story of the Phantom of the Opera and find it compelling, and the character change from a naive Christine to a more ruthless one is a new twist, but overall Phantom doesn’t do enough with the story’s interactive possibilities for my taste.