Phantasmagoria is Sierra's notorious 1995 horror epic, conceived by Roberta Williams as a deliberate departure from the studio's whimsical adventure roots. Spread across seven CD-ROMs, it uses full-motion video, filming live actors composited over pre-rendered backgrounds, to tell the story of Adrienne, a novelist who moves with her husband into a remote mansion once owned by a murderous stage magician. As she explores, the house's dark history seeps into her marriage, and her husband's descent into violence drives the mounting dread.

The game became a lightning rod for the era's debate over graphic content, drawing censorship and controversy for its gore and a disturbing assault scene. As pure adventure design it's fairly gentle, mostly point-and-click exploration with a chapter-based structure, and the acting and effects look dated now. But it stands as a landmark of the FMV boom, a moment when developers genuinely believed interactive movies were the future. It endures today as a fascinating time capsule of mid-nineties multimedia ambition, best appreciated by those interested in the history of the medium as much as in the scares.