So one of my obsessions is bad musicals. I'm really fascinated by musical theater in general, as song and dance are things I am very very bad at and as such enjoy very much when people are good at it. But I also love musicals as language and the wordsmithery of a Sondheim, for example, is very appealing to me. But lowbrow musicals are also fun. I just like them!
In fact, musical theory youtube makes up the bulk of my video essay consumption, and one of my favorites is Lindsay Ellis' video about Love Never Dies, the insane sequel to Phantom of the Opera. I have both watched Love Never Dies AND read the equally insane book The Phantom of Manhattan that Andrew Lloyd Webber commissioned, and they are some of the most entertaining pieces of bad media I've ever consumed; I highly recommend both.
So when I found out there was a 1993 DOS game called "Return of the Phantom" that was also a detective game I was very excited. Either it was good fanfic and thus entertaining, or bad fanfic and thus entertaining, and possibly it would be REALLY bad fanfic and it would join its brethren in the Bad Media Hall of Fame.
Unfortunately the game is the more rote kind of bad, and I'd really only rec it if you, like myself, hold a strange fascination for bad sequels to Phantom of the Opera. It's a very for-its-time game and as such not much fun, and the story is bizarre but largely because it makes the most boring choices possible.
[url=https://www.dragon-quill.net/17403-2/]It does have its moments, though.[/url]
Honestly this sequence with this image and the actor playing Raoul in like a vaudeville mustache made the experience completely worth it, and if the game had sustained this level of ham the entire time it would have been a masterpiece.
The game starts really well, with you playing an investigator called to find out who sabotaged the chandelier in the modern-day Paris Operahouse. It becomes apparent that someone is going around dressed as the old Phantom doing Phantomy things, and it appears he murders a young ballerina. This is good stuff!
Unfortunately it then decides to become a weird time loop story (what is it with this ♥♥♥♥♥♥-ass twist showing up all the time???), and you go back in time as the original Raoul and then second half of the game is just you playing out the plot of the original Phantom book/musical to a tee, except for the very end where you kill the Phantom instead of letting him go, destroying him in the future and preventing anything bad from happening again. It's stupid, misunderstands why the original ending worked, and the most boring route they could have taken. But yeah the big problem is that it goes from being a sequel to just being a beat-for-beat recreation, which is deeply weird. I wondering if they wanted to do a straight adaptation but thought the 'sequel' thing was better for PR?
The other problem is there's basically no gameplay. You walk extremely slowly across big rooms to talk to a few people, and then at the very end there are two small puzzles, but that's it -- most of the time is dead time waiting for the characters to walk. This is all extremely 1993, but nonetheless not a great gameplay experience.
Also this is a nitpick, but the rotoscoped animation was super bad looking. In Last Express it was part of a visual style that was about high contrast and constant movement, but here it's just out of place, looking weird and uncanny on normal pixel-art backgrounds.
So sadly this isn't as entertaining as I was hoping and has little to recommend it. Also, what is it with mediocre dudes trying to de-musical-ize their musical theater adaptations? Literally no one wants Phantom of the Opera to be gory and grimdark. It's a gothic romance and that's why it's successful. Read the room!
