Am I cheating by putting Phantasmagoria on this list? Quite possibly. But then, whether I am or not depends entirely on what you consider to be a video game. If we go by the traditional definition of interactive media that involves completing an objective through player input, then hell yeah it counts, and that's good enough for me. Released at a time when the popularity of interactive movie games had reached fever pitch, Phantasmagoria almost feels like a game intentionally made to be controversial in every which-way possible. Copious amounts of realistic gore (for its time) through the use of real actors? Check. A controversial rape scene? Check. Awful acting? You betcha. You couldn't have better ingredients for a cult classic if you tried. Phantasmagoria is chock full of gory scenes, but the one that takes the cake involves the game's main antagonist force-feeding a helpless woman the organs of dead animals through a funnel until she suffocates and dies from the process. If you didn't like it, why didn't you just say so? God, people are so ungrateful. https://youtu.be/G7ButWINW2Y
Joe is a freelance games journalist who, while not spending every waking minute selling himself to websites around the world, spends his free time writing. Most of it makes no sense, but when it does, he treats each article as if it were his Magnum Opus - with varying results.
