Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh - Production

Production

Lorelei Shannon, who had previously served as a writer on the Roberta Williams games King's Quest VII and The Dagger of Amon Ra, was selected to take on the task of writing and designing the sequel to Williams' Phantasmagoria. While the first installment was a supernatural horror in the tradition of The Shining and the works of Stephen King, Shannon redeveloped the series into a more modern, urban setting and utilized a psychological horror approach with science fiction undertones; Shannon has said the game was influenced by such authors as Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson, and was influenced visually by Seven. Some reviewers have also noted a slight plot similarity to the film Jacob's Ladder.

While Phantasmagoria was shot with live actors super-imposed in bluescreen backgrounds, A Puzzle of Flesh was filmed entirely on set and on location, not unlike a regular feature film (although the game's final scenes, in the Alien World, were shot on bluescreen). Filming took place in and around Seattle, Washington from February to September 1996. Shot on Digital Betacam, nearly four and a half hours of video was shot, from a script over 200 pages long. The entire budget for A Puzzle of Flesh was roughly around four million dollars.

For a while, Sierra was planning Phantasmagoria 3, and had asked Roberta Williams to return as its lead designer. However, after the commercial disappointment of A Puzzle of Flesh, along with the decline of the point-and-click adventure with interactive movie genres, the project never materialized.