#Phantasmagoria game play update#
If you haven’t played it, I recommend picking it up on Steam or GOG (the GOG version seems to be higher quality, but be aware: I had to manually update the bundled version of ScummVM to avoid crashes). The campy and quintessentially 90s plot of Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh is complicated and messy, so I won’t attempt to dissect it here. While the game has its fair share of problematic elements, its LGBTQ representation is remarkably progressive for the period in which it was released. And his best friend, coworker, and love interest, Trevor Barnes, is an out-and-proud gay man. Curtis is canonically and identifiably bisexual in the game, making him arguably the first playable LGBTQ protagonist in gaming history (among commercial games, at least). The story of A Puzzle of Flesh is unconnected to that of the original game, instead following the tribulations of Seattle-based office worker Curtis Craig. This horror adventure from Sierra On-Line was released in 1996 as a follow-up to Roberta Williams’ phenomenally successful Phantasmagoria. Sorry, did I say “none”? I meant exactly one: the inexplicable outlier of a game Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh. As for major studio games that have multiple prominent, canonical, authentic LGBTQ characters, you’ll find none. If you look hard enough, though, you can find some minor characters like Vivien Pentreath in Moonmist (1986) or the unnamed lesbian flapper in The Dagger of Amon Ra (1992). The lack of inclusion in pre-2000 era games is, unsurprisingly, a reflection of the level of social acceptance toward the LGBTQ community during that time. Before we had Ellie and Dina, Hammerlock and Wainwright, Snorpy and Chandlo, or any other outstanding 21 st-century queer characters, we had only the faintest glimpses of authentic LGBTQ representation in video games.
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