Welcome to the new blog. I'm starting kind of tame (I think) but expect the games to get really bizarre very soon.
The 7th Guest was released in April of 1993. looked like one of the coolest things ever. Full-motion video in a game! Creepy atmosphere! Logic puzzles! Ok, I was kind of a nerd (was? kind of? I hear you). The problem was, our family computer could run it because our first PC was missing a crucial component. A CD-ROM drive. 7th Guest was one of the first games to be released solely on the CD format.
Eventually, we tried to upgrade our computer. We bought all the parts, installed them, and discovered that the memory in the computer was actually faulty. So, we got a new computer. This one had a CD-ROM drive! Unfortunately, enough time had passed that 7th Guest was not a going concern on the Best Buy PC shelves. A couple more years later, and I finally found it! A greatest hits-style re-release of the 7th Guest. I got it home, booted it up, and nothing. Turns out the disc was defective. So, I gave up on the game.
I had kind of forgotten about 7th Guest until I started scrolling through the massive list of games in eXoDOS. Since it was right there, I had no excuse to not install it and finally play this game that had eluded me for nearly 30 years.
Getting into the game, the story is laid out in a full-motion video storybook. Basically, a strange old homeless man named Stauf kills a woman and takes her purse. That night, he has a dream about a wooden doll (huh?). He then carves that doll and trades it for room and board at a tavern.
Eventually he becomes a successful toymaker (but what about the murder??)...until the children that are given the toys mysteriously start dying. Stauf holes up in an obligatory creepy mansion at the edge of town and is never seen again. In a convenient plot point for the game, he also begins having dreams about puzzles that he starts to create and leave in various rooms around the mansion.
As for the game, it's played from a first-person perspective where you never see your hands or anything in front of you. When you start the game, you are in the foyer of the 1st floor. There is a cinematic where you meet the 6 guests (hey, I thought this was The 7th Guest??) that were invited to the house at some point in the past. You can tell this because they are all presented as ghostly transparent.
I read in an interview that this was done because the actors were all filmed with a blue screen around them, and that screen left a noticeable line around their bodies...so they made them ghostly to hide it.
Anyway, you move around by clicking near the edge of the window (a skeleton hand beckons you if you can move that direction) and a pre-rendered movement animation happens. Once it stops, occasionally there are some interstitial clips, but most of the time you keep moving until you enter a room. In the room, you are met with a puzzle.
Once the puzzle is solved, you will see another video that helps bring the story along.
Usually, after finishing a puzzle, the room locks so you can't return. That helps making the wayfinding much easier.
I'm not going to go into much more detail about the game, as I don't want to spoil it for anyone that is intrigued and wants to play it for themselves.
So, how did I feel about the game after waiting since 1993 to play it? I began really getting into it, and was actually invested in the story. Which is frankly unusual for me. I normally don't care about the story. A few things though hindered my enjoyment to the point where I abandoned the game.
First of all were the controls. I don't necessarily mean the ones to move you around the mansion, but those were clunky in places as well. I mean specifically with some of the puzzles. A couple of them needed pretty good accuracy, and when playing the puzzles, your cursor becomes a googly eyeball. When trying to do something exact like pointing at a certain letter or a key on a piano, that precision is key.
Next was that a lot of the puzzles weren't terribly interesting. Most of them came from 18th Century puzzle books, so I've seen most of them many times before. Granted, that may be an artifact of playing it 30 years later. There are two chess puzzles that are the same basic premise, just using different pieces. There are also coin and card puzzles which are the same basic puzzle. That disappointing, especially since those actually come around later in the game.
There were two puzzles that ultimately caused my interest in the game to crash to the point where I fired up YouTube to watch the ending. One was an interminably long Simon-style puzzle in the piano room. If you missed a note, of course the entire process started over. The computer moved very slowly, and your key presses weren't always reliable. After the third time of having to start over because I couldn't push the right key, I rage quit.
Second was the chess-themed Bishop Swap puzzle. It's a simple puzzle where you need to put the 4 black bishops where the 4 white bishops are and vice versa. It would be simple except the game blocked any move it didn't want you to make, even if it was legal. So you had to try and figure out how the game wanted you to solve the puzzle, instead of just solving the thing. Very frustrating.
Overall, I am happy I finally got to play The 7th Guest, although I was a little bit let down by the game as a whole. Maybe if I didn't have the experience with puzzles and escape room style games, I would have found it better. I am still impressed with how the designers worked around technical limitations to make a puzzle game with a nicely put together creepy overtone.
I know there was a sequel called The 11th Hour. I've heard it's pretty bad. However, maybe it's weird enough that I'll have to tell people about it here?
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