(Note: My reviews will always attempt to remain as spoiler free as possible.)
What is this game?
The 7th Guest is an interactive movie puzzle adventure game produced by Trilobyte and released by Virgin Interactive Entertainment in 1993. It was revolutionary for its time and also one of the games that helped with the standardization of CD-Rom drives which were not yet common. The 7th Guest is a first person adventure where your character begins the game trapped inside a dark and unsettling mansion built by Henry Stauf a sinister toymaker. Your character known only as "Ego" can't remember who they are or how they got into the mansion first place. You must solve puzzles to unlock rooms and progress the story.
Things I loved.
I said in my Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis review that I have quite a bit of nostalgia blindness toward it. This game is no different. I normally don't care for "scary" games but maybe because I played it when I was younger I developed some kind of bizarre fascination with it. Regardless of how it happened, I really love this game.
I think the story is great. There are six guests in the house invited there by Henry Stauf, a toymaker of some esteem that became a recluse. They are to spend the night in the mansion and perform a task Stauf has set for them involving a seventh guest. In exchange Stauf will give them their heart's desire. The catch? Only one of the six guests can complete the task and walk out with the prize. Your character, Ego, has no memory of who he is or how he arrived in the mansion and seems to simply be an observer, watching the events unfold as he traverses the mansion. As you solve puzzles you unlock rooms and subsequently various cutscenes of the overall story.
The characters are all wonderful as well. Each is very unique with their own backstories and motivations for wanting to take advantage of Stauf's proposal. I'm not certain I have ever played a game with a more colorful cast of characters. My particular favorite is Hamilton Temple a stage magician hoping Stauf will grant him real magic powers who I dubbed "Magic Man."
I think the graphics are great. This game is what is called a FMV game which stands for Full Motion Video and The 7th Guest was one of the first of its kind. All of the ghosts and characters are real actors that were filmed against a blue screen and programmed into the game. The acting is wonderful. It's a little over the top at times but in the context of the game it works great and is completely in character for the cast. The actual house and furnishings look great too. They're a little campy but again, it is perfectly believable within the setting of the game. The style, lighting, and various animated sequences of the game add to the overall unsettling ambiance.
Also adding to the unsettling ambiance is the music composed by George "The Fat Man" Sanger which is absolutely wonderful. In particular I love the "Skeletons In My Closet" song that plays during the end credits. The only issue I had with the sound was that sometimes the music was louder than the voices and it was difficult to hear what the characters were saying. Since there is no way to turn on subtitles of any kind and you can't replay scenes more than once, this can result in issues hearing dialogue and possibly missing some of the story.
I don't play many puzzle games so based solely on my experiences with this game I thought the puzzles were done really well. I had trouble with some of them but I was able to figure them all out with only the occasional help from my stream chat. The nice thing is that there is in-game help if you get really stuck. When you go to the Den/Library there is a book on the coffee table. When you are working on a puzzle and click the book it will give you a hint. If you click on it a second time, it will give you a second hint. When you click on the book the third time it will say "The Puzzle is Solved" and the puzzle will in fact be solved. You could actually do this to beat every puzzle in the game however, the issue with solving puzzles this way is that you don't get to see the associated story cutscene if you choose to solve puzzles that way. (This does not apply to the microscope puzzle in the lab as there is no cutscene associated with it.)
The gameplay is simplistic. You're basically just exploring the house, watching cutscenes, and solving puzzles. As a result a complicated interface isn't necessary so the controls of the game are very easy to master. It's all just pointing and clicking. The cursor changes based on what you're doing. For example, if you're traversing the house it's a skeletal hand beckoning in a direction and clicking will cause your character to turn or move in the direction. The menu is very simple as well and the map of the house within the menu makes it very clear which rooms are unlocked and have puzzles available and which ones you have already completed.
The ending is a little anti-climactic. It's pretty short and I'm not super clear what exactly happens and I personally was left with some unanswered questions or at least questions I have to make assumptions about regarding the answers. But that's mostly because I was so invested in the story. That said, the ending is quite satisfying, especially when the credits song starts to play.
Things I Found Frustrating.
There isn't much I dislike in this game but there are a couple of things that were a little annoying:
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You can't skip the cutscenes. This was only a problem one time once I started the game in the library when you hear the nursery rhyme about Stauf. I thought there was a different cutscene that would result from clicking there but it wasn't. It's the same scene with the rhyme each time you click. Normally you can't repeat a cutscene more than once so I was confused and annoyed that I couldn't skip it when I realized it was one I had already seen. This was also a problem with the game's introduction. One of my files was corrupted and kept crashing in the middle of the opening so every time I tried something to fix it, I had to watch the same 8 minute intro to see if it worked. I couldn't just skip the intro and start the game so I was basically locked out until I managed to get it working.
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On the flipside, you can't rewatch cutscenes more than once. You see them played the first time then, generally, you are able to click the theater mask to get the scene to replay but only one time and only if you haven't turned away from the area. (Sometimes you can't rewatch them at all.) It would be nice to maybe have a spot in the menu that lists the cutscenes as you unlock them so you can rewatch them to remind yourself of the various story points.
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The cutscenes are triggered in the order you complete the puzzle which isn't necessarily the order in which the events happen. Since you have to complete certain sections of the house in order to progress there is some order to things so it's not completely random but there is still no specified order. The only semi-issue with this is that it's difficult to hammer down a timeline. Of course the story itself is a little out of sequence just because of its nature so this isn't ultimately a problem.
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You can miss cutscenes! Or at least one of them. In this last playthrough I knew from my past experience with the game that there was a cutscene that showed how the seventh guest got into the house in the first place but I hadn't seen it. I found out it was simply because I hadn't gone back into the kitchen since I completed whatever puzzle triggered it. I had been on my way to the final encounter so if I didn't know that the scene was there and specifically go back to watch it, I would have missed it.
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I had some trouble reading the letters on the Bed Puzzle on the second floor. I think if I was playing the game in full screen it would have been fine but since I needed to play it in windowed mode for the stream, it was hard to read them. The letters were mostly legible but one of the few places in the game the graphics were almost too pixelated.
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The "flip" puzzle in the doll room gave me some trouble. Apparently there are unsolvable patterns that can generate. If you don't know that you could be stuck on that puzzle for way longer than you need to be.
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There is a slider puzzle that you have to complete to enter the underground labyrinth. Once you complete it, you are automatically moved into the maze. I am a compulsive saver so I saved the game after I was dropped into the maze. I returned from the menu to discover I was back outside at the unsolved slider puzzle again. Apparently anytime you access the menu while in the maze it will kick you back to the slider puzzle. I'm not sure why they made this choice to tie the two together, but I was pretty annoyed when I discovered I had to do the puzzle a second time to get back into the labyrinth. The only thing I can think is that it's a simple way to "reset" the maze if you get lost.
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One of the "activate" cursors looks like chattering teeth. Sometimes when you click on something that triggers it, there will just be an animation of some kind. Other times when you click trigger it there will still be an animation but also you will travel to a different room (usually from the second floor back to the first floor.) I'm sure this is meant to help speed travel around the mansion but since I never really knew what went where it wasn't really helpful. I just like to click on everything before I start solving a puzzle so generally I'd get sent back to the first floor and since there is no way to backtrack I'd just have to climb back up to the room I was in. Since there was no differentiation between travel and non-travel animations it was never helpful and always inconvenient for my playthrough.
Other Things To Note
N/A
Overall Assessment.
At the time of this review you can find The 7th Guest on the sites below for the listed price:
Steam: $5.99 | GoG: $5.99
This game is 100% worth buying for this price.
There is nothing about this game that doesn't deserve 5 stars so that's what I rated it. (I MIGHT lean more towards 4.5 if that was an option for the potentially unsolvable generated puzzles.) Yes there were a couple of frustrations I posted but they're tiny nit-picky things in the grand scheme of the game. The fact that I'm not a huge puzzle game person and how much I dislike horror things, yet still enjoy playing it, should speak volumes. The story of this game keeps me coming back for more. The story is unique and the characters are fun and the ambiance of the game just really pulls you into the world. If you like puzzle games and want a unique retro game experience, definitely give this game a try.
For anyone interested I previously streamed The 7th Guest. You can find the videos here:
My Twitch Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/piratesavvy
My Twitter: https://twitter.com/piratesavvy
I hope this was helpful. Thanks for reading and happy gaming!
- piratesavvy
