The acting/script is kind of entertaining but not exactly good and I’m not convinced anything in this game is even remotely scary. I still quite enjoy the puzzles themselves for what they are but it’s a very basic gameplay concept held up by the technology.
The animations in some of the puzzles can be interminable. This is another of those games made entertaining for me with the aid of a long backlog of podcasts to catch up on. I just finished my own playthrough last night. The nostalgia still carries it in my case but only because this was my introduction to games on CD-ROM. As soon as the technology loses the wow factor, it stops being a viable product. The 7th Guest is a game that made sense for a space of about 1-2 years in the first half of the 90’s.
I would probably be less harsh although it’s hard for me to be subjective with a game I’m this familiar with from back in the 90’s. Nevertheless, it is an impressive game for it’s time, and I feel it has earned a place in history. If the animations were 4x as fast, that might have allieviated some of the boredom I have felt playing it. It is a nostalgic experience, but it was barely enjoyable in the 1990s same as it is today. I can appreciate now why I didn’t play this game longer than a month. I’ve spent about 5 hours on the game over yesterday and today, and in this time I have managed to complete 14 of the puzzles. I don’t mind a few hard puzzles, but the slow animations with every move only worsens my experience of any puzzle, into an exercize in boredom. The Bishops puzzle was the first hard puzzle I encountered. This was not hard to solve, just unnecessarily long winded. For example, the solution to the Cans puzzle in the kitchen was obscure to work through, and I don’t feel there was enough guidance for the player, though I did eventually solve it. This can’t be said for all of the puzzles though. These are are relatively quick to solve and are no more complicated than they need to be. Some of the puzzles are quite straight forward, like the Cake puzzle, the Spiders puzzle, the Queens puzzle, the Cards puzzle, the Heart puzzle, and the Telescope puzzle. Their novelty quickly wears off, and and whatever enjoyment I get from the animations is quickly replaced with tedium. The mouse does everything, and the pointer animation changes to indicate what you can/can’t interact with, and what the nature of each interaction is.īoth navigation and puzzle solving are beautifully animated, but the animations are so slow that I find myself impeded by them. The unfolding story never interested me back then, and it still doesn’t :p The cutscenes feel unnecessarily long and tedious to sit through, and afaik are unskippable. For example, a painting at the top of the stairs that deforms when clicked on, and a painting in the bedroom with the stabbing hand when clicked on.īut one thing I couldn’t remember were all the lengthy cutscenes with the ghosts, though I do remember the ghosts drifting along the upstairs corridor. Suffice to say that the sketchy memories I listed above have all been refreshed, and I have resurrected many other memories of the game which I didn’t know I had. The house was familiar to me also – I recognised it’s overall layout and *most* of the rooms and puzzles on rediscovering them. Right from the beginning, I recognised the skeleton hand mouse pointer, with it’s finger tapping/waving animations. Playing this game again, a lot of details are instantly familiar to me on seeing them.
If nothing else, Dos Game Club gives me a chance to create these missing pages! For some reason I had no pages for The 7th Guest, maybe because I didn’t enjoy the game enough. Since I was under 10 years old, I have maintained an A4 folder with notes on various games I have played, including hand drawn maps, solutions, levels/codes, ideas, stats, and other miscellany. I discarded the game box long ago, keeping only the jewel case with the two CDs, as I did with all of my boxed games.Īfter twenty years I felt that I couldn’t remember much about The 7th Guest, Only a few details were springing to mind – A chess puzzle a first person maze with a map on a rug a lobby with a sweeping staircase tedious navigation around the house and that the game was pretty boring. I played it on and off for about a month, but never again until this october 2019.
I was gifted an original The 7th Guest in the 1990s, making it one of the first PC games I owned.