Primeiro jogo zerado no ano, zerei em torno de 8 horas dividido no período de 2 dias, sendo um clássico esquecido dos Adventure Games da década de 90 indo na onda de Myst eu espera dar uma nota 8 ou 9, mas infelizmente não foi o caso.

Prós:
- Uma das melhores trilha sonoras de jogos que eu já ouvi na minha vida, infelizmente pela baixíssima popularidade do jogo ela não está disponível de forma completa nem no YouTube nem no Spotify.
- O trabalho de remasterização transformou um gráfico que hoje em dia nós vemos como arcaico em algum charmoso pro próprio jogo, incluindo as cenas live action em chroma key.
- A ambientação e a atmosfera do jogo são perfeitas apesar das limitações do jogo.
- A história apesar do jogo não aproveitar um terço de seu potencial, ela consegue prender nossa atenção.
- A atuação dos personagens apesar de soar bem caricata, ela é um elemento proposital e encaixa bem no jogo.

Contras:
- Criatividade nos puzzles, apesar de termos vários puzzles unicamente brilhantes, temos no total de 4 puzzles que simplesmente se repetem só que de forma ainda mais difícil, sendo que 2 deles tem exatamente a mesma identidade visual.
- Falta de clareza e objetividade nos puzzles, várias vezes eu fui atrás de guias na internet não pra ver a resposta e sim como é que eu faço alguma coisa nesse puzzle, 2 deles o próprio jogo te dá uma dica (só disponível na versão remasterizada) de tão impreciso que é.
- As frases do protagonista pensando alto e o vilão palpitando nosso desempenho sempre são as mesmas e se tornam extremamente repetitivas e enchem completamente nosso saco.
- O puzzle do labirinto é RIDICULAMENTE PÉSSIMO, PQP, PODEM USAR TUTORIAL SEM VERGONHA

Veredito:
Revolucionário na época e interessante até hoje, esse clássico que foi esquecido com o tempo tem seus altos e baixos e apesar de eu ter esperado muito mais, não chegou a me decepcionar por conta da sua trilha sonora impecável e e proporcionaria uma experiência diferente pra fãs do gênero.

Para The 7th Guest: Nota 6

This game was groundbreaking when it was released but it’s hard to recommend now. Conceptually the game isn’t a bad idea, you wander around a haunted house and do puzzles, and successfully completing a puzzle means being rewarded with some fun FMV. Unfortunately many of the puzzles you are required to do require lots of trial and error or they’re just not fun to do. Maybe they were the standard at the time but mazes and sliding tile puzzles are exhausting these days. There’s a few gems in there though such as the famous cake puzzle where you need to divide a cake into equal sizes with the same number of pieces. The parts of the game outside the puzzles are charming though. Robert Hirschboeck is a lot of fun to watch in his over the top performance as the evil Stauf and the soundtrack by George “The Fat Man” Sanger remains a classic.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/10/01/a-look-back-at-the-7th-guest/

It might not seem like it now with more than 25 years of advancements in computer tech allowing for some fantastic looking games, but ‘The 7th Guest’ helped to push a lot of advancements of it’s own, not only graphically, but technologically as well. Released in 1993, ‘The 7th Guest’ was one of the few games at the time to be exclusively released on CD, just like it’s just as influential competitor Myst, which came out around the same time. Moving from the limitations of the 1.44 megabytes of 3’5″ floppy discs up to the 700 megabytes of the CD, roughly 500 times bigger in size, a jump in storage never seen in physical media ever again.

It did just a good job of pushing tech forward that Bill Gates himself called the game “the new standard in interactive entertainment”, which are pretty big shoes to fill.

The game was conceived by Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros, who met in 1988 while working at Virgin Games, and who both had a love of making games. They liked working together and would often watch moves while they worked, one of their favorites being ‘The Shining’. Soon they hatched a plan for a new game of their own, inspired by shows like ‘Twin Peaks’ and the board game ‘Clue/Cluedo’, and wanted to make something with a similar tone.

They handed the idea over to Martin Alper, president of Virgin Games, over lunch, who said that it had failure written all over it since he thought that gaming’s future was in cartridges, and fired them on the spot. And we all know how well cartridges went. Well, technically they weren’t fired, but they were now free agents. Soon they were under a new banner at Trilobyte Games, so if they failed, it wouldn’t look bad for Virgin Games, who would still publish the game.

He gave them three conditions with making the game. It had to ship on floppy disc, they had to work 30 to 40 miles from where martin was, an they had to make the game in 6 months. Of course, none of this happened, and 2 years later ‘The 7th Guest’ made it’s way onto store shelves.

The lengthy intro flashes back to the year 1935, showing a drifter by the name of Henry Stauf, who steals whatever he can from small business that he comes across going from town to town., as he is in the middle of killing a woman just to steal her purse. Soon, he finds himself having a beautiful doll, and the next day he begins carving it.

He trades the doll to the owner of a local tavern for food, drink, and a place to stay. He soon has more dreams of toys, each more elegant than the last, and he soon starts making a lot more money, eventually becoming a successful toy maker. He uses his fortune to build a mansion at the edge of town. However, the children who had his toys begin to contract a mysterious illness and slowly die one by one. Upon hearing the news, Stauf disappears into his mansion and is never seen again.

In the present time, the character “Ego”, who is a stand in for the character, wakes up in the Stauf Mansion without knowing how he got there. As you explore, you soon discover that the mansion is deserted of people, but has ghostly visions of the past, of six guests who were invited to the Stauf mansion, all of which have a wish that they want granted, and who have to solve puzzles that are far more dangerous than they seem to get their prize.

There was a booklet that came with the original game that came with a lot more detail about the history of Henry Stauf, the mansion, and each of the characters that you come across when exploring the mansion. Thankfully this comes with the 25th Anniversary Edition, which also comes with the original game too.

The game was written by novelist Matthew Costello, who was brought in to write the games story, whose most recognizable book is ‘Murder on Thames’, the first book in the long running Cherringham series. He also wrote the novelization of ‘The 7th Guest’, which fills out a lot of details of the game, with the first half of the book following the characters before moving onto the story of the game itself and it actually came on the re-release of the game along with being a downloadable extra with the 25th Anniversary remaster of the game, so getting a hold of it is pretty easy.

It’s hard to get across just how good ‘The 7th Guest’ looked when it originally came out back in 1993. Yes, it was entirely per-rendered CGI for it’s still images and video and was made for a video game in 1993, but having a game be running in real time 3D graphics back in 1993 was extremely limited by the hardware at the time. The only way you were getting real time 3D games were either in arcades with games like Daytona USA or Virtua Fighter, games like Doom in the PC, or games like Star Fox on the SNES, which was only capable of it’s 3D through a special chip called the Super FX chip and even then it had a framerate that could almost be counted in seconds per frame. It’s not that it wasn’t possible, it was just incredibly limited.

And it was either the still images or pixel art as the only other options, and pre-rendered stills and videos were the only things that made sense for what Trilobyte Games wanted to do with their game.

White it’s quaint to see something pre-rendered from 1993 more than 25 years later considering that it could easily be outdone with the advancements in real time graphics that have happened since it’s initial release, with even phones in the 2020s being significantly faster than computers were in 1993, the pre-rendered backgrounds in ‘The 7th Guest’ have aged fairly well for the time that it was made in, with it’s graphics being stylized in such a way that prevents the aging that a more realistic style would have suffered from.

It really showed off what the extra space that the CD format could do for pushing video game graphics forward by having high quality images, videos, and sound all available on a single disc, even if it could still be bottle necked by the rest of the computer.

The game even presents itself in widescreen, even if it’s formatted to appear on the square monitors that computers were using at the time, so the developers were clearly confident that there game was so advanced that it was practically a movie. And much like a lot of games that were trying to be movies at this point, ‘The 7th Guest’ is a game filled with full motion video. And while that might sound dubious considering the reputation that FMV games have in retrospect, but it’s nowhere close to being one of the worst ones out there, not only in terms of being a game, but both it’s acting quality and gameplay quality.

It’s like watching an overly dramatic play, which was the style at the time since not only computer monitors were much smaller but the video quality was limited by the hardware computers at the time, which meant that the actors needed to do this to try and get across the intent of the acting and plot for the game for it to work. Plus it works in the games favor since the whole thing is pretty cheesy to begin with, intentionally or not.

Fun fact, the characters were never originally meant to be ghosts. It just turned out that with the quality of the video recordings, each character ended up having a blue aura around them when they were filming on the blue screen, so the developers made everyone into a ghost. Which is a sense of self-awareness that most developers who had Full Motion Video in their games lacked completely when it came to applying it to their games.

But my favorite part out of the entire game is the soundtrack. Entirely composed by George Alister “The Fat Man” Sanger, who has a small cameo in this game as a painting, along with David Sanger. George Sanger has done a lot of work in the video game industry, with a small sample of the games he’s worked on featuring ‘Maniac Mansion’ for the NES, ‘Loom’, ‘Wing Commander’ 1 and 2, ‘Ultima Underworld’, ‘Zombies Ate My Neighbors’, ‘Evil Genius’, and several Humongous Entertainment’s games just to mention a few, which is quite the career.

The games soundtrack ranges from the cheesy spooky vibes that you would expect from a game where you wander a haunted mansion filled with ghosts which only enhances the mood to tongue-in-cheek songs, with the notable example of “Skeleton’s In My Closet” performed by ‘The Fat Man and Team Fat’ and sung by Kris McKay, which plays during the credits, and is also featured on the album ‘7/11’ also done by ‘The Fat Man and Team Fat’, which is music from both ‘The 7th Guest’ and it’s sequel ‘The 11th Hour’. The whole soundtrack really is the stand out thing about ‘The 7th Guest’, and it even comes with the digital re-releases of the game, and I’ve been listening to it as I’ve been writing article looking back at the game.

While ‘The 7th Guest’ was technically impressive, from a gameplay perspective it’s a lot rougher. Moving from area to area is slow, mostly due to CDs at the time having slow read speeds, a side effect of adopting the new technology, and computers not being powerful enough to process a faster video. Meaning that going back and forth between puzzles was tedious at the best of times, frustrating at the worst if you just wanted to move on from a puzzle that you were stuck on. I know it’s a limitation of the technology at the time, but when you consider that other games just used still images instead of videos when moving from place to place, making the whole thing a lot smoother, it just feels like it’s the side effect of riding the bleeding edge of technology in a decade when technology was moving at lightening speed rather than a good idea. It was still impressive for the time though.

Calling the puzzles a mixed bag is putting it politely. A few of them are pretty easy and straightforward to figure out, like the heart maze or the cake puzzle. But then there are the puzzles that drive you up the wall. The piano puzzle is pretty much a ‘Simon Says’ puzzle where you have to press the keys in an ever increasing order, and if you mess up you have to start over again. This is incredibly tedious and sluggish, especially with the speed at which the game is limited to due to hardware limitations. These limitations also meant you couldn’t skip cutscenes either, so if you were replaying it just for the puzzles, you were out of luck and stuck with watching all of the cutscenes.

It’s also slightly confusing to get to some areas of the house with there being no obvious signs of where to go. If it wasn’t for me peaking at the achievements of the 25th Anniversary Edition, I would have had no idea that there were some unconventional ways of getting around the house to put it politely. You have to look at the floor in the foyer to get to the portraits room for example. I guess you would have seen it if you moused over it and the cursor changed, but I still would have been confused when a transitional animation played and suddenly I was in a room that was somewhere else. Even the room is detached from the rest of the house on the map.

Then there are the puzzles that range from trial and error to entirely luck based that are so obtuse that if takes way too long for you to figure them out.

The first infamous puzzle, and yes, I said first, was a puzzle so notorious in the adventure game genre at the time for it’s obtuseness that it ended up naming a trope for puzzles that not only obstructed the player from continuing but the player would have significant trouble figuring out the puzzle out on their own, even with major hints about the answer from the game itself. The puzzle in question is an anagram with letters placed on a soup can in the kitchen cabinet. In the modern era, this could easily be solved with brute force through an anagram decoder, but this would have been frustrating back in the day when it was released. It’s not as keyboard smashing as pre-1993 Sierra games were, which is probably it’s only saving grace.

This is a good time to mention that there is a hint book in the mansion’s library, which gives you three hints in order from a slight nudge to borderline telling you. If you use the fourth book, it just solves the puzzle for you, but you sacrifice a part of the story with the game just skipping over it. It doesn’t stop you from playing the game, you just don’t get that part of the story. And the third hint for this game pretty much requires using a thesaurus to solve, so you’re at bare minimum using a pen and paper to solve an anagram or spending 20 minutes looking through a thesaurus, and that’s if you even have one.

If anyone going through the history of video games for the first time is wondering why adventure games went from being one of the dominant genres in the medium to being more sidelined for more easy to grasp genres, it was less the fact that games like Doom and Wolfeinstein 3D were simpler action games for a wider audience, but more the fact that a lot of adventure games were filled with puzzles that frustrated people that most people pretty much gave up on the genre. And ‘The 7th Guest’ isn’t even the worst example.

Another infamous puzzle is the microscope puzzle, which was a problem but for entirely different reasons. This one involves going up an AI opponent. How the game’s logic works for the AI is that it uses the CPU speed to figure out the next couple of moves for the AI. The immediate problem with this is that in the next few years after this games release, CPU speeds skyrocketed, as did a lot of other tech at the time, meaning that the AI went from predicting a few moves ahead to predicting practically every move the puzzle could make, making the puzzle, and by extension, the entire game impossible to beat. It’s a pretty good example of not tying a game’s logic to the speed of what’s in your computer. The game still requires some luck in playing, but it’s not as egregious as other puzzles in this game. Thankfully emulators like ScummVM lowers the speed to what it was originally intended, making the puzzle perfectly playable.

But this puzzle still ended up being popular enough that it was released on it’s own on the iPad under the name ‘The 7th Guest: Infection’ by Trilobyte Games, where it can be played against Henry Stauf in a Single Player more or against another player, or in a demo mode where the game plays against itself. It sounds like a fun little time waster even though I haven’t played it for myself.

And then there are the puzzles based almost entirely on luck, like the picture flip puzzle, the coffin puzzle, and the portrait puzzle, which require little to no skill to beat but still require a lot of time playing them, making the player spend unnecessary time doing repetitive work. And to top it all off there is even a maze that you have to figure out. Every time you hit a dead and, Stauf mocks you by saying “Feeling lonely?”, which will happen often and start to drive you mad. And putting a maze in a game is a bad idea even in the best of games.

The game does try to give you hints to how the puzzle works are you’re playing them by having the character that you’re playing as talking to himself during the puzzle But he doesn’t do it just the first time that you’re trying to solve a puzzle, he does it every single time you start the puzzle over. And with every puzzle you’re going to hear him say the exact three or four things over and over and over again no matter what, making you press the space bar as quickly as possible to skip over the audio, which takes control away from you for a couple of seconds as he talks to himself.

And on top of that, Stauf taunts you every couple of moves in whatever puzzle you’re playing. It’s always the same line specific to each puzzle too. The taunting needed to be significantly reduced and the character dropping hints only needed to be played once and maybe brought up again every now and again as a reminder.

I feel like half of these puzzles are probably going to make the player just look up a walkthrough, and that’s if they haven’t already quit in frustration, and I wouldn’t blame them. Enough of the puzzles are actually fun and even the right kind of challenging to make a player invested, but so many others are just an exercise in frustration. Having to brute force your way through a game is never a fun time.

The whole thing just comes across as a game that has a mystery plot first adventure game second, with it’s aesthetic and tone coming first, gameplay second. All of the puzzles feeling so haphazardly strung together with how radically different they are in difficulty. And from what I’ve seen from the interviews from the creators, it seems like they just wanted to jump onto the CD as a technology first, with the game coming from what they could do with it rather than a good game first.

And since I have no idea where else to put it, some of the animations when moving around make no sense. You can click on a door that you want to go through but in order to move to it the game moves it another area first and then moves to the door that you originally wanted to go to because the animation to move to the door was only done from that angle. I know it had to to with the developers having a limited schedule and budget, but it still ends up being a frustration to the player.

Also, with a small aside, due to the era that this game was released in, if you click on certain spots in the game it plays a fun little animation, which is one of those things that developers didn’t have to do but did anyway because it’s just a fun thing to do.

At the time of it’s release ‘The 7th Guest’ managed to sell 2 million copies, which was an impressive feat at the time considering that CD drives weren’t cheap or readily available. Apparently it increased the sale of CD drives by 300% around the time of it’s release. It sold enough for the company to release a ‘Special Edition’ of the game which features a ‘Making Of’ video on the second disc, which is rare in games even today. This video also comes with digital versions along with other bonus downloads.

But when it comes down to it, I personally find it a little hard to recommend the game. While it’s considered significant game for a reason, it’s not for having good gameplay or a compelling story, but for pushing PC hardware forward which helped a lot of developers do a lot more with games down the line, which just make it feel like a tech demo more than a well thought out game.

‘Myst’ came out a few months after this and it’s puzzles were a lot better designed in that I could actually take notes and properly figure them out instead of having to brute force most of them.

‘The 7th Guest’ should be respected for it did but it should be respected from a distance. To be looked at but not touched. I know that’s a backhanded way to talk about a game, but sometimes time is not kind to some things, and ‘The 7th Guest’ is one of them, even if it does have it’s charm.