To my surprise, it hasn't aged that badly.
You've got to appreciate the technical wonders accomplished by the small team of Trilobyte: a complete mansion pre-rendered in computer graphics, with (awful) live-action sequences blending in. A CD-Rom tour de force in 1993, released six months before Myst (an eternity in video game time). And it's not that janky! OK, there's a little bit of jank, but nothing terrible. Stauf's mansion still feels atmospheric nowadays and it's an impressive feat after all this time.
My main issue with the game is, you know, the actual game part. It's a simple adventure game where you wander the mansion and solves all the puzzles you can find, until it unlocks more rooms and puzzles to solve (in a quite arbitrary way).
I hated the puzzles. They're slow, generic, and poorly explained. You've got three chess puzzles, a buttload of stuff to slide, a game of notOthello against an almost unbeatable AI, a ten minutes long Simon musical sequence (better not miss once!),... It's the worst. There is a hint system, but you need to go down to the library each time to access it. If you consult it more than three times, you can skip the puzzle you're stuck on altogether which is nice. Another problem I had was actually finding the puzzles I missed at the end of the game since the mansion is huge at this point.
I don't regret playing The 7th Guest, it's a neat piece of 90s video game history. I didn't have much fun, that's all.
You've got to appreciate the technical wonders accomplished by the small team of Trilobyte: a complete mansion pre-rendered in computer graphics, with (awful) live-action sequences blending in. A CD-Rom tour de force in 1993, released six months before Myst (an eternity in video game time). And it's not that janky! OK, there's a little bit of jank, but nothing terrible. Stauf's mansion still feels atmospheric nowadays and it's an impressive feat after all this time.
My main issue with the game is, you know, the actual game part. It's a simple adventure game where you wander the mansion and solves all the puzzles you can find, until it unlocks more rooms and puzzles to solve (in a quite arbitrary way).
I hated the puzzles. They're slow, generic, and poorly explained. You've got three chess puzzles, a buttload of stuff to slide, a game of notOthello against an almost unbeatable AI, a ten minutes long Simon musical sequence (better not miss once!),... It's the worst. There is a hint system, but you need to go down to the library each time to access it. If you consult it more than three times, you can skip the puzzle you're stuck on altogether which is nice. Another problem I had was actually finding the puzzles I missed at the end of the game since the mansion is huge at this point.
I don't regret playing The 7th Guest, it's a neat piece of 90s video game history. I didn't have much fun, that's all.