Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2023/10/01/the-7th-guest-25th-anniversary-edition-2019-review/
While it might not be as well known 25 years after it’s release as it was when it was first released as it has been overshadow by two and a half decades of games that are either just as influential or have become significantly more popular, but ‘The 7th Guest’ and definitely left it’s impact on the industry by helping push it forward as I have discussed in my original review. It certainly has left enough of an impact to gain a cult following and be respected enough to get a remaster in the form of ‘The 7th Guest: 25th Anniversary Edition’.
I’m just going to go over the differences between the original and the remaster, since otherwise most of this review is just going to be an almost exact copy of the original.
Since the plot is the exact same as the original game due to the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ being a simple update, I’ll just copy and paste the plot synopsis here since there’s no point it re-summarizing it.
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 toymaker. 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 illens and slowly die one by one. Apon 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 graphics largely remain the same as the original version of the game. The full motion video remains in all of it’s pixelated and interlaced glory. It’s much more noticeable since it’s now being shown on higher resolution screens, but hey, what are you going to do? The developers couldn’t really do much without going back to the original 3D renders of the mansion and original video files and completely re-rendering them to look much better on more modern screens, and unfortunately they didn’t get archived properly due to budget constraints on the original game, so this is the best that we’re going to get.
The game is now in proper widescreen. For the purists, you don’t have to worry about things getting cut off since the original game was presented in widescreen formatted for the square monitors at the time, so all the game had to do was zoom in. There is an option to toggle between a widescreen mode that has the game touching all sides of the monitor or the game having narrow black bars at the top and bottom, making it slightly thinner than 16×9, but showing everything from the image. It’s a tiny difference, but if a purist wants those extra pixels, the option is there.
There is an optional filter that you can turn on to smooth out the graphics to try and make them look a little less pixelated, but it just looks like a smudged mess to me, especially since the resolution of the original images and videos is pretty low compared to the more modern games released 25 years since the original release of ‘The 7th Guest’. There’s no real reason to apply a filter to a game so low res and pixelated. I’m pretty sure the graphics snobs weren’t going to play this anyway, but it is nice that it was included as an option.
All of the animations that play when you’re going from one area of the mansion to another are now sped up, making the process of exploring new areas along with revisiting the puzzles that you took a break from have become less tedious. This is the most significant and all around best update to the game, for me at least, since having to move around or backtrack in the original game was such a pain.
Also, the cutscenes in this game now can easily be skipped. Well, technically sped up like the transitional animations, but being able to skip through that intro cutscene on another playthrough is fantastic.
A small part of me misses the slower animations. It was as if the character was slowly creeping throughout the mansion scared of what might jump out at them, not wanting to draw attention to themselves, like the developers were taking advantage of the limited speed of CDs when the game was first released. But if I had to pick between faster animation or the atmoshere, I would pick the faster animation ever time just because of how tedious the original was. It would have been nice to have a toggle to choose between them to appeal to the purists, but I’m fine with the faster animations.
Also, is it just me of is the spinning icon on the loading screen look like it’s spinning the wrong way?
The sound and music pretty much remains the same as the original game. There is an option to switch between a re-mastered version of the score or go back to the high quality Midi or Adlib, which is nice. You do have to load a game or start a new one to change it in the game though. This version does add in voice acting for German, French, and Russian, along with subtitles for those new languages long with subtitles for several other languages. I can’t speak those languages, but I hope that they’re equally as cheesy as the original acting.
Since the ’25 Anniversary Edition’ is almost exactly the same as the original, pretty much all of my complaints about the original carry over. From puzzles ranging from tedious but solvable to practically needing a walkthrough to complete, it’s not exactly the most warm welcome, but it’s entirely presented as it originally was, warts and all, so fans should be happy.
The ’25th Anniversary Edition’ mobile port, which has a HTML front end while the game is running on ScummVM, made obvious by the game’s credits. My only real complaint about this is that a few of the hotspots used to move around the mansion are a bit awkward to use. There is a way of highlighting which areas of the screen allow you to move around the mansion, but it took a while for me to get used to clicking on the right hotspots, taking me to a wrong part of the room or changing my view. It’s not egregious but it does take some getting used to.
It even comes with a bonus mode called “Open House Mode” as an unlockable. It doesn’t allow you to actually wander around the house and do whatever you want, it only allows you to solve any puzzle from the game again without having to wander around the house.
The one thing that I have to point out is that this is based on the mobile port of the game. Not the original mobile port, since several puzzles were removed in that version because of the size of mobile devices at the time, with the infamous microscope puzzle getting it’s own version on mobile devices. So if you’re reading any reviews talking about missing content, you can ignore those parts of the review.
But is the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ of ‘The 7th Guest’ worth playing? If you’re into old adventure games and are fine with dealing with some of the frustrating quirks of old adventure games, then yes. Is it worth playing over the original? Also yes. The ’25th Anniversary Edition’ is enough of an improvement in my opinion that I would recommend playing it over the original, since it removes a few of the frustrations of the original game.
And if you’re a purist, the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ comes with the original game as a free bonus anyway, even if it’s weirdly hidden away as DLC in the Steam release.
But because of the flaws inherent to the original game, I can’t exactly recommend this to a lot of people outside of the people who are already fans of the original or people who are fans of 90s adventure games and all of the hair pulling puzzles that was part of the genre back in the early 90s. There are way too many puzzles that either rely on luck or aren’t clear with their logic that make it a hard game to recommend to a lot of people.
Maybe watch a retrospective or playthrough if you’re curious but don’t want to put up with the puzzles.
While it might not be as well known 25 years after it’s release as it was when it was first released as it has been overshadow by two and a half decades of games that are either just as influential or have become significantly more popular, but ‘The 7th Guest’ and definitely left it’s impact on the industry by helping push it forward as I have discussed in my original review. It certainly has left enough of an impact to gain a cult following and be respected enough to get a remaster in the form of ‘The 7th Guest: 25th Anniversary Edition’.
I’m just going to go over the differences between the original and the remaster, since otherwise most of this review is just going to be an almost exact copy of the original.
Since the plot is the exact same as the original game due to the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ being a simple update, I’ll just copy and paste the plot synopsis here since there’s no point it re-summarizing it.
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 toymaker. 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 illens and slowly die one by one. Apon 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 graphics largely remain the same as the original version of the game. The full motion video remains in all of it’s pixelated and interlaced glory. It’s much more noticeable since it’s now being shown on higher resolution screens, but hey, what are you going to do? The developers couldn’t really do much without going back to the original 3D renders of the mansion and original video files and completely re-rendering them to look much better on more modern screens, and unfortunately they didn’t get archived properly due to budget constraints on the original game, so this is the best that we’re going to get.
The game is now in proper widescreen. For the purists, you don’t have to worry about things getting cut off since the original game was presented in widescreen formatted for the square monitors at the time, so all the game had to do was zoom in. There is an option to toggle between a widescreen mode that has the game touching all sides of the monitor or the game having narrow black bars at the top and bottom, making it slightly thinner than 16×9, but showing everything from the image. It’s a tiny difference, but if a purist wants those extra pixels, the option is there.
There is an optional filter that you can turn on to smooth out the graphics to try and make them look a little less pixelated, but it just looks like a smudged mess to me, especially since the resolution of the original images and videos is pretty low compared to the more modern games released 25 years since the original release of ‘The 7th Guest’. There’s no real reason to apply a filter to a game so low res and pixelated. I’m pretty sure the graphics snobs weren’t going to play this anyway, but it is nice that it was included as an option.
All of the animations that play when you’re going from one area of the mansion to another are now sped up, making the process of exploring new areas along with revisiting the puzzles that you took a break from have become less tedious. This is the most significant and all around best update to the game, for me at least, since having to move around or backtrack in the original game was such a pain.
Also, the cutscenes in this game now can easily be skipped. Well, technically sped up like the transitional animations, but being able to skip through that intro cutscene on another playthrough is fantastic.
A small part of me misses the slower animations. It was as if the character was slowly creeping throughout the mansion scared of what might jump out at them, not wanting to draw attention to themselves, like the developers were taking advantage of the limited speed of CDs when the game was first released. But if I had to pick between faster animation or the atmoshere, I would pick the faster animation ever time just because of how tedious the original was. It would have been nice to have a toggle to choose between them to appeal to the purists, but I’m fine with the faster animations.
Also, is it just me of is the spinning icon on the loading screen look like it’s spinning the wrong way?
The sound and music pretty much remains the same as the original game. There is an option to switch between a re-mastered version of the score or go back to the high quality Midi or Adlib, which is nice. You do have to load a game or start a new one to change it in the game though. This version does add in voice acting for German, French, and Russian, along with subtitles for those new languages long with subtitles for several other languages. I can’t speak those languages, but I hope that they’re equally as cheesy as the original acting.
Since the ’25 Anniversary Edition’ is almost exactly the same as the original, pretty much all of my complaints about the original carry over. From puzzles ranging from tedious but solvable to practically needing a walkthrough to complete, it’s not exactly the most warm welcome, but it’s entirely presented as it originally was, warts and all, so fans should be happy.
The ’25th Anniversary Edition’ mobile port, which has a HTML front end while the game is running on ScummVM, made obvious by the game’s credits. My only real complaint about this is that a few of the hotspots used to move around the mansion are a bit awkward to use. There is a way of highlighting which areas of the screen allow you to move around the mansion, but it took a while for me to get used to clicking on the right hotspots, taking me to a wrong part of the room or changing my view. It’s not egregious but it does take some getting used to.
It even comes with a bonus mode called “Open House Mode” as an unlockable. It doesn’t allow you to actually wander around the house and do whatever you want, it only allows you to solve any puzzle from the game again without having to wander around the house.
The one thing that I have to point out is that this is based on the mobile port of the game. Not the original mobile port, since several puzzles were removed in that version because of the size of mobile devices at the time, with the infamous microscope puzzle getting it’s own version on mobile devices. So if you’re reading any reviews talking about missing content, you can ignore those parts of the review.
But is the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ of ‘The 7th Guest’ worth playing? If you’re into old adventure games and are fine with dealing with some of the frustrating quirks of old adventure games, then yes. Is it worth playing over the original? Also yes. The ’25th Anniversary Edition’ is enough of an improvement in my opinion that I would recommend playing it over the original, since it removes a few of the frustrations of the original game.
And if you’re a purist, the ’25th Anniversary Edition’ comes with the original game as a free bonus anyway, even if it’s weirdly hidden away as DLC in the Steam release.
But because of the flaws inherent to the original game, I can’t exactly recommend this to a lot of people outside of the people who are already fans of the original or people who are fans of 90s adventure games and all of the hair pulling puzzles that was part of the genre back in the early 90s. There are way too many puzzles that either rely on luck or aren’t clear with their logic that make it a hard game to recommend to a lot of people.
Maybe watch a retrospective or playthrough if you’re curious but don’t want to put up with the puzzles.