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The 7th Guest   Released: 1992 Manufacturer: Virgin Interactive Developer: Trilobyte In Brief: A bunch of interesting puzzles strung together by a silly haunted house motif.
A lot of people complain that Myst is not an adventure game, but simply a puzzle game. It depends on how you define adventure games, I suppose, a subject that greater (and lesser) minds than mine have tangled with for quite some time. My feeling has always been that Myst's well-integrated puzzles and finely detailed and rational world made it a complete, cohesive environment that gave the proper sense of adventure and forward momentum, but that's just my opinion. "The 7th Guest", on the other hand, is, pure and simple, a puzzle game.
Not that it doesn't have a story. In "The 7th Guest" you visit the Stauf mansion, Stauf being a not-nice guy who once invited 6 people to his home and killed them, for reasons that aren't especially clear to me. I should probably say that a good deal of time has passed since I started the game, so perhaps it all makes sense and I just don't remember, but my impression is it all makes very little sense altogether. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Once in the mansion, you solve puzzles. These are not Myst-like puzzles, in which you try to figure out the workings of a mysterious world, these are puzzles; ordering puzzles, chess puzzles, pattern puzzles, organization puzzles. Some are familiar, like Othello (if you play Othello on expert mode you'll be able to win this; I couldn't) and that game where you jump pegs, others I've never seen before. But they are all puzzles stuck in the middle of a room that you play, and that's it.
To add to the puzzles, you've got a little bit of atmosphere. You've got a big, dark mansion to look for puzzles in, you've got some really bad actors playing the ghostly remains of the guests, you've got music, you've got Stauf's evil voice laughing at you. It's all here to try and convince you that you're playing more than a puzzle collection.
In "The 7th Guest", the first part of any puzzle is figuring out the rules of the game. This involves moving pieces around and seeing what happens and figuring out when you lose why you did. Sometimes it is possible to figure out the rules and sometimes it's not. One puzzle involving a tile floor was incomprehensible to me even after I read a solve for it. But usually you can figure out the rules after awhile. If not, "The 7th Guest" comes with an online hint system which will first give you the basics of the game, then give you more help if you come back, and will finally just allow you to skip the puzzle altogether. I like that: This is a game that doesn't want you to get stuck on a puzzle you don't like.
As you play, your inner voice and Stauf's voice make comments on the game. Some of these are clues as to how to win and some are just random comments. If you take too long a voice might say "we'll all be dead by the time you solve this." That's amusing once, but these interjections get old quick, especially since you can't play until the voice shuts up. It probably seemed like a cute idea, but it becomes the biggest annoyance in the game.
"The 7th Guest" comes on two CDs, but when you put in the second one you've only got one puzzle left (a fairly complex and ingenious one that I solved by accident, a method the UHS hint file actually recommends over trying to figure it out). I guess they just couldn't quite squeeze the whole thing onto one CD. To fill up the extra room there's a 1/2 hour of music by the game's composer George Alistair Sanger. It's pretty good music, especially "Skeletons in the Closet," the torch song that plays over the end credits.
While not a game for the ages, "The 7th Guest" is undeniably entertaining for us puzzle freaks. I especially liked the chess puzzles, but then, I always like chess puzzles. In a few places identical puzzles turn up packaged differently, and I could have done without that, but this is a good collection of brain teasers. -- Charles Herold -2000
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