Playing this game again, a lot of details are instantly familiar to me on seeing them. Right from the beginning, I recognised the skeleton hand mouse pointer, with it’s finger tapping/waving animations. The house was familiar to me also – I recognised it’s overall layout and *most* of the rooms and puzzles on rediscovering them. 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. 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. 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. 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. Their novelty quickly wears off, and and whatever enjoyment I get from the animations is quickly replaced with tedium. 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. These are are relatively quick to solve and are no more complicated than they need to be. This can’t be said for all of the puzzles though. 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 was not hard to solve, just unnecessarily long winded. The Bishops puzzle was the first hard puzzle I encountered. 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. 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 can appreciate now why I didn’t play this game longer than a month. It is a nostalgic experience, but it was barely enjoyable in the 1990s same as it is today. If the animations were 4x as fast, that might have allieviated some of the boredom I have felt playing it. Nevertheless, it is an impressive game for it’s time, and I feel it has earned a place in history. 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. 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. As soon as the technology loses the wow factor, it stops being a viable product. The nostalgia still carries it in my case but only because this was my introduction to games on CD-ROM. I just finished my own playthrough last night. This is another of those games made entertaining for me with the aid of a long backlog of podcasts to catch up on. The animations in some of the puzzles can be interminable. I still quite enjoy the puzzles themselves for what they are but it’s a very basic gameplay concept held up by the technology.
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