Sometimes, it's easy to forget that games have come a long way since the early days, and no corner of the medium was as much of a wild west in its infancy as the early PC gaming scene. Back in 1993, PC gaming was barely in its infancy. Sure, there'd been a ton of early DOS and Apple computers that were playing baby's first role-playing games like Ultima or Wasteland, but it was only in the early 90's that the PC really seemed to start finding its foothold and started pushing technological limits, and one of those brand new innovations that the high and mighty consoles wouldn't catch up with for a few years was this magical new concept: a video game...on a CD! But of course, it's 1993, floppy discs are still the industry standard, and plus CD-ROM drives aren't exactly cheap, so you need a real killer app to get the kids bugging their parents until they get one of them new fangled CD drives. Enter the 7th Guest.
The 7th Guest came out at just the right time to be the big next step for PC gaming, especially in regards to bringing CD-ROM tech into the mainstream, even if it was somewhat overshadowed several months later by Myst which seems to be the better remembered of the two. But indeed, the 7th Guest graced PC gamers with its own unique brand of quasi-Gothic horror first and sold many a disc and many a CD drive to go along with it. Bill Gates even called it "the new standard in interactive entertainment," which, looking back at just how goofy looking this thing is, is kind of hilarious in hindsight. This was 1993 after all, and time has not exactly been kind to some of the really dated 3D graphics and some of the hokey acting in the live action cutscenes. Same goes for the story which is just kinda silly. Even for the time, I find it hard to imagine anyone taking this game as a "serious" horror story.
Though, for what it's worth, once you look past some of the relics from the early 90's, the aesthetics of the 7th Guest are almost...classy? I mean, it's still pretty hokey to see a bad 3D rendered face slowly popping out of a painting, but the look and the atmosphere and the music betray the healthy amount of sincere love and care that went into capturing the feel of a good Gothic horror story. From ghostly apparitions appearing every so often to hint at a grander history to this abandoned house to a real solid sense of art design, every room feels legit and every room tells a story. And as far as story goes, it's probably the aspect that has aged the best aside from the atmosphere. The story, such as it is, follows 6 guests invited to an old mansion by a mysterious toymaker named Stauf. Stauf challenges them to solve the many puzzles in his house while also teasing a mystery behind a secret 7th guest to this grisly party, with the prize at the end being anything the guest desires. This story is presented as having already taken place, with it being slowly revealed as ghostly visions that slowly reveal what once took place in these now empty halls. Which is smart, for a number of reasons (the least of which being that the ghostly translucent effect helps hide some of the early-FMV artifacting), paramount of which is a real sense that this house is a massive and very dusty puzzle box that Stauf left behind, just waiting for the next piece to be revealed. And Stauf, the villain of the story and voice from above following you throughout, might sound like a total dweeb, but there's a delectable cheese in his every line that sometimes even evokes a campier Vincent Price (and considering Vincent Price, that's saying something). That being said, you better get used to that acting, cuz you'll be hearing Stauf a lot. Like, a lot a lot. He really likes to interrupt you while you're busy trying to figure these puzzles out.
Which, speaking of, hits on probably the most antiquated and clunky part of the entire 7th Guest experience, that being the puzzles themselves. And it also betrays that, behind the sleek and appealing presentation, the real audience of fans for this game is closer to the Lucasarts Monkey Island crowd that the horror fans that would end up flocking to your Resident Evil's or Silent Hill's several years later. Because I'm not just talking about puzzles, I'm talking logic puzzles. A lot of logic puzzles. So many that they really start to wear on you after a while. And it's not that they're all mind-numbingly obtuse (just you wait for that), but more than a few are almost a little too simple. I hope you like moving chess pieces, cuz there's more than one chess themed around swapping chess pieces in specific orders. And while they're not all bad, the worst ones can get really grating. Especially this one puzzle towards the middle where you're moving these chess bishops with the objective of ending up with the white and black pieces switching their original positions. Sometimes they even throw one of those sliding picture puzzles at you, which feels like it's about the time they just gave up and threw in something you'd find in the kids section of a browser-based games website. That being said, there's some fun ones. Early on, there's a maze that actually had me breaking out a pen and paper to mark my route and had me marking up where the dead ends were and noting landmarks, so that was fun. By the end of the game, though, I was about done with this kind of stuff. Especially since the end ones can get so obtuse that I don't even quite understand what I'm doing. Fortunately, there's a hint book in the library that, if you click it enough times, it'll actually give you the option of skipping the puzzle entirely. Albeit, it's kind of annoying having to walk all the way back to the library if you run into a late game puzzle that just seems impossible, but beggar's can't be choosers, I guess. And at least I didn't find myself falling back on that until the end compared to how the sequel handled things.
The game's sequel, the 11th Hour, came out just two years after the 7th Guest, and it managed to do the impossible. It managed to take every single aspect of the original, do it more, and do it way way worse. The obtuse puzzles? Even more incomprehensible. Also there's more of them, along with a dumb "find-it" object game between the puzzles complete with some of the most nonsensical clues you could think of. The atmosphere? Taking place several decades after the original, the Gothic atmosphere has been replaced by...uh...old? There really isn't an aesthetic. You could be generous and say it's just a more generic version of the spook house, but it's the same map just with more cobwebs and a more ruined look to the place. The story? Somehow even dumber and cheesier than the original with none of the class of that original story. The ghostly cutscenes have been replaced by fully scripted FMV movies you watch on a little screen that serves as your main menu, featuring a story that looks like it was shot with a budget of a ham sandwich. On the making-of documentaries that come with the game, they talked about how they wanted a more adult story with fully realized characters, but the result looks like something that the MST3K crew would have a field day with. Some of the most forgettable stock characters with the goofiest one-liners, the most slap-dashed editing job, and without the translucent effect, the early-90's artifacting on the video makes it look terrible. The one perk is that having a little PDA device as your menu means that the hint book is now with you at all times, and believe me, some of these puzzles are so goddamn convoluted and tedious that you'll end up falling back on the old "click it until it lets you skip it" more often than you'll be proud of. Fortunately Stauf's omniscient narration stays quiet most of the time, but it doesn't help you feel like like an idiot. All the personality that defined the original has been sacrificed for an artificial sense of challenge and an attempt to be "edgy" in the storytelling department that wouldn't even qualify as good enough for an episode of Goosebumps, let alone the Bill Gates-approved new standard of entertainment. Not to mention the really REALLY goofy song called "Mr. Death" that plays on the startup screen, which...okay honestly the song is kind of bad in a hilarious and fun way.
What's sad about that is that, while the 7th Guest's aesthetic wasn't exactly unique especially after it came out and wowed the industry, it arguably pulled it off better than a lot of the competition. It somehow straddled the line between a goofy early-90's PC romp and a genuine attempt at something approaching vaguely artful. And yes I would describe something with the goofiest acting in the universe to be "artful" to an extent. Seriously, the clip that plays when Stauf asks if you're "feeling...loooooooooooooooonelyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy????" is the funniest shit I've heard in a PC game, and I'm not entirely sure it was unintentional. Just don't go in hoping for an entirely rewarding gameplay experience. The 7th Guest is a relic, and that's more of an endorsement than it may sound. It's a historical artifact worthy of further study and worthy of the time and effort that went into its creation. It's not really a tone or an atmosphere that we even really attempt anymore, so what the heck, if you have a couple of hours to kill and you don't mind having to have a walkthrough on your phone handy, check it out. Just don't expect too much from the sequel.
No comments:
Post a Comment