DAY 24 / GAME 24 the 7th Guest

DAY 24 / GAME 24

the 7th Guest

              The 7th Guest was an odd purchase.  I would have never heard of it if it weren't for a news report on tv discussing how it was a game, but it wasn't intended for children.  (Can you tell this was the 90's yet?)  It had a 18+ rating or similar.  Of course, the guy at the counter of Futureshop didn't even look twice before selling it to me.  (I was like, 15 at the time I think.)  A horror game that was so scary it had an 18+ rating AND was on the news?  Sounded like it was perfect.

               Turned out it was a pretty cool game.  A Myst-style puzzle game set inside a creepy mansion with a story driven by bits of live action video masked into the setting.  And man was that acting campy.  Good for the genre though, and good for the times.  Plus, I remember really enjoying the super b-movie acting (and voice acting) in the games of the late 90's as silly as that sounds.  The 7th Guest did a good job with what tech it had though.  It ran fairly smooth on my old PC, though some of the full-screen video was a little choppy, but it was never story or puzzle critical video.  It would just be transitional video as you move from one area of the house to the next.  

The story was like some evil game of Clue.

             Traversing the house was inventive.  You discovered new puzzles by unlocking access to new areas through other puzzles.  Sometimes you'd flow through a drain into a basement room or the like and it really gave it a neat fly-on-the-wall feel to the adventure.  The house was pre-rendered in 3D, so it was all created for the game's puzzles and was designed quite well.  I remember getting inspired to draw a ton from the setting and puzzles in this game, especially the cover art.

              Considering how I never saw this game advertised, I'm surprised a lot of people know about this game.  Then again, there wasn't much of game advertising until after the mid 90's.  Anyone who hasn't can still try it out as it was recently released on iOS for free I think and it's a great adaptation that plays quite well on the touch screen.