The Quest For The Worst Adventure Game Puzzle: The 11th Hour Is So Much Worse To Play Than 7th Guest [Part 4: FINALE]

Author's Note: In case you missed the previous parts to this series, here are the links:

• The Quest For The Worst Adventure Game Puzzle: Mike, The 11th Hour Is So Much Worse Than The 7th Guest [Part 1]
• The Quest For The Worst Adventure Game Puzzle: The 11th Hour Is So Much Worse To Play Than 7th Guest [Part 2]
• The Quest For The Worst Adventure Game Puzzle: The 11th Hour Is So Much Worse To Play Than 7th Guest [Part 3]

The 10th Hour

The Furniture Puzzle

[Rating: 9/10]: It's another sliding block puzzle, but this one is so much worse than the mirror one! The objective here is to move ten pieces of furniture so you can reach a harp, which is the solution to the current riddle. To create that opening, you need to make a path to move a piano to a red arrow on the puzzle board. The good news with this puzzle is that the pieces all have the same default starting position whenever you start or reset the puzzle. On the left, from left to upper-right, you have a two-square-long lounge followed by a 2x2-sized piano, which is followed by another lounge. In the middle, there is a line of one-square-sized chairs. The bottom row has another lounge, a desk that is also two squares long but horizontally aligned, and another lounge. The bad news is that the perspective or camera angle the game gives you to complete this puzzle is fucking terrible, and the furniture types vary in shape and size. There are whole squares on the board that are all but impossible to see because of the angle, which makes planning your moves, or even envisioning a route to the harp, a massive chore. It's also worth noting that you can't flip any furniture pieces like Tetris pieces; they're locked in their vertical or horizontal orientation no matter what.

And the entire puzzle is long. Abritrarily long if you ask me. After spending what felt like an hour on this one, I realized moving the piano was a red herring; your first objective is to move the couches to the back row. When you get those out of the way, there are multiple ways for you to move the piano to its ultimate destination. In my case, I moved the piano from its starting position to the upper left, then down into the middle of the board, then downward again, and eventually through the exit. But to return to my issue about how long this puzzle takes, I wanted to see how many moves it would take with optimal play, so I consulted a guide and found it's ninety moves. Yup, the best and most efficient number of piece movements is goddamn ninety moves! What in the actual fuck is that? Who thinks that is a good idea? To highlight, to move the piano one space to the left, you need to make twelve moves, and if you make even one mistake in that sequence, you need to reset the puzzle and try again.

But here's the kicker: this is the only real "puzzle" in all of the game's tenth hour. Mind you, these numbers discount the minigames against Stauf, but the seventh hour has three puzzles, the eighth hour has three puzzles, the ninth hour has FIVE puzzles, the tenth hour has one puzzle, and the eleventh hour has one puzzle. Why didn't they take one or two puzzles from the previous chapter and move them to the back two chapters? Because the game has way more FMV cutscenes for you to enjoy! To call The 11th Hour "top-heavy" is an understatement. This game is built like a pyramid.

Riddle #28: Instrument is sharp, but is missing its head.

Solution: Click the harp in front of you after you solve the furniture puzzle.

[Rating: 1/10]: So, how do you know you need to click the harp in the first place? Well, for one thing, there are only two puzzles, and inevitably, you'll need to go to those puzzles to solve riddles. Nonetheless, this riddle is one of the few in the entire game where you can read it, notice the word play, and interpret things literally. You need to find an instrument, "harp" rhymes with "sharp," and the harp in the game is missing a headpiece. The rest of the game's riddles are not so considerate; therefore, I'll be kind to this one for having a line of logic I could follow.

Riddle #29: A defective truck with a crane makes for a ball-busting ballet.

Solution: "Truck" and "crane" are anagrams for "nutcracker," but also, when you see "ball-busting ballet," you can use that alone as a clue to find a nutcracker because there have been riddles before that were shitty jokes, and this one is no different. Regardless, upstairs in a hallway is where you'll find a nutcracker.

[Rating: 3/10]: I hate the anagram riddles, but with this one having an alternate route that immediately gives away the solution, I'm not that angry. I didn't realize there even was an anagram until after solving the riddle, because I remember there being a nutcracker in a hallway, and the last line immediately reminded me of that. So, with that in mind, I'm only marking this a few points extra from the lowest score because navigating to the nutcracker isn't a straight shot.

Riddle #30: Look at key missing first misprinted label.

Solution: Alright, this one is going to take a bit to explain, but the line "key missing first" is meant to be your hint to drop the letter "k" from "key" to get "ey." Then add those to the word "label," and rearrange the letters to spell "eyeball." That is your clue to find a cue ball with an eyeball pattern on a pool table from an earlier puzzle.

[Rating: 10/10]: And after offering some praise for riddles that seemed direct and to the point, we are back to awful riddles that rely on you honing in on a handful of non-marked words to rearrange into actual phrases. As I have stated before, these would be so much better if the words you needed to unscramble or sort were highlighted in a color to suggest they were part of a puzzle, rather than the entire sentence all being the same uniform font and color. And with nothing else in the phrase with this riddle to give you even the slightest clue on where you need to go, this one goes damn near the bottom of the pile, with its only saying grace being that it happens near the end of the game, so there are only a few clickable objects left for you to think of as possible solutions.

Riddle #31: Disabled cutting edge.

Solution: "Cutting edge" is meant to clue you into finding a blade, and the word "blade" is hidden in "disabled." You'll find a clickable knife in Temple's bedroom.

[Rating: 6/10]: Fuck solving this through finding a hidden word. It's far more reasonable to look at "cutting edge" and assume you need to find a blade or knife. However, finding the correct knife is a bit tricky. It's a small object and is incredibly easy to miss, even during the required moments in Temple's room. Beyond that, there are so many knives and blades in the mansion, it's hard to narrow in on this one as the logical solution to this particular riddle.

Riddle #32: Unreasonable reason.

Solution: "Unreasonable" is meant to translate into "crazy," and "reason" translates into "motive." So, that leads to "crazy" and "motive," and from that, you need to connect the dots and jump to the word "locomotive." Therefore, the toy train from the train puzzle is what you need to click.

[Rating: 9/10]: For the riddle that best exemplifies The 11th Hour as a video game, look no further than this one. The game gives you two words and asks you to cook. And at the heart of the riddle is something that likely only makes sense to the person who wrote it, including the haughty wordplay. That's The 11th Hour in a nutshell, if you ask me! The parts of it that you play are incredibly anti-player and malicious if you aren't an English Lit. major or think about puns for days upon end. In this case, only getting two words and expecting players to draw logical conclusions feels like game design negligence. There's no tangible clue if this is another anagram, or if it is a pun/joke-oriented riddle, or maybe it's a literal clue to an object. The game gives you NOTHING unless you really get desperate and click the "Hint" button and have an NPC explain shit that the game should explain to you in-game in the first place! Seriously, fuck this riddle!

Riddle #33: Paper used in unusual theses.

Solution: "Theses" is an anagram for "sheets." However, there are plenty of rooms with beds and bedsheets. So, to solve this riddle, you need to find the blood-covered ones in Martine Burden's room.

[Rating: 6/10]: I'm not even that angry about this riddle being another poorly communicated anagram. Everything I have already complained about before applies here, and I don't feel like beating a dead horse. What is worth hounding is that there are slightly over a half-dozen beds with bedsheets, and the fact that this riddle doesn't provide even the slightest clue as to which set it wants, even after you solve the anagram, is downright ridiculous. At least the riddle is short, which makes zoning in on the keyword slightly easier, but man, do things take a real sharp turn for the worse from this point forward.

Riddle #34: Adroit holding a sharp instrument.

Solution: "Adroit" means "clever," and what "sharp instrument" sounds like "clever?" Yup, you need to find and click a cleaver in the kitchen.

[Rating: 4/10]: AGAIN WITH THE ENGLISH MAJOR WORDPLAY BULLSHIT! At the very least, you can see "a sharp instrument" and assume you need to find a knife of some sort. The kitchen is the most logical place to look, and after a bit of sleuthing, you'll eventually come across the cleaver you need to click. So, while this riddle is a bit too up its own ass for my tastes, it has an alternate path for you to follow that doesn't exclusively rely on the wordplay.

Riddle #35: A desserted Arthropod.

Solution: An anthropod is a type of bug, or I should say, invertebrate, and "desserted" is your clue to find a cake or pie. You'll find one in the dining room, and adorned on top of it, you'll see a trilobite fossil.

[Rating: 5/10]: Maybe a step up from the last puzzle, but not by much. The first part of the puzzle is enough to make you realize you need to find a cake, even if you've forgotten your phylums from middle school biology. If there is something worth remarking upon, it's the fact that Trilobyte really loves to wink directly at the camera with their games, even when it results in tonal dissonance. They go to painstaking lengths to treat the world of The 11th Hour as a serious drama with story set pieces that pine for 90s-era TV procedurals, and then they go and put a fly in the ointment by childishly breaking the fourth wall whenever they can.

Connect Four Match Against Stauf

[Rating: 5/10]: IT'S MOTHERFUCKING CONNECT FOUR, I SHIT YOU NOT! But here's the good news: since you always go first, you have a natural advantage. Also, for those unaware, Connect Four is a "solved game" wherein you can employ one of nine strategies to win every time, and there's nothing the second player can do to stop you, even if your opponent plays the best possible moves. For example, by simply playing in either of the columns adjacent to the center, the third and fifth columns, the first player can opt into a 41-move guaranteed victory sequence. If you can't mentally calculate your way to that, there are plenty of online algorithms that are more than happy to help you. It also helps that Stauf's AI isn't as hard as it was during the previous minigames. I found myself winning in about four tries, mainly because I wanted to see how Stauf played the game after I blundered a move. Even when I set him up to win, I noticed him blundering as well, and when I used one of Connect Four's well-documented forced-win solutions, Stauf blundered outright, allowing me to win in under 12 moves. For once, a minigame in The 11th Hour isn't the worst thing imaginable.

The 11th Hour

Riddle #36: 663 264625 46 2 6455466

Solution: Another telephone message puzzle. When correctly translated, the numbers decode to "one animal in a million." This phrase refers to a gold lion statue at the top of the mansion's stairs. Once you click that statue, you enjoy a cutscene in which a female character named Robin and her sister are attacked by a cougar. Fantastic stuff.

[Rating: 5/10]: Translating the numbers into letters follows the same logic and steps as the last telephone puzzle, so that's not the reason why I'm ranking this riddle as I have. My objection stems entirely from whether the fully deciphered message is compelling enough at pointing you in the right direction, and if you ask me, that's not the case at all. My first assumption was that "a million" meant the player needed to find a fat wad of cash or to click one of the MANY treasure chests or trunks in the mansion in hopes of finding gold or jewels. The lion statue is shiny enough that once you see it, you can make a connection to this riddle when it's in play, and the riddle itself has an animal motif to it, but that's still questionable signposting at best.

Riddle #37: Drink left at sea.

Solution: Another attempt at wordplay in The 11th Hour. "Left at sea" converts to "port," and "port" is a type of wine you can drink. You'll find a bottle of wine in Edward Knox's room.

[Rating: 4/10]: This riddle isn't the game's worst attempt at wordplay, and at the very least, the word "drink" clues you into a beverage of some kind. What is a bit odd, at least in hindsight, is the fact that this is the second or third time you need to track down an alcoholic beverage to solve a riddle. So, zeroing in on this specific bottle for this particular riddle is a slight stretch, but nothing insurmountable in the world of The 11th Hour.

Four Bishops Puzzle

[Rating: 7/10]: What are the most annoying puzzles in The 7th Guest? I'm not asking for the "hardest" puzzles in the game, but the most irritating and vexing puzzles. If you ask me, it's the chess piece puzzles. In every single case in The 7th Guest, you understand what the rules are and what you need to do with those puzzles, and there are rarely any tricks to make things more complicated. All you have is a limited playing field and a bunch of chess pieces to move around in an uncommunicated order, and if you make one mistake, usually, you need to restart the entire puzzle. And because this is Trilobyte that we are talking about, the correct solution is an insane number of moves, which, without a guide, requires a massive amount of mental calculation that the average player is unlikely to be capable of on their own. That's precisely what's up with the four bishops puzzle in The 11th Hour, which also represents the game's final "real" puzzle. The good news is that there's no randomization of the playing pieces or their positions, so if you do get desperate, you can always look up the solution. Likewise, this game should end with a chess-piece puzzle, all things considered. I expect no less from Trilobyte.

The puzzle itself follows a template we've already seen in The 11th Hour. On one side are white playing pieces, and on the other, black playing pieces. The objective is to swap each color's position to the opposite side. However, the playing field is constructed from tinker toys and doesn't mimic a standard chessboard, and the bishops still move according to chess rules. As is the case with most of the chess puzzles, your best bet is to number all the playing positions, with this one having ten possible positions. I numbered my field with 1 and 2 on the far left, from bottom to top, and 9 and 10 on the right, again from bottom to top. So, the black bishops were in positions 1 and 2, whereas the white bishops were in positions 9 and 10. From here, the real barrier is your patience. The puzzle isn't "hard," but because Trilobyte loves their fully-rendered 3D cinematics and in-game graphics, you have to watch over-designed chess piece animations every time you make a move. This adds to the annoyance factor; the puzzle takes so goddamn long to solve, even if you know what you need to do.

I suspect there may be more than one solution to this puzzle, which lowers the difficulty factor by a smidge. Nonetheless, the most optimal solutions are about eighteen to twenty moves, and that's part of why this puzzle ends up being such a time sink. The solution I found involved moving from 10 to 7, 1 to 8, 2 to 3, 7 to 4, 3 to 5, 8 to 10, 9 to 6, 6 to 1, 4 to 6, 5 to 2, 10 to 5, 6 to 8, 5 to 7, 2 to 4, 8 to 3, 7 to 10, 4 to 9, and finally, 3 to 2. One sign that Trilobyte's in-house engine wasn't designed for the puzzles they loved to put in their own games is that whenever you have two possible moves for a piece, you have to click on the position you want using the same throbbing eyeball cursor you have for whenever there's a story-related interactable in the environment. It's a finicky and aggravating interface that makes this so much harder than it needs to be. But that's ultimately it. This is a fairly by-the-numbers chess puzzle, with most of the difficulty stemming from extraneous factors unrelated to the puzzle itself. As a result, I'll mark it slightly above average, but not by much.

Riddle #38: Snake, baby, trap.

Solution: After you solve the last "true" puzzle in the game, move to the left of a bureau to find a trapdoor. This trapdoor leads to a nursery wherein you need to find and click a baby's rattle.

[Rating: 1/10]: I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I like this riddle. Honest. All parts of the riddle connect to every required step to get the object you're searching for. I don't even mind that the riddle is in reverse order of how you complete things; at least there is an order. "Trap" leads to the trapdoor, which is a click away. "Baby" signals the nursery isn't a dead end, which you would otherwise think if this riddle didn't exist. And "Snake" connects to the object of your current search. All in all, this is one of the rare occasions where the entire riddle is properly used, and it all makes sense because it operates on a coherent line of logic. Bravo, Trilobyte, now why couldn't you have done that with every riddle?

Riddle #39: A letter from Greece is quite a number in Rome.

Solution: How well do you know the Greek alphabet or the Roman numeral system? Because the solution here involves knowing that XI is a letter in Greek and also the number 11 in Roman numerals. With that knowledge, you need to click the 11 on the grandfather clock in the foyer.

[Rating: 3/10]: This is another clever riddle once you get what it's trying to say. It requires you to know two separate alphabet and numerical systems, but you have to hand it to the developers, this riddle makes sense. The one oddity that sticks in my craw is the fact that you've already used the grandfather clock to solve more than one riddle before, and repeating it here feels out of place. Nevertheless, the riddle itself is fine and points to only one viable object.

Riddle #40: This eight letter word has kst in the middle, in the beginning, and at the end.

Solution: Right, so this is one of those riddles that is up its own ass, but here's how it works. At first glance, it seems like the riddle is asking you to create a nonsense word that amounts to "KSTKSTKST," but the start of the riddle is just that, the start. "KST" goes in the middle, then "IN" goes at the beginning, and "AND" at the end. That spells "Inkstand," and there's one in the library. When you click it, the words "Play in my doll house!" appear on a piece of parchment.

[Rating: 7/10]: This is a riddle that's too clever for its own good. The commas, which signal the start of separate word phrases, are tricky to notice in your first playthrough. On top of that, the inkstand is an easily missed piece of furniture, and the library is a long trek away from where you first trigger this riddle. It's not the most challenging riddle and an odd end of this part of the game, but it does have some red herring potential if you're not careful.

Pente Match Against Stauf

[Rating: 6/10]: The 11th Hour just straight up ends with a game of Pente against Stauf. And here's the weirdest part: Stauf's AI is deliberately programmed to be average to below average. The story justification is that Stauf wants to present you with a different "challenge" in which you need to pick from three possible female characters, and each selection leads to a different ending, with one clearly the canonical "good ending." So, pulling a general game design adage in which the final boss of the game should never be the hardest in a game, Trilobyte opted to be merciful towards their players, which is odd to see from them.

It does, however, feel anti-climactic. It's just Pente, wherein you need to make a line of five or more stones of the same color to win, and the game even lets you go first, which results in a natural advantage. The one rule about Pente worth noting is that, unlike its cousin Reversi/Othello, there's an alternate way to win that involves capturing five pairs of your opponent's pieces. You can capture a piece if you flank an adjacent pair of an opponent's piece on either side with your own playing pieces, but captures require exactly two pieces. The key concept to winning at Pente, especially if you go first, is to create a "threat" of making a connection of five pieces, without having to respond to an opponent. This means your opponent needs to use their turn to "respond" while you plan your next "threat," and much like Tic-Tac-Toe, the objective is to eventually construct a threat that has two winning moves and your opponent can't block both. But again, you don't have to worry about puzzle theory too much because Stauf's AI has been seriously curtailed with this minigame, which is a blessing. After all, this is the only minigame where you cannot employ the auto-solve feature.

What Did I Learn?

Trilobyte, Inc. was a game studio whose days were numbered almost immediately after they struck gold. The 7th Guest was a monumental hit, and while The 11th Hour wasn't an outright financial failure, during its development, the red flags that something was going horribly wrong at the studio were everywhere. In referring to that Geoff Keighley article I linked two blogs ago, the factions at the studio made making The 11th Hour an incredibly unpleasant process. But fundamentally, every part of The 11th Hour reeks of a game that completely missed the mark, even when examined contemporaneously when it came out. The Groovie engine that Trilobyte was too married to can provide some decent-ish FMV cutscenes, but the complexity of some of your in-game actions is made much harder by it. The up-and-down hand gesture is cute the first time, but it grows tiresome because it's a constant reminder of how sluggish the game's interface really is. And while parts of it are technically impressive, even in 1995, the game was considered technically uneven. I have mentioned it before, but the game uses MIDI-based music despite being on a CD-ROM. Also, every time you use the GameBook, the game has a crusty-ass pixelation effect because it's resizing things to a lower aspect ratio.

And The 11th Hour is harder than The 7th Guest, while also repeating many of the same puzzles and design decisions from the latter. The riddles are either asinine pixel hunts or some of the worst things in the entire game, with a scant few that come across as genuinely clever. Some of the puzzles take upwards of 20 minutes to complete because everything is over-animated, which feels like a vain act of one-upmanship against The 7th Guest. The chess puzzles are harder and longer; the backtracking is more involved; the cutscenes are unskippable and take up almost a quarter of the game's length. All signs point to Trilobyte thinking their success with The 7th Guest was an excuse to double down on all parts of that game's design and structure, even the very apparent foibles people screamed at the tops of their lungs that they hated. They made The 7th Guest, but longer, darker, and more complex, warts and all.

Yet, this game didn't completely kill Trilobyte. The studio would eventually break apart into cliques, almost like a toxic high school graduating class. One clique went on to waste millions of dollars on Tender Loving Care, a game I will not be covering because Giant Bomb has already said everything there is to say about that game. The other clique went on to make Clandestiny, a game pulverized into obscurity, and reeks of a studio completely out of its element. When time and engineering allows, you can expect to hear me talk about that game on this site.