Tuesdays* of Terror: The 7th Guest

(*Sometimes Wednesdays.)

Here it is, my mid-effort blogging feature for October, a.k.a. scary season, a.k.a. the time of the year when my birthday happens if anyone felt inclined to buy a gift off my Steam wis- oh god, what depths I've sunk to already? Well, speaking of descending to the darkest of depths, that is what we're here to explore with this feature, figuratively and sometimes literally. However, besides just playing games that make you go "agh!" (in like a terrified way) (parenthesis: scary) I've gone one step further with the theme for this year's particular quartet of horror games: these are what I consider less-celebrated formative titles for the horror genre as it translates to video games. Trailblazers, ambitious experiments, or off-kilter oddities that could've become indelible icons of the survival horror format in an alternative timeline, maybe. Obviously there's your big marquee titles like Resident Evil and Silent Hill and Fatal Frame, fare that popularly defined the survival horror genre that everyone is patently familiar with already, but I wanted to check out a few other avenues here (and maybe get a few RetroAchievements along the way, because I'm hopelessly obsessed at this point).

Our first game needs no introduction because our very own Merch Master Mike Minotti is presently streaming it in one of his many Monday shows: The 7th Guest by Trilobyte. A fledgling FMV adventure game released around the dawn of the western CD-ROM boom, 1993, The 7th Guest has you play as the enigmatic wandering spirit "Ego" presently trapped inside the haunted mansion of murderous itinerant turned successful toymaker Henry Stauf. You, along with six other spectral guests, are forced to repeatedly live (in a manner of speaking) out the events that led to your demises all the while solving puzzles that Stauf has set up in every room of his manse. After solving all the rooms that are currently accessible, you get a bit more elucidating story and then more open up elsewhere. It's a pretty straightforward format delivered in a not particularly straightforward way, playing around with the capabilities of a fully 3D environment and the type of adventure puzzles that, I guess it was felt at the time, would succeed the usual inventory management and NPC dialogue that graphic adventure games had settled on as their main gameplay delivery system.

Now, I've played both The 7th Guest and its sequel The 11th Hour before, but besides bits and pieces of certain puzzles I'd forgotten almost everything about either. That's why I opted to defer on watching Minotti's streams so I could go into it almost-fresh myself first, since this a game that loses far too much if you know the puzzle solutions beforehand, though in retrospect I think I might've been better off watching Minotti suffer his way through it rather than doing so myself. I... don't think this game has held up particularly well. It certainly still has its lasting charms, the things you're there to see: cornball FMV actor performances, splattered with unconvincing MS Paint horror visual effects, and cheap jumpscares while Stauf himself sardonically criticizes you every step of the way like a particularly hostile Cryptkeeper. But playing this original version of the game you quickly recall just how much dead air and pointless environments the FMV era centered around: there's one hotspot per room worth a damn, which of course is the puzzle you're in there to solve, but besides the occasional bonus FMV that might tell you something about the guests (I never knew most of their names, so I figure we're still very much in the era of "read the damn manual") or a goofy spook (i.e. a spookfy) the only other things you'd typically find in there is a shortcut to somewhere you didn't want to be because it meant hiking all the way back with the concomitant long-winded FMV transitions.

Then there's the puzzles themselves. For this section, I've borrowed (stole) a format my fellow moderator and adventure game buff @zombiepie frequently employs where he'll rank/score the individual puzzles in the antediluvian FMV games he exhumes from some manner of internet abandonware tomb, because any modern review of this game cannot and should not tiptoe around the sheer hit-and-miss disparity of these things. Some are great, most are fine, others are like pulling teeth from an animated skeleton actively trying to bite you. I've loosely organized these things by when you're most likely to encounter them just by walking around, first on the ground floor and then those discovered on the next floor up, and really this is all because I just wanted an opportunity to vent. Don't get me wrong: the whole adventure game model where they replaced using random objects on hotspots with these Mensa-style puzzles was not only a fine notion to revitalize a flagging genre but one that has evidently caught on, if most of the FMV and first-person puzzle-adventure games to follow (along with the entire HOPA subgenre) is any indication. I give The 7th Guest credit, along with Myst (which 7th Guest precedes), for getting the ball rolling on this approach but it's clear this early on that they often had no idea what they were doing. None whatsoever.

(Worth also pointing out that there's a (mostly inconvenient) in-game hint system that will eventually solve the puzzles for you if you consult it too often. I neglected to use it much because I didn't want to keep walking all the way back to the library where you find it, but it can ameliorate those irksome cases where the rules aren't immediately apparent let alone the solutions.)

Slice-of-Death (Dining Room)

The first puzzle I found and probably the first you're meant to do, as it's a pretty simple case of cutting up a grid-like cake into pieces of equal size with an equal number of decorations on top—six slices for the six guests, each of which comprises of five squares that must include two gravestones and two skulls—and so you kinda work backwards from the empty spaces, since there's fewer of those and they're harder to work into each slice. Pretty easy and inoffensive puzzle to get you started, unless you're adverse to eating food with gravestones on it. Not too scary either but, I dunno, maybe the icing has potassium benzoate in it (that's bad).

Rank: C+

My Precious Antique Cans (Kitchen)

The notoriety of the can puzzle is so significant that it was the only puzzle I clearly recalled before I'd embarked on the playthrough. The idea is that there's a couple dozen cans with single letters written on them—consonants only, no vowels—and you have to write out a message with what you have, swapping the cans around as required. The shelves have their own word breaks in them so it was clear that it was a three-letter word followed by a five-letter word, and so on, but no real insight into what the message was meant to convey and which words of the same length were meant to go where. What's more, the puzzle contains a slur which makes it slightly more awkward to solve on stream (can't wait to see how Minotti handled that). I'm a big fan of word puzzles in general, since I do way too much of the whole writing thing already, but returning to this was a trial and a half.

I think they could've improved it with a couple of prompts, maybe one that offered a bunch of synonyms ("romantic rendezvous" instead of "tryst", maybe, which was indeed one of the words) to give you an idea of where to start or at least an indication of what the full message wanted to convey, as without something to get you started you'd probably just stare at this thing for entire minutes while willing yourself to join the other NPCs in the land of the dead. As it is, this puzzle kinda sucked then and, unsurprisingly, still kinda sucks now.

Rank: D+

Spi-Door (Entryway)

The front door of Stauf Manor has a stained glass window with a puzzle on it, but it only activates a few puzzles into the game—you start the game right next to it so maybe they didn't want people turning around and solving it before seeing any of the cutscenes. Basic enough premise of having spiders draw lines to make an eight-pointed star: the trick is to ensure you always leave somewhere to move next, since each dot connects to two others and you don't want both of those to already have spiders in them. This is one of those ones that makes sense intuitively after a few minutes so it's hard to describe the solving process, except to say I prefer puzzles like this where the rules become self-evident after a few attempts and you can just feel it out with a little (not a lot) of trial and error.

Rank: B-

Scope Harder (Library)

The library contains the hint book but also a puzzle of its own, which offers a complex chart of letters connected together by several windy lines. It's simply a process of tapping around to figure out where to start—a single letter out of place causes the puzzle to reset—and then creating the message you can make with the letters remaining, provided each is linked to the next. If you're sharp enough you can make out the individual words and then work on the syntax to figure out which one goes where. No reason to make this one too tough I suppose if the puzzle hint book is right there: there's a slightly tougher variant on the upper floors, at least.

Rank: B

Crypt-ic Corridors (Basement)

This is a very basic sliding puzzle followed by everyone's favorite, the maze. You're meant to glean the solution to the maze by completing one of the puzzles in the bedrooms on the upper floor, but trying to memorize that thing or write it out in an age before screenshots (though they probably still had good ol' PrtScr and MS Paint) is way more trouble than just following the left or right wall the whole way. What you won't get tired of, at all, is Stauf mocking you with a "feeling... lonely?" approximately 5,000 times as it plays at every dead end and the sound clip even extends a few seconds after he stops speaking, to subtly extend the torture. A case where a dark maze with no distinguishing landmarks (besides a skeleton, and if you went the right way you won't even see him) is somehow made worse by the game's occasionally counterproductive grasp of spooky atmosphere.

Rank: D

Petaling Backwards (Bedroom #1)

This is the more tricky version of the telescope puzzle from before, where you have a chain of flowers that contain letters, stars, and empty spaces. The idea, as instructed by Stauf, is to move along the flower chain in units of three or five: that means you can move three or five steps ahead but also behind, the latter being a secret technique you get hinted about. The stars indicate breaks between words while the spaces are red herrings you're meant to avoid. It's a situation where, once you realize what you've been asked to do, the puzzle becomes that much easier; a case to make perhaps for why they didn't just give you a basic outline of the rules for any of these going in. As I said with the cans, I prefer word puzzles whenever possible so I liked this one well enough.

Rank: B+

I Chess Can't Get Enough (Bedroom #2, Play Room, Bathroom)

These are all linked by focusing on chess pieces so I'll do them all at once. For the bishops and knights you're meant to gradually replace all the black pieces on one side with their white equivalents, and vice versa, while the queens all have to be placed in spots where they aren't threatened by other queens. The knight one is pretty easy and just takes a while, so it's more boring than anything, while the queens one is super easy if you know the trick to it which I dimly recalled from some Layton game or another (maybe a Zero Escape?). The bishops one was truly horrible though, conversely, and required a very specific chain of moves to pull off since you couldn't place a piece that would be threatened by an other-colored bishop. As I may have mentioned earlier, the puzzle difficulty in this game is kind of all over the place given all three of these are available around the same time in the same part of the house.

Knights: C

Queens: B-

Bishops: D

The Way To a Man's Heart (Bedroom #3)

A maze, fortunately of the top-down kind where you can see the whole thing at once, where you're meant to fiddle with breakers to redirect the blood from a heart to its destination of... thin air. Well, it would be spooky if all your blood mysteriously left your labyrinthine circulatory system so I'll give it that. As with any maze you'll have a much easier time working backwards, since there's usually only one path from that direction. I guess I should be thankful that this wasn't just a bad Pipe Dream mini-game since we sure saw plenty of those in games made after this.

Rank: B-

What's The Big Flip N' Deal? (Bedroom #4, Bedroom #5)

These two puzzles are basically the same thing except one uses dealt cards and the other uses flipped coins. The idea is that you can jump to any card or coin that is directly north, west, south, or east of your current one, including skipping over already activated coins/cards, but must do so in a single unbroken circuit. If you've ever played one of those puzzles where you have to draw a basic house outline without crossing lines it's a similar deal. There's four scenarios total and, once you know where you can go, it gets somewhat easier though the second coin puzzle is kind of a doozy (and shaped in a slightly sus symbol). Unless you have some insight into the ideal place to start this has trial-and-error written all over it.

Rank: B

House Flipping (Toy Room)

This is one of those irritating sliding puzzles or so it seems initially, but what it's actually all about is flipping a set of three panels horizontally or vertically (so, a 3x3 grid) to make an image of a rundown house appear. You get to see the image before the puzzle starts, at least, but working around to make the right panels appear—each button on the side of the puzzle rotates all image fragments one spot forwards or backwards, so clicking the forward one for the image that's meant to be in the top corner will turn it into the middle top image instead—can lead you down a miserable path of confusion real fast. I later learned that there's many instances of this puzzle, of which you're randomly assigned one each time you start over, which are actually impossible to solve; it's real rewarding when you happen to get one of those and spend close to an hour trying to make that damn house appear. Imagine having a puzzle game where the puzzles are literally unsolvable if you're unlucky. Terrible.

Rank: D-

Low-Key Torture (Music Room)

Remember Simon Says? And how memory puzzles in general are kind of annoying to deal with? Well, what if you took the "follow the leader" mini-game from, say, Ocarina of Time and extended it to be eighteen notes long? I despised this mini-game, partly because I can't follow music that well but also because... I did already say that this puzzle is eighteen notes long, right? That's way too much for a memory thing, especially if you get 14 notes in and make a mistake and are forced to start over with one repeated note, two repeated notes, etc. and so forth. There's ways to do this specific mini-game to make it less of a pain in the ass for those of us with recall issues already dreading the advent of full on Alzheimer's in our senior years; this ain't it.

Rank: D--

The Stauf Nightmares Are Made Of (Painting Gallery)

More tile flipping. I forgot to mention the other half of the basement puzzle but both this and that are pretty much the same thing: it's one of those puzzles where if you flip one thing it affects those immediately adjacent, where usually it's a bunch of on/off lights but here it's panels of Stauf's face on a haunted portrait (or a bunch of coffins in the basement's case). In both scenarios you just need to click around for a little while and you'll be able to see a path to a solution eventually. I've never found this type of puzzle all that engaging and yet it's seemingly everywhere. I think Undertale even had one.

Rank: C

Altared Beast (Chapel)

Another one of these puzzles where you're meant to ascertain the right path between the start and end points. Each panel along the way has a different color (the voiceover, which sometimes has hints, called them "etchings" but there weren't any of those) which caused slightly different behavior but it was unclear what, besides something about the panels disappearing behind you and cutting off your escape. I don't think I ever figured out how this puzzle worked, I just lucked upon the solution eventually. Rewarding stuff but I was starting to get real bored of the game by this point.

Rank: [N/A]

Writer's Blocks (Dollhouse)

Man, screw this one. The idea is that you have another 3x3 grid of blocks with letters on them and you have to arrange them to spell out a three-word sentence featuring words of three letters each. It takes a while to eventually get all three to spell out the words you want—like the picture tile spinner puzzle, you're always affecting three blocks at a time—and then you find that they're the wrong three words and you need to start over. There's a whole bunch of ways you can make valid words too. The actual solution, which pissed me off so much I have to reveal it here—GET BOY TAD—is absolute nonsense. Tad is the name of the titular 7th guest that the others are chasing after for a sacrifice that Stauf requested in exchange for a wish, all of which you may have learned by this point if you'd seen the relevant FMV scenes, so you could argue that this puzzle requires some narrative comprehension as a means of ensuring that the player has been following everything so far but it's still trash central that they'd factor in some kid's name into a puzzle which had plenty of non-proper nouns to choose from. And, again, like the cans you have no clue where to start with this one which makes it that much harder along with everything else.

Rank: F

Playing the Microscopic Violin (Laboratory)

With this puzzle you're meant to play a particular variant of Go or Othello called Ataxx where you move pieces around to take adjacent pieces of the opposite side. It's one where you have to be careful to not give your opponent a big opportunity to wipe out multiple tiles of your color at once, like leaving a gap next to four or more of your own tiles that they can exploit. For whatever reason the CPU is set to maximum difficulty so it's kind of like playing a board game against a near-perfect opponent, as opposed to the other puzzles that are more solo affairs between you and the puzzlemaker. It'd be like if Layton suddenly dropped a Puyo Puyo game on you and the opponent (perhaps Layton himself) was godlike at stacking blobs like a motherfucker. Not only is this deeply unfair but it's completely against type considering what the rest of the game is like. Really feels like this shouldn't be in here.

Rank: F-

Knockin' on Hell's Door (Attic Door)

The penultimate puzzle is full of pentacles, fittingly, as you're meant to move around a star to... wait, didn't we already do this? Right, with the spiders. The 7th Guest loves reusing ideas, huh. They were pioneering a brand new type of adventure game though, to be fair to them, and at least it wasn't yet another chess puzzle or some tile-flipping nonsense. I beat this in like thirty seconds and, given my patience with the game, was happy to have something I could be done with that quickly.

Rank: C

Windows Operating System (Attic)

The last puzzle in the game is one where you're meant to climb to the top of a house by clicking on windows. It's another situation where you have to spend some time figuring out how it works but then it gets that much easier to solve once you know the trick. In this case, when you click a window and then click one next to it (either up, left, down, or right) that behavior "sticks" to every window of the same type. If you used a half-circle window to go up, for instance, every other half-circle window will do the same thing. If you solve the first part you've solved the others: the order doesn't change and it's simply a matter of pressing the right starting window to resume the next part of the chain after that. Anticlimactically easy.

Rank: B-

And that's pretty much the meat of the whole game right there, beyond actors in mid-century costumes stabbing the heck out of each other in pursuit of some Faustian (or Staufian, as it were) bargain for what their hearts long for the most. Actually figuring out the plot and what happens to everyone in which order is sort of a puzzle unto itself, since the snippets you see are delivered achronologically. Maybe it's because I've played too much Danganronpa but I was half-anticipating some sort of Mad Libs style logic puzzle where I had to outline the entire story from the bits and pieces I'd witnessed, but fortunately the game didn't seem too bothered about whether or not I knew what was going on (barring that one canon-related puzzle with the blocks).

The 7th Guest feels very prototypical, which is expressly the vibe I'm going for with the selections chosen for this feature, and yet it's hard to say it's managed to stand the test of time. A lot of that is being supplanted by years of imitators and their improved quality-of-life features, in addition to the game industry eventually dropping FMV once 3D graphics improved sufficiently since it caused everything to move like molasses whether you're aggressively trying to skip the same voiceover line you've already heard a dozen times (it doesn't actually let you skip, but it feels good to try) or just trying to walk from A to B without the camera pendulously swaying around to take in the game's early polygonal wonders, making every route feel like "the scenic route". Worst was the lab, where the microscope puzzle could be found, where to move from one entrance to the other the protag would dead-ass (well, he is a ghost) walk to the opposite side of the room from where the doors are to stand in front of the microscope, then turn around and walk back to the other door which was about a yard along the same wall as the first door. I get having a hard limit on how many of these animated transitions you could squeeze into your game, but it still felt like I was taking crazy pills every time this ghost would wander off on his own little journey when I just wanted to get to places directly.

Anyway, The 7th Guest feels every bit as old as it actually is. In many ways I can relate. I dunno if I'd wholeheartedly recommend trying it now, whether you're new to it or it's been as long between playthroughs for you as it was for me, but I might recommend watching Minotti play it. There's some puzzles I'm dying to see him try to tackle without resorting to Google or, less reliably, the chat. Honestly, some of these bad boys make the Fujin duel in MK Mythologies feel like a perfectly fair and well-telegraphed boss fight.

On The Next Tuesdays of Terror...: Aw, sweet.