7th Guest - Ghosts and Mazes

Written by Reiko

In the introduction to the game, we saw Stauf’s origins, met his guests at the front door, and experienced some of the ambiance of the creepy house. Now I’m ready to start solving some puzzles.

What garish wallpaper. And those chair backs look like spiderwebs.

As I face the stairs on the first floor, I decide to start on the left and examine the left-most room, which appears to be unconnected to anything else. When I go through the door, I find myself in an ugly dining room with a large cake on a raised cake platter in the middle of the table.

From left to right: Temple, Burden (obscured), Dutton, Edward, Elinor, Heine.

I move toward the table for a better look and find a ghostly scene playing: again the guests mostly complain about the food, although Elinor offers the clue that each guest is to receive exactly the same size piece of cake, including the symbols. Stauf is being a rather poor host and not attending his own dinner, as Dutton comments about having to "fend for ourselves."

Not only is the cake creepy, so are the cake plates, with their staring bloodshot eye design.

Focusing on the cake shows me my first puzzle: the cake is divided into a six-by-five array of square pieces, some of which have a skull or gravestone, and I have to divide it up such that each portion has two skulls, two gravestones, and one empty piece. When I click on a piece, it's raised up a bit, and when I click on four more adjacent pieces, the whole set lifts out and disappears.

This isn't a particularly difficult puzzle; the trick is getting each set of symbols to be adjacent to one of the empty pieces, three of which are in a line in the middle of the array. I start from the top right corner and work my way around, ending in the bottom left.

He’s married already.

After I complete the puzzle, another short scene plays in which Burden invites Edward up to her room and suggests she could help him. I'm not sure where Elinor is supposed to be at that point, but it certainly looked like a seduction to me. Later, when I'm accidentally wandering around the second floor, I catch a glimpse of Edward going into Burden's room, so I guess he took her up on that.

Now the table also has a "spooky" effect where the dishes will dance for a moment and rotate around the place settings before settling back down again.

The library looks cozy enough.

Instead of continuing from left to right, because the top-left room appears to connect to some back stairs, I move over to the far right room next, which again doesn't appear connected to anything, although I shortly find I'm not quite right about that. This room is the library. On a coffee table facing the door, there's a book that has the puzzle icon, but I think it's a way to get hints or something. The only page in it so far just says, "This puzzle is solved" and takes me back to the dining room if I click through.

Farther into the room, there's a telescope set up to look through a closed French door. To the right is a fireplace, which I notice I can enter. If I do, somehow I end up going through a passage and end up in the second-floor hallway. I turn around, but can't return the way I came, so I have to go down the stairs and around to get back where I was.

Nice alliteration.

The telescope is the second puzzle: when I look through it, it brings me to a close-up view of Mars with a number of letters connected by paths (perhaps a reference to Burroughs' Martian "canals" or some such?). The starting letter is forced to be the T at the bottom, and I can select a connecting letter to create a sequence. I can quickly see "POSSIBLE" as a valid arrangement of some of the letters, so it doesn't take long for me to arrange all the letters into the phrase "THERE IS NO POSSIBLE WAY". Bemused, my character comments, "What twisted crime of logic would merit such a sentence?"

Is Stauf speaking to me?

Completing this puzzle yields a scene where Stauf himself appears (well, his head and torso, anyway) and recites a rather creepy poem about six guests that never appeared, and blood in the house, etc. Who is he talking to here? This scene can be repeated (whereas the “story” scenes cannot). So now the library is done.

This looks a lot like Elinor, but another line mentioned “Mrs. Knox”...

I wanted to continue around to the top-right room, but that one seems to be locked or something still. The map also shows that it isn't available. So I continue back to the top-left room, which turns out to be a kitchen (which would make sense given its proximity to the dining room). There are two scenes available here; one is triggered from the right side, where Stauf seems to be speaking through a woman in pink called Mrs. Knox, informing us that there are clues about what must be done everywhere in the house, but the other guests are trying to do the same thing.

The other scene, triggered on the far side of the room, shows Heine busily working at something that sounds like some kind of block arrangement puzzle. It doesn't tell us whether she succeeded at it, just that she was trying to solve it, just as we will be shortly, I'm sure.

I move forward, which advances the view right up to that far wall. I look around and find that there's a door to each side, but I can't move through either one. I suspect that one door might well be a rear door out of the building, so of course I can't leave, but the other door should be to the back stairs, but apparently that passage isn't available (yet?). Turning back to the far wall, I trigger the third puzzle, which causes the wall to open up into a pantry full of cans with letters on them.

WHY is Y the only vowel here…?

I can swap the positions of any two cans, but unlike the previous two puzzles, it's not clear at all what's to be done here. Each can has a single letter, and they all start out in alphabetical order except for the fact that eleven Y cans are all placed above/before all the rest of the cans. There are 33 cans total, arranged in groups on four shelves.

I try swapping cans around for a while but accomplish basically nothing. I alphabetize them all properly, then reverse alphabetize them, then mix them up some more. There don't seem to be enough vowels to make a phrase out of all the letters (the only vowel available is Y, in fact). Stauf just taunts me at one point, saying "I don't think you CAN do this." (Har har) But what exactly is it I'm meant to be doing?

The only anomaly I find, which may or may not just be a bug, is the way that the H can ends up out of position if I try placing it in the left-most slot of the second row. If I place it there and then move it anywhere else, an offset image of it remains behind whatever can I put in its place.

No dots, either. The dots mark unusable nodes.

Perhaps I'll get a clue somewhere else. I reluctantly move on for now and begin working my way along the second-floor corridor. I go into the first bedroom along the left side, where I'd seen Burden invite Edward in. The bed contains the next puzzle, a spiral of letters and symbols. Stauf gives an initial clue of having to move by "threes and fives," and after I select the first letter (there's only one choice, the first T, like the telescope puzzle), the PC mentions that there are no spaces, only stars. So I have to move around the spiral to form a sequence, skipping by three or five spaces at a time, and separating words with stars.

It helps that there are only ever two or three possible choices at most. I don't quite twig to the phrase right away; I can't see it the way I could the telescope sequence, but trial and error gets me past every ambiguity. The graphics are a bit muddy here, too, which doesn't help; at least once I missed the right path the first time because I was misreading the letter (a Y looked like an X, I think). The only trouble with starting over is that I have to listen to Stauf's clue and the PC's comments every single time, and I can’t seem to click through or get the puzzle to respond until they're done talking each time.

Eventually I get a sequence that says, "THE SKY IS RUDDY, YOUR FATE IS BLOODY." Stauf sounds angry that I actually solved the puzzle, but there's nothing to be done about that.

Stauf said only one guest would win, though…

Then I get another scene, this one the follow-up on what Burden and Edward were doing. I was right, she was seducing him and trying to team up with him. He seems very passive here and just lets her do it. She literally snares him with her scarf or whatever it is she's wearing, and they fall on the bed. After the scene, the "spooky" thing you can trigger with the bed is literally just noises of the two of them getting it on. Ugh.

The voices don’t sound like just Elinor talking.

The bedroom across the hallway briefly shows Elinor sitting on the bed, looking at the floor and sounding excited about doing a maze. Before looking at the puzzle, I look around the room a little and find a short scene in the mirror where Elinor appears and I hear some unintelligible voices. The subtitles are a huge help here, though, because they show text that appears to just be written backwards (it's a mirror, duh), so I can use my screenshot to transliterate the text to read this: "No one knows what happened next, there's no one left to say. But if you should see Old Man Stauf, get on your knees and pray." Nothing critical, just more creepy atmosphere, but I find it interesting that it's accessible this way.

That the puzzle wasn’t a maze was a surprise.

The rug does look like a maze, but instead of having to solve anything there, the cursor icon just appears as the puzzle icon again, and when I trigger it, the view slides up toward the bed and the actual puzzle displays eight bishops on a small 5x4 chessboard area (it looks bigger than that, but the usable spaces are only 5x4).

I move them around a little, not sure what I'm supposed to be doing, but eventually decide I have to switch their positions. They start with four black bishops on the left and four white on the right. But they can never directly attack each other, so it's tricky to move them around in the small space. Once I understood the rules, I made more progress, but getting the last two bishops switched is rather difficult and I'm honestly not sure exactly how I managed it in the end.

The mirror image doesn’t match the original anymore…

Oddly enough, the rug still acts like it's a puzzle, but I can't seem to do anything more with it, and the map indicates that the room is solved, so I move on. Most of the rest of the second-floor rooms are still locked, so I start working my way down the right side.

The next bedroom has a scene with Heine looking in the mirror, lamenting her lost youth when she had beautiful hair. The image in the mirror somehow starts getting younger, but it goes too far, and she starts panicking as she turns into a child. Before the scene fades, we see and hear a crying baby crawling on the floor. That's one way to get your heart's desire, I suppose.

Where is this blood going after it exits the maze?

This room also has its puzzle in the rug, and this one is actually a maze, but it's a maze with a twist: a heart pumps blood through the maze, and I have to adjust valves along the path to direct the flow to the exit. I don't think I've actually seen a maze like this before, so props for originality. It wasn't very hard, though, especially when I tried following the path backward from the end. Still, I think this is probably the best puzzle so far. The effect is only slightly spoiled by the cheesy "You win!" graphic in the blood when I solve the maze.

I guess Temple doesn’t get what he wanted.

Afterward, another scene plays, this one with the sixth guest who didn't speak at the beginning, called Temple. He's speaking to a boy, Tad. This is the first we've seen of Tad; does he count as another guest? He wasn’t in the parade of characters at the beginning. What is he doing there? Temple thinks Tad should leave with him, but it's too late. The scene shifts and Tad's gone, but Heine appears and starts strangling Temple. I thought she got turned into a baby though? Now I'm more confused. Is this all we'll see of Temple?

Just to summarize, we have Burden seducing Edward and trying to team up with him to solve the puzzles, Stauf being creepy in the library, Elinor enjoying a maze which wasn't actually the puzzle in her room, Heine getting younger and turning into a baby, and also at some point strangling Temple. Presumably Dutton is also around somewhere but I haven't seen him since the dining room scene.

Puzzles solved: 5

Session Time: 1 hours 45 minutes
Total Time: 1 hours 45 minutes

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!