7th Guest - Won! (An Abrupt and Confusing Ending)

Written by Reiko

Not sure why Burden would have been in here before or recognized it.

Last time I fell through a strange portal that appeared at the base of the stairs, right where I started the game. The new room I appear in is a large gallery room with what looks like another piano at the far end, and walls covered in a variety of paintings. Immediately a brief scene shows Burden, who recognizes the room, and Edward, who thinks the paintings are strange and sick. I start looking around and find I have to agree with him.

Creepy paintings.

One wall's creepy event replaces all the paintings on that wall with one large painting of a man on a horse that animates to show the horse running through fire. Another creepy event animates two of the people on the far wall, one with what looks like a lighter, and the other making a creepy face and breathing out a smoke ring or something. I don’t know why all the screenshots in this room are so dark, but really, you aren’t missing much.

The puppy still loves this vampiric boy.

There's no puzzle in sight, though, so I start turning around. To my left, I find myself facing a nearly life-size portrait of a boy with pointed teeth, who says, "If you think my eyes are big, you should see my teeth!" Then he opens his mouth wider to show just how long his teeth are, making him look rather vampiric.

Stauf as Humpty Dumpty

Behind me, a large painting of the music room fills the wall, and the cursor changes to indicate a way I can go. It doesn't look like a door, but it's clearly the way back to the rest of the house. Finally, on the last wall next to me, there's a nearly life-size portrait of Stauf himself, and this is where I find the puzzle.

The view zooms into Stauf's face a bit, and I find yet another 3x3 grid. This time, it's another take on a Lights Out puzzle where triggering one of the cells also cycles adjacent cells. When cells are shifted, they take on either a reddish or a greenish cast, and show that part of Stauf's face with demonic features. His forehead has horns, his eyes glow green or yellow, his tongue is forked, etc. The green nose is very wide, and the red nose is very narrow and sharp. As I fiddle with the pieces, the narrator makes comments about how Stauf isn't all there, and he's falling to pieces but we're putting him back together. Later, there's even a comment about how this puzzle reminds him of the coffins, which was the other puzzle to use a Lights Out method.

Stauf’s demonic green face

It's a tricky puzzle, but as I fiddle with it, I get a better sense of the patterns. The center piece cycles itself and each of the four adjacent pieces. The four side pieces each cycle their row or column, but not the center piece. The corner pieces cycle their 2x2 corner. And of course, there are three states: normal, red, and green, rather than just on or off. I eventually get to a point where the portrait is all normal except for the center piece, which is red. From there, I work the symmetry, triggering each corner, or each side piece, or just the center, until I manage to get the whole thing green.

Most of Stauf’s red face, one move from the end

Now I know I can get all the pieces to match, so it's just a matter of cycling everything through enough times where the cycles line up so everything is normal instead. The trick is that the colors (particularly the center piece, which shifts every time I hit a corner) cycle every three times, while there are four corners to the grid. I mostly use the corner and center pieces, but I find I have to hit all the side pieces at least once also. As with the other long puzzles, Stauf sneers at me every half dozen moves because I'm taking too long, which is annoying enough that I take off my headphones so I can concentrate.

The portrait’s face is distorting and twisting.

I'm sure there was a quicker solution, but I got the job done in the end. Stauf shouts, "Foiled again!" Meanwhile, his portrait starts distorting strangely, and a bell begins tolling. This actually alarms me enough that I save the game in case I suddenly have a time limit on finding the next thing or something. But nothing seems to happen. The bell stops, and I step back into the music room, and everything looks as it did before. But I've solved another puzzle, which I verify on the map was indeed the disconnected room, so there's bound to be something that triggers somewhere now.

Pentagram of daggers thrown through the air

I wander around for quite a long time, discovering nothing new except the fact that I can trigger the phonograph in the music room to play another recording of Stauf singing about breaking bones, before I think to try the back stairs from the second floor. I could never go that way before, and it sort of looked like that was the door I had come out when returning from the dollhouse. But of course it isn't; that's the only way I haven't been, and there's still a puzzle to be solved in the second floor hallway. This time, when I click on the recessed door from the hallway, the view zooms in to what looks like a sort of brand that appears on the door, and blades appear to be thrown into it from behind me. Nine daggers, marking most of the points of a star with an inscribed pentagon. This is probably along the lines of the door puzzle where I had to jump items around a layout.

I fiddle with the daggers for a while before realizing that I have to keep jumping the points of the star into the pentagon, and arrange them in such a way that the last point can jump into the pentagon and then continue to jump the rest of the daggers in sequence. Once I frame it that way in my head, I manage to solve the puzzle on the very next try. The narrator says, "Great move!" and the daggers all reappear, then the view zooms out again as the brand disappears. The door looks completely ordinary again, but now it will open for me.

Another very dark and cluttered room.

Through the door is another set of stairs, and at the top of the stairs is the attic, full of junk, of course. Nothing activates except for the puzzle on the right side, taking the form of a large toy house absolutely covered in windows in various shapes. Some are oval, some are rectangular, some are half an oval. The goal seems to be to make a path of lit windows from the bottom to the top, but the rules for the legal moves are quite opaque.

I poke at it for a while and make little progress. The path seems to reset nearly every time I do anything. I do notice that selecting a shape that matches the last shape in the path sometimes causes the path to extend further than just the window I selected. I have no idea how to determine where the path will go when it extends like that, so it's hard to even strategize about how to make a path that will reach to the top.

Toy house with the first stage lit, starting from the bottom row.

In the end, I resort to trial and error, systematically trying every possibility. Once I find a path that starts extending from the bottom right, I quickly start to make progress by trying each available option until it extends further. I find that it’s not enough to just get to the top row, because the path bends back down again; I have to find the exact path that the game wants.

The last window I actually choose causes the path to wind its way along about eight more steps to get to the top of the stage, which I never would have predicted. The rest of the puzzle is more of the same, extending the path further up the building, but each level is smaller and narrower than the lower levels, so it goes more quickly. Or it would if I didn't have to carefully redo everything from the bottom each time I guess something that doesn't work. It's a bit maddening, but I get there eventually.

It’s hard to see, but Elinor’s head is on the dummy on the left, which has no arms or legs.

After I finish the puzzle, Elinor's head appears on the dressmaker's dummy to the left, and Tad appears as if through a trapdoor or something. She begs for help, and Tad implores her to run away, but she can't move, which seems obvious, since she has no legs. I'm not even surprised by weird stuff like this any more. Suddenly Heine appears and grabs Tad, confident that she can solve the last puzzle. We automatically proceed further into the attic, where we then get a mysterious close-up on Tad. Our PC murmurs, "It's happening now. I-I've... I've been here before. I've seen all this."

Tad can’t escape this time…

Finally we follow Tad and Heine into a very dark rooftop scene, where Stauf sits to receive whoever thinks they've solved all the puzzles, apparently, including capturing the boy. Heine refers to Tad as "the one you wanted" and "the guest". She assumes that Stauf is pleased and asks if she'll get her wish. If I recall correctly, she wanted her younger beauty back, but instead she got turned into a baby. I guess that was just temporary. Shockingly, Stauf does nothing of that sort again (not too surprising that he'd renege on any promise anyone thought he'd made), but instead vomits some kind of green acid all over Heine, who is quickly dissolved. What happens next is a bit muddled in my head, and my screenshots don't help much, unfortunately.

Somebody who's not named, so I guess it's the PC, says, "Run! Run for Pete's sake!" I think he means that Tad should run away. But instead, it seems like Tad grabs some part of Stauf's clothing like a tie and yanks on it really hard. Then the PC says, "I... I can't do anything! You're not real!" Which seems rather contradictory, to me. Who's the ghost here, anyway? If we're the ghost, then how are we solving the puzzles and affecting anything? (Although we do get sucked into some really weird and physically impossible passageways.) If Tad isn't real, then how is he doing anything?

Skeleton Stauf in a wheelchair…?

At any rate, whatever Tad does somehow causes Stauf to turn into a skeleton and then burst into flames. That's majorly weird, in a game full of weird things. Oddly enough, in the light of the flames, it clearly looks like Stauf is sitting in a wheelchair. When I look back at the earlier screenshots, the wheels are just barely visible there in the darkness, so he was like that all along. He didn't seem physically damaged in the intro sequence or anything, so I have no idea where that came from, if he actually needed it, or if it was just some weird aesthetic choice to be sitting in a wheelchair instead of anything else that might have acted like a special seat or throne. I mean, the guy's so unhinged that I guess a throne or a wheelchair are about equally likely.

Yay, we win? I think?

Somehow Tad thinks I did something, and now something has changed and he's saved. Stauf is maybe gone? And as far as I can tell, Tad is the only one of the seven guests to survive. You'll see at the end that I finished compiling a list of all the deaths and strange fates of characters that I saw, and all of the six other guests run into mortal trouble of one sort or another, sometimes more than one thing. So I guess we've won, or at least reached the end of the story.

The game thinks I’m done, at least.

Honestly, when I finished the dagger puzzle, I was still expecting a handful more puzzles left in the game, so it was at that point that I split the post and finished the previous post. I was then surprised when the attic puzzle was the last one. I maybe could have combined this post with the previous one, since I had been covering five or six puzzles per post up to that point, except that the ending sequence and credits were fairly long, and I'd had a lot to say about the previous three puzzles.

Speaking of credits, we get detailed black and white credit illustrations for all the main positions (except Lead Artist Robert Stein III, whose illustration is just a creepy-looking hand instead of his face). We have programmers Graeme Devine and Alan Laird at Trilobyte and also tools by Hayes Haugen. Some people must have been contractors or the like, because they're listed as working under other companies besides Trilobyte. For instance, the 3D Modelers were Alan Iglesias at Alan Iglesias Design and Phil LeMarbre and Gene Bodio at PCA.

And then there are the credits that just seem like a big joke.

Finally, later in the credits, I get full names for the guests: Brian Dutton, Edward Knox, Elinor Knox, Martine Burden, Julia Heine, and Hamilton Temple (although Tad is still just Tad). These would have been useful to know at the beginning, when the guests were visually introduced.

At the very end, there's a rather amusing special note: "Any similarity to person/persons now living to anyone or thing [sic], dead or undead, is entirely accidental and just one more irrefutable proof of the paranormal. And, although some really nasty mind-games were played, no entities were physically harmed during the making of this interactive entertainment (except for the botched special-effect on the bunny rabbit that went so horribly wrong and really bummed everyone out, no thanks to Mr. Boomer)." Not really sure what this refers to, but it sounds like a good story.

And that's it for the 7th Guest! Back next time for some head-scratching over the plot and some scoring.

Puzzles solved: 3 (total: 22)
On-screen deaths and character fates:

• Dutton: stabbed by Edward, also poisoned by the briefcase in the lavish bedroom
• Edward: his neck was snapped by Temple
• Temple: strangled by Heine, also chokes in the laborator
• Burden: drowned in the bath
• two babies: one sacrificed by Dutton, one smothered by the doll
• Elinor: became a dressmaker's dummy
• Heine: age-regressed into a baby, dissolved (as herself) in Stauf's acid
• Stauf: became a flaming skeleton and disappeared

Session Time: 1 hours 30 minutes
Total Time: 12 hours 30 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!