7th Guest - Final Rating

Written by Reiko

Having finished the 7th Guest and taken some time to consider the experience, I'm going to take it apart and consider what worked and what didn't. I'm glad I got to experience this classic game, but it really hasn't aged well. I wish I'd at least tried playing it back in the day so that nostalgia could have helped me out a bit.

Puzzles and Solvability

We've got a mixed bag here, for sure. Probably two-thirds of the game is solving puzzles, and the rest is trying to understand the ghostly scenes. The variety is good: we've got chess puzzles and tile puzzles and language puzzles and even a music puzzle, but the quality is uneven. Most of the puzzles are interesting to some extent, but honestly I'm struggling to think of puzzles that were truly fun.

I liked this clever twist on a maze

Now that I've finished, my favorites are still the mazes: the heart maze with the valves and the full-size maze depicted in the rug. The card and skull coin puzzles, where the goal is to find a connected path through all the objects, were also quite good: I liked making the realization that the path could jump over gaps and also previously flipped objects. The door path puzzles (the insects and the knives) were tricky but fair.

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.

7th Guest - More Tiles, Less Death

Written by Reiko

To be honest, I stalled out for a long time on this section. Partly it was due to being busy, and partly it was too many puzzles that were more fiddly than fun, and finally it was a matter of not even being able to find the endgame areas for a long time. I think I must have missed triggering a scene that was required to be able to get to the next stage after finishing all the earlier puzzles, and I only found it after painstakingly rechecking every room multiple times.

I didn't remember to screenshot the map until I had already done the next puzzle, in the doll room on the left end of the corridor.

I look at the map to orient myself and see that it looks like there are four unsolved rooms left, plus the back stairs and the main upstairs hallway. There's the rectangular area off to the side on the main floor that looks disconnected from the rest of the house. There's the lab adjacent to the ornate room and the chapel, which I already know is the microscope puzzle. And there are two rooms down at the left end of the upstairs hallway.

7th Guest - Cards and Tiles

Written by Reiko

Welcome back to the creepy puzzle-fest that is The 7th Guest. Apologies for the delay in getting through this. It's been a busy summer, but we're now back into the routine of the new school year and back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Last time I had solved every puzzle available at the time, culminating in the basement scene, which surely must allow more puzzles to be unlocked. In trying to find what's new, I look around the first floor a bit, and when I step back into the library, I get a new lengthy scene with all six of the main guests together again, Elinor sitting on the couch and Burden and Edward already standing together behind her. They talk about the creepy things they've heard and seen.

Temple seems like the most sensible one here, except we already saw him kill Edward...

When Heine suggests they should get some dinner, Edward suggests they should have had the soup. Temple suggests they all team up and play by some rules. But Edward insists that Stauf is watching them, and only Stauf knows the rules. This seems like a significant scene, enough that something else should have changed. Sure enough, when I check the map again, the rest of the second floor is all accessible now. I slip through the secret door in the fireplace and start with the room on the bottom right.

7th Guest - Verbal Logic and Another Maze

Written by Reiko

Last time I solved the first few puzzles and got some disjointed bits of story. I'm still not really sure what's going on, but it seems to have something to do with the mysterious boy, Tad. I'm starting to run out of available puzzles, though. At the moment, there's one more room on the top floor that I can access. This one isn't a bedroom; it looks more like a game room, with a pool table in the middle and a chessboard set up near one wall.

Here the fireplace isn’t a secret passage, but the pool table is.

When I walk in, Temple appears (so clearly these are out of order and I should have come here first before the previous bedroom). He calls this "the mad man's play room" and challenges Stauf to show him some real magic. Maybe Temple is some kind of stage magician but he wants the real thing?

This passage was a half-baked idea.

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.

Game 127: The 7th Guest - Introduction (1993)

Written by Reiko

PC front cover

Many of you will undoubtedly be familiar with The 7th Guest. From what I can tell, when it was released, it was an unprecedentedly huge multimedia-rich adventure puzzle game, doing for horror adventure what Myst did for mechanical puzzle adventure. Or at least, that's my general impression, knowing almost nothing about the game. Yes, you are getting as a reviewer someone who is going in almost completely blind to this classic game. I certainly played Myst back in the day, but I wasn't interested in horror, so I skipped over 7th Guest and never played it despite being very interested in puzzle games (for instance, you can see my definitely not-blind coverage of the first two Dr. Brain games here and here. I'm hopeful that as an adult, the horror aspects of the game won't bother me too much, and I'll be able to enjoy it more for its puzzle aspects.