tThe ’90s were a gold rush for adventure games. LucasArts kicked off the decade with its legendarily irreverent Monkey Island games. Then, Cyan Worlds materialized to offer a series of atmospheric and soul-searching odysseys featuring Myst and Riven. Among these mainstream genre texts is The 7th Guest, a lesser-known but still notable adventure that garnered plaudits for its unique FMV visual style, combining live-action filmed footage with pre-rendered 3D backgrounds. It was originally remade for VR and has now been reconfigured into something playable on PC and consoles, with its digital cobwebs cleared away and tricky puzzles solved for a new (or nostalgic) audience.
We step into the ectoplasmic shoes of an amnesiac apparition and arrive at the gloomy haunted house of a toy manufacturer. Armed with a time-keeping flashlight and a Ouija board-shaped map, your job is to solve a historical whodunit by literally illuminating events from the past. It’s a melodramatic and surprisingly campy adventure that effectively evokes the excessive CD-Rom horror of its original era.
The mansion’s dilapidated design can take some of the credit, with its dusty ornate chandeliers and gaudy framed portraits lining the hallways. But it’s the haunting specters that make the biggest impact as you progress through the story. To capture the full-motion narrative of the original games, this interpretation uses volumetric video capture on 3D models, creating a stunning visual effect. This anachronistic appearance reinforces the game’s unnerving atmosphere, and I quickly became obsessed with stalking the figures and watching the polygons explode and bounce as if in response to the extravagant performances of the game’s cast.
Toppings aside, the real meat of The 7th Guest Remake is its puzzles, which range from accessible to migraine-inducing. You’ll find yourself rerouting a model train to connect cabooses, playing a theremin to blow up rune vases, and rearranging the squares of a moldy quilt to recreate the cycle of life. Because the answer to each riddle is crystallized in the past, you will need to use your mystical light to explore and scour each area for clues. This could easily have become boring over the game’s six-hour running time, but the well-executed visual trickery and careful theming of each bedroom and playroom keep it from feeling like a chore.
The only problem with this animated remake is that controlling it can be a nightmare. While you can move around the mansion freely, lighting whatever you want, when you want to interact with something you’re reverted to a complicated point-and-click system. You have to wait for a skeleton hand icon to appear on an item before you can interact with it, and tracking your input is unreliable at all, leaving you stuck pushing the mouse around a millimeter at a time to try to pick something up or press an intriguing button. This may be a result of the transition from virtual reality, but since The 7th Guest was a point-and-click game in the first place, the controls feel atrocious.
It’s easy to see why The 7th Guest was so beloved in the first place. Vertigo Games has given this classic a well-deserved facelift, increasing the impact of its theatrical story and unique historical atmosphere. Frustrating mechanical issues aside, it still seems like essential reading for puzzle lovers who want to experience one of the classics that shaped the adventure game genre.
