The Horror – of early 90s FMV-game graphics! The 7th Guest stems from a time when the vast memory of CD-ROMs needed to be filled, and Full Motion Video did the job quite well. It did such a good job, that the videos had to be compressed a lot to actually fit on the medium. 24 years later they are rather hard on the eye. I remember reading in magazines (bundles of paper with words printed on them) about the game back in the day (I am old), but I never actually played it.
The 7th guest is a adventure/puzzle game in the horror genre. You are the seventh guest in a mansion haunted by the ghost of a mad man, who killed the six guests before you and forces you to do puzzles. You walk from room to room via slow pre-rendered videos, to then solve static puzzles, which open rooms with more puzzles. There are a lot of amateurish and very compressed looking ghost entering and exiting the screens.
Once you get used to the ugly graphics and blasting general midi soundtrack, there seems to be a decent puzzle game hidden beneath, but I won’t find out for certain, because I don’t care much for puzzle games or haunted mansions. Luckily enough I played far enough to stumble upon this beautiful poem from the game:
Old man Stauf built a house
and filled it with his toys.
Six guests were invited one night,
their screams the only noise.
Blood in the library,
blood right up the hall,
dripping down the attic stairs,
‘Hey Guests, try not to fall!’.
Nobody came out that night.
Not one was ever seen.
But old man Stauf is waiting there…
Crazy! Sick! and MEAN!
When you quit the game a voice screeches ‘Come baaaack!’. I won’t.
I played this back in the days, but never finished it either. The graphics were astonishing back then. A good example that “realistic” graphics don’t age well, it’s the same with Myst.
Yes, I completely agree, about the graphics. It’s not as bad with the sequel, but it’s still bad. For some reason Myst never made it in my steam library (everything else seems to have managed). I remember, at the time it came out, I quickly lost interest – as I do with most puzzle games of that type.