[Throughout this project, I will be handing over to the viewpoints of others for guest posts. This one (including the gifs!) is by Joshua Minsoo Kim, who previously wrote about Sam and Max Hit the Road]
Originally released in April 1993, The 7th Guest was a first-person point-and-click puzzle game set inside a haunted mansion. Its ambitious use of full motion video required it to be sold solely on CD-ROMs, making it one of the first games to do so in a time when CD-ROM drives weren’t ubiquitous. Its importance as a major fixture of ‘90s gaming—if even for driving CD-ROM drive sales a considerable amount—is indisputable, but the game itself isn’t exactly unimpeachable.
The 7th Guest takes no time to make clear what it’s trying to accomplish: the starting menu’s design is based off a ouija board and an introductory narrative features full motion video sequences overlaid on a book. This is a horror game, and one that will try to scare you through the novel presence of real people. The story centers around a toymaker named Henry Stauf who had a vision to make a “house that scared people” (the mansion was based on the Nunan house in Jacksonville, Oregon). While initially intriguing, the plot is ultimately rote and has the loosest of ties with any of the game’s puzzles.
The most successful aspect of the game, and the one that holds up best today, is its cryptic atmosphere. Largely responsible for this is the fact that it’s played entirely in a haunted house — an interview with Rob Landeros, co-creator of the game, saw him citing Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining as an influence. The sequences of video that are present feature actors in a theatrical mode; actress Debra Ritz Mason commented that scenes were filmed with wide angle shots, and their expressive body movements were the natural result, as if befitting a stage performance. The overacting has a campy charm to it, but more crucial is how the characters are meant to be ghosts; their faded bodies make logical sense and look appealing over the game’s 3D-rendered settings.
The game’s soundtrack is also apposite. Tracks range from the carnivalesque to the jazzy, from gothic organ dirges to eerie dark ambience. They all help to keep players invested in the game’s dark tone, even when puzzles can leave one stumped for long stretches of time. Equally impressive is how sound designers Web Staunton and Greg Haynes approached their roles much like that of foley artists—they noted, for example, that they broke open a coconut to get the sound effect for a head being cracked open.
What makes The 7th Guest hard to love is its puzzles. Almost every single one is self-contained, requiring zero effort from players to consider how clues or ideas present in one section of the game can inform how they approach puzzles in others. There is one exception: a long, unwieldy maze whose path can be determined from the pattern on a rug in a different room. While playing the game, I realized that I needed to go back to this room to figure out how to navigate through the maze, but it proved so difficult to find my way out that I simply ended up at the end by chance.
This lack of intertwining puzzles is disappointing because it’s antithetical to the immersion that the game strives for. As one progresses through The 7th Guest, it starts to feel less than the sum of its parts, like little more than a series of unrelated tasks. Indeed, Landeros said he was inspired by Games Magazine, which is an apt representation of the game: a collection of puzzles housed in a single unit. This is all the more frustrating because of the puzzles’ lack of creativity. Among other things, they involve chess-based maneuvering, Simon-like pattern replication, and word unscrambling. It can feel rewarding to solve puzzles given how extraordinarily difficult some can be, but it doesn’t feel rewarding in a way that’s singular to adventure games due to such familiar mechanisms and their lack of interconnectedness.
At the end of the day, The 7th Guest is mostly worth playing to gain an understanding of its legacy. The puzzles are lackluster compared to those in other point-and-clicks of the time, and the extensive full motion video present in the gameworld is worth witnessing but nevertheless a novelty that’s hindered by lackluster gameplay. Like the apparitions that haunt the game’s mansion, The 7th Guest is lifeless.
