Do any of you remember the Vincent Price classic The House on Haunted
Hill? The 7th Guest’s environment always reminded me a bit of walking through
that house. Now what do gamemakers, dealing with the exact same environment, do
to vary it and make it look fresh? Give it to a motorcycle club as an open house
for the weekend. And that’s exactly the condition you find the Stauf mansion in
this sequel to The 7th Guest, and believe me, it works just fine.

You
are Carl Denning, an investigative reporter for the television series “Cases
Unsolved,” and you have gone to the Stauf mansion to find your missing TV
producer, Robin Morales, a woman you’ve been previously involved with. The story
opens with news reports of her disappearance, occurring while she was investigating
a series of bizarre murders and disappearances, and Carl receives a mysterious
package containing a PDA that, when opened, shows a frightened Robin trapped in
the Stauf mansion. Carl, of course, goes to the mansion to get to the bottom of
the mystery, embroiling himself as well, and once the mansion is entered, the
game becomes first-person, with you playing as Carl. Plot, usually a weak point
in adventure gaming (especially in a straight puzzle-solving environment such
as Jewels of the Oracle) is pretty darned good, and it gets an A.

The
11th Hour has great FMV sequences, and the actors are definitely working professionals
this time around. There were a few tracking problems with sound and video, but
these were very minor. As I said above, the designers have very cleverly changed
the look of the house itself, keeping the gameplay very fresh and really giving
the game its own legs–you never once get the feeling of a rerun. There’s a nice
turn-around feature, time saving for backtracking, and a repeat of my favorite
game cursor in the whole world, the beckoning skeletal hand. The PDA, called a
“GameBook” here, serves up the FMV in little morsels as a reward for
moving the action along, with (!) five full chapters after full portions are completed.
The graphics get an A-.

Now about the music. The first thing I want
to know is where is my @#$%&@* music CD? The music to The 11th Hour is
every bit as good, if not better than, The 7th Guest’s. So what, no companion
audio CD? Okay, okay, maybe you couldn’t package it as it was already top-heavy,
weighing in at four CDs (are we all looking forward to DVD or what?). The music
was again created by “The Fat Man,” and it’s another fabulously spooky
job. Sound and music both quite properly capture the feeling of being in a very
creaky old house and get an A.

The game contains some fiendish AI
puzzles, which cleverly outwit walkthrough writers everywhere, which may have
been part of the plan. In other words, the player is forced to play the game and
beat the program in most instances to get bits of plot, which works exceptionally
well as the story is good enough that you actually care what happens next. It
is well-designed, and it could just not have been done any other way. (Okay, you
could have, but you’d have to call the game Spud–see the Dungeon
of Shame for that.) Stauf makes wry comments as you fumble around, but only
if you miss the boat in what you click on or fail to solve a puzzle and it gets
reset, so if he’s laughing at you, you deserve it.

The weakest point of
the game is a series of anagram puzzles, which force one to take out pencil and
paper and get smart to figure it out (for all of those Pamela Anderson Lee types
out there, that’s the end without the eraser you need to be using there, honey).
The game includes clues but no solves, a big change from The 7th Guest, but
I felt the puzzles were much more original and entertaining so didn’t mind one
bit. Puzzles get an A-; I love AI but hate anagrams–if I wanted to do
those, I’d just get a Games magazine subscription.

This is a much
more sophisticated game in story and design, from the much improved acting to
the oh-please-no-walkthrough-just-grow-up AI puzzles and no game solves feature.
My overall score is a solid A!

(By the way, it looks like the bikers
got in via the kitchen window–maybe someone should look into bolt locks for that).

System
Requirements

PC:
486
66 MHz or faster
8 MB RAM
Local bus video
CD-ROM drive with minimum
300k per second transfer rate
Sound card with PCM sound
4 MB free HD space

MSCDEX 2.2 or higher
DOS 5.0 or higher or Win 95
Mouse

Mac:

Power Mac 80 MHz or faster
12 MB free RAM
Thousands of colors
4X ROM
Drive
6 MB free HD space
System 7.5.3 or higher