When I bought a CD ROM
drive a couple years ago, the first game I got for it was 7th Guest.
Despite a few annoying points, I really enjoyed the game. So, when
the 11th Hour was announced, I naturally looked forward to
its arrival with great eagerness. Now, after many delays, 11th
Hour is on the stands, and it has turned out to be a great disappointment
in many ways.

In
the first game, you wandered through a haunted house, solving puzzles
in the various rooms. Completing one or more usually opened more of
the house to you, and also triggered ghostly reenactments of what
happened in the house back in the ’20’s, when Stauf and his six guests
mysteriously vanished. Eventually, you made your way to the top of
the house for a confrontation with Stauf himself.

There was a lot about 7th
Guest that was never fully (in some cases, not even partially)
explained, and many of the ghost scenes were not displayed in order,
making the story even harder to follow. This was perhaps the single
biggest complaint about 7th Guest, and evidently the designers
took that to heart, as 11th Hour is a rigidly-linear production.

The story here is about
Carl Denning and Robin Morales. Denning is a reporter for, and Morales
the producer of, a TV show called “Case Unsolved”. Morales
goes to Harley-On-Hudson to poke around the Stauf mansion and promptly
vanishes. Denning receives a palm-sized computer called the “Gamebook”,
which shows him a picture of Robin in trouble. Naturally, he jumps
right on his motorcycle and heads for the Stauf mansion himself, where
he quickly becomes embroiled in Stauf’s little games.

As Denning goes through
the house, solving the puzzles, the Gamebook shows him playbacks of
what happened from the time Morales arrived in town. Some show Morales,
some show other people. At the conclusion of each hour, the playbacks
from that hour are shown again, in sequence, with some extra scenes.
Over the course of the game, the complete narrative is thus developed,
in order.

The interface is simple,
and will be familiar to anyone who played 7th Guest. The main
cursor is a skeletal hand, whose motions indicates what you can do.
A beckoning or pointing hand means you can go in that direction, while
a hand moving rapidly back and forth means no action to be taken.
A tapping motion indicates something that can be touched.

The
cursor changes to an eyeball over some objects to allow a closer look,
and becomes a skull with an exposed, pulsating brain when over a puzzle.
Pushing the hand to the top of the screen accesses the Gamebook, which
is the main control panel. From here, you can save or load the game,
quit, look over the house map, review a playback, or obtain help from
the mysterious Samantha, who sent you the computer in the first place.

The game is divided into
the hours of 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 o’clock (P.M., of course). Everything
in each hour must be completed before you can move on to the next
one. In many instances, certain puzzles or Treasure Hunts must be
solved before more opens to you during a particular hour.

Now that you know something
about the game, let’s take a look at what’s wrong with it. First,
11th Hour was designed, not merely for a high-end system, but
a top-end one. Where 7th Guest played flawlessly on my ’66, I couldn’t
even bring up 11th Hour except in quarter-screen grayscale.
It was rather like watching a letterbox movie on a black and white
TV. There was no deterioration of the graphics, just no color except
a tinting of the pieces when doing a puzzle.

Further, the voices on
the playbacks were often hard to make out; there was a lot of stuttering
and skipping in the audio portion. The game music usually came through
all right, however, as did Stauf’s voice. Unfortunately, the music
rapidly became boring, as did Stauf’s taunts, and I generally had
the speakers off except during the playbacks. None of this added any
enjoyment to playing the game.

There are thirteen puzzles
in 11th Hour, and six head-to-head confrontations with Stauf
in strategy games. Sad to say, most of the puzzles are unimaginative
at best. Five of them are of the “switch places” variety.
You exchange the starting positions of bishops, knights and spiders
(separate puzzles, of course), rearrange books on a shelf, and anagram
the letters of “Faust” to “Stauf” on a railroad
track. One or two would have been all right; five of essentially the
same thing is too much.

Worse
yet is the mirror, a form of sliding block puzzle, where you have
to move the nine panels around to form a complete picture. The puzzle
is okay; the problem is that much of the time, you’ll get a starting
arrangement that’s impossible to complete, and you won’t know it until
you’re well along (the puzzle begins with a random configuration each
time).

However, the absolute worst
is the Piano. Here, you have a “room” crowded with furniture,
and you must move the pieces so you can get the Piano out of the room.
Not only is the concept dreary to begin with, it takes something on
the order of 90 (!) moves to do it. This isn’t a puzzle, this is stupidity.
We all have better things to do with our time than indulge in such
tedious exercises.

Beyond the puzzles, there
are the Treasure Hunts. In the Hunts, Stauf provides a bizarre clue
to some object in the house, via the Gamebook. After figuring out
the clue, you find the item and touch it. Usually, though not always,
this triggers one of the playback scenes.

The clues are in the style
of British crosswords, relying heavily on anagrams, puns, homonyms,
and the like. What is bad about this is, you pretty much have to write
down all the viewable items in the rooms and hallway, or you’ll be
a long time finding anything. There’s so much junk lying around, you
won’t be able to remember what’s where after awhile, so a list is
necessary.

There
are more Treasure Hunts than anything else in the game; 41 of them
altogether, and what might have been interesting turns into drudgery
before very long. Playing a game should not require taking inventory
of the house’s contents. Where’s the fun in this?

The face-offs vs. Stauf
were something of a drag for me, since I’m not much of a strategy
game player. Fortunately, the AI for these games seems to have been
scaled way back from that in the universally-hated microbe puzzle
of 7th Guest (the one thing in that game I used the library book to
solve), and it is entirely possible to win all of them, with persistence
and perhaps a little luck. However, I didn’t particularly care to
have to go through six of these things.

Moving around the house
is cumbersome and awkward. You’d think that, having a map, you could
just click on a room to go there, but that’s not the case. I can see
where, for the first visit to an open room, you’d have to go the “hard
way”. After that, though, you should have been able to reach
such rooms from the house map. It isn’t until the game is over, and
the entire house is open, that you can travel by using the map, and
who really cares then?

It’s during play that you
really need this ability, and you don’t have it. Instead, you must
sit through the tiresome movement system to get anywhere, over and
over again. While the house isn’t that large, it still takes awhile
to reach most places.

About the story, I won’t
say too much, because I could go on a long time about it. While the
narrative is more connected, it leaves as much, if not more, unanswered
as did 7th Guest. Too many things happen without an explanation,
which is very unsatisfying.

More, while the story itself
starts off interestingly, it soon devolves into something cheap and
sordid. And that is really the whole sad point about 11th Hour:
It isn’t so much a game as a third-rate sex and sadism flick masquerading
as one. As the events unfolded, I was repelled rather than horrified,
and between that and the general tedium of playing, I couldn’t finish
this one fast enough.

Overall, 11th Hour
is a mess in its storyline, its poor puzzle quality, its too-high-end
requirements, and its general lack of consideration for the game player.
I would not recommend this game to anyone.

(Note: I wouldn’t want
anyone to get the wrong idea by the mention of “sex”. While
some of the scenes are highly suggestive, there is nothing remotely
pornographic about them

Final Grade: D

System Requirements:

PC:
IBM and 100% compatibles, Win 95 or MS-DOS 5.0 or greater, 486DX2/66
minimum (Pentium recommended), 2x speed CD-ROM drive performing
at a sustained rate of 300k/sec, 8 MB RAM, 4 MB hard disk space,
Sound Blaster family, Roland family, Media Vision family, Gravis
Ultrasound and 100% compatibles, Local Bus Video capable of displaying
thousands of colors, Microsoft 100% compatible mouse; good, powered
speakers.

Mac:
80mhz PowerPC
128MB RAM
System 7.5 or better
4x CD-ROM