When
you were a kid, did you ever go to a haunted house during Halloween? Remember
walking through the dimly lit rooms, trying to see everything in the dark, or
worse, through the flash of a strobe light or the garish colors of day-glo paint
and a black light, all the while some adolescent dressed like Freddie Krueger
with an evil edge poked you with a stick, or waved some disturbing and indecipherable
object at you to keep you moving along? Remember coming out the other side thinking
that was pretty cool, and that you had gotten your money’s worth?

Well,
if you’re that kind of weirdo, like me, then Trilobyte’s The 7th Guest is
for you. Now this computer-generated haunted house is a little fancier, more like
the Disneyland version, but you’re still provided with all the fun of sneaking
through rooms and having ghosts jump out at you.

The game is played first-person–you
are “Ego,” a faceless, nameless entity moving through the house discovering
the unfolding story. The background story is of a man named Stauf, a drifter who
has visions of toys, which he builds and sells, until the children who own them
begin to die, and the scary mansion he has built. The interface is point-and-click,
with indicated hot spots.

The
presentation of the background story is excellent. It is meted out to you via
a book that is read to you, just showing pictures to go with the story–no lengthy
introduction of what you’re going to experience to read. The story is integral
to the completion of the game. Bits of the story are given by ghosts as a reward
for puzzles completed, or to move the story forward and access more rooms, in
some instances. Now about those ghosts. Have you ever seen a reviewer or writer
claim to have experienced the horrors of bad, hammy adventure game acting? This
game has got to be the genus of that old saw, and gaming has apparently been living
it down ever since. I don’t understand why game makers feel compelled to organize
the slightest detail to perfection in graphics, puzzles and music, then when it
is time to hire actors, someone asks the deli guy delivering sandwiches to “put
that box down and come over here for a minute.” in other words, the acting
is bad community theater quality at best, loud and overdone, the actors one for
one chewing up the scenery. The story is excellent; this is not. The story,
as a result, gets a C+ for the cruelty of having to watch those people constantly
gyrate.

But
this isn’t a game where we are here for the acting or story; the real star of
the show is the puzzles. These are fun, very straight puzzles, word and sliding
puzzles, puzzles using pieces from a chessboard, things like that. The puzzles
are like taking a walk down the Toys R Us game isle, and thinking, “I saw
a piece of that one in The 7th Guest, but it was all twisted around and
different.” I played this game originally as a neophyte gamer and have returned
to it more seasoned, and found the puzzles are still as entertaining as I remember;
the only difference is that this time I could get through them in record time,
but I do not know whether to attribute this to experience or familiarity. Nevertheless,
this is an excellent game to give to someone new to adventure gaming to get him/her
started, or hooked, as he/she can easily accomplish things and move around without
too high a learning curve or difficulty in solutions. The game also provides a
book in the library that, if returned to, will give you clues twice, and on the
third time back it will solve the puzzle for you, which is great for someone new
to puzzle games. Puzzles get an A.
The
graphics are one of the highlights and one of my most fondly remembered points
of the game. Firstly, the cursor is a real highlight, and some work and thought
was put into using this thoroughly throughout the game. It is really nicely designed,
with changes to signify a puzzle, direction, story or main screen, and these are
done large and with striking differences, so there’s no mistaking them. The details
are fun, and just what the doctor ordered, haunted house-wise. There are eyeball
plates in the dining room, the wallpaper is properly Victorian, the lighting sufficiently
low and creepy. The interface dictates that you sail through the house like an
apparition yourself, a fun thing that gives you the feel of being on a ride, and
flying up and down the main staircase is a lot of fun. The graphics get an
A.

The music, written and performed by one or more people known as “The
Fat Man,” is clever enough that the game makers put it into its own audio
CD, included in the package. One difficulty I had with the sound, and with the
overall game for that matter, is that there were no preference settings to control
volume, etc., and this has to be handled manually on the computer. The voices
and sound often are fuzzy and sound as though they are coming from a cardboard
box. The music and sound get a B.

Can you die in this game? No, except
from causes exterior to the game, like dying from old age from being trapped in
the maze.

Several bugs are contained in this game, for Mac players–the
first time I played it I did it on a 68040, with virtual memory off, and it played
great. This time, it was on a Power Mac, and what a nightmare. It does not play
well on a Power Mac, with frequent crashes and freezes that I was able to get
around being fairly savvy on Mac problem-solving, but let’s just say it was a
good thing I had a copy of the unauthorized biography of Martha Stewart on hand,
which assured me, in between restarts, that there were people in the world having
a worse time of it than me. The game kept dumping out, at one point corrupting
so badly Norton couldn’t fix it and a fresh copy had to be installed. Also, if
too much memory is allocated (!?), it will lock up after the cake puzzle.

All
in all, if Shivers is like a Tim Burton film, I’d have to say The 7th
Guest is the Roger Corman of adventure games, mostly from the creepy, second-tier
acting and costumes, like Fall of the House of Usher, a three-star Corman effort
that is still relegated to American International release versus a major studio.

Final score is a B.

System Requirements:

Mac:
68030 or 68040 Mac
20 MHz or higher

System 7.0 or higher
4 MB RAM, 8 recommended
CD-ROM drive
32-bit addressing
turned on
Note: You may encounter difficulties running this disc on a Power
Mac. Try using QuickTime 2.1.

PC:

386
2 MB RAM
10 MB disk space
DOS 5.0
Note: There is also
a Win95 updated version available.