The tale of The 7th Guest is one full of promise. A villainous drifter named Henry Stauf becomes a toymaker whose dolls and puzzles please children all over town, but every child becomes ill and dies. Some time later, Stauf builds this massive house and invites six guests for a night of...well, puzzles apparently. Puzzles that you, the player, need to solve while the drama of the six (and a mysterious seventh) guest unfolds.
Then and now, the game is a head-scratcher. It's been over 20 years since I played this with my best friend in grade school, and we never could reach the finale. There are many I would have never solved were it not for guides (which can now be found easily within just a few keystrokes on Google). There are some I flat-out refuse to solve (come on, it's hard enough doing musical note puzzles on a console game, I did not have the patience to sit through the piano puzzle in this game). But for every puzzle that's darn near impossible, there's one that's easy. Some can be solved on pure intuition or experimentation. Some require some serious thinking and planning. If you want a game that makes you spend long hours trying to figure out how to move chess pieces across the floor, how to spell things in weird places, and figure out basic geometric patterns, then this game will keep you entranced.
Frustrating puzzles here and there makes this a pretty dodgy experience as it is, but what makes the game drag is having to walk room to room to find them and figure out which other room they unlock. Since it's just animated screens taking you from one place to another, you have no choice but to sit and watch the hallways slowly glide by until you make the next click. There are shortcuts, but you're more likely to click on them by accident and wind up in another part of the house you don't want to be in. It's rather droll if the macabre atmosphere doesn't keep you on your toes.
It did unsettle me as a kid in the 90s. The house is just plain creepy, with all its dark hallways and ghosts and moving paintings and such. It took me some time to realize you can't really die in the game, so all the macabre happenings are just flat images you passively watch. The game tries its best to scare the pants off you--there are frequent screams, lots of gimmicky 3D effects, skeletons playing pianos, occult imagery and symbolism, and a touch of the gothic. To be fair, the game does some of its scares right--the characters and environments become uncanny to the point where it can creep under the skin. But when the cut-scenes consist of hammy, over-the-top performances (with each actor dressed up in ridiculously campy outfits), the effect is lost entirely. It's about as terrifying as a Halloween spook house you might take your kids to.
I'd also argue that the plot tries to cover too much ground with its scares. I could dig this as a haunted house story, plain and simple. But the game shoves in aspects of the occult and supernatural that feel very disconnected (although the novelization of the game provides more clarity). It is pretty clever how the game offers six characters with individual goals, and each one gets what they want but with diabolical twists. The actual seventh guest is presented as an important stake, but it's hard to really feel much about it. All the characters are as flat and insubstantial as the pixels that illustrate them (save for Stauf, who might be one of the more nuanced video game villains I know of). Once I got to the actual ending, I don't even know what that was I saw.
The 7th Guest is an interesting relic from my own childhood. Back then, I spent hours with my best friend in school exploring the freaky house and solving as many puzzles as we could. It was fresh then. Though it's still playable now (on Steam), some things just don't hold up. Things about the story are fascinating, the music is decent, and the technical quality was really fantastic by 90s standards. It is a bit goofy, highly uneven, and might even be frustrating.
3.5/5
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