The 7th Guest

Since I spent quite a lot in the steam store over Christmas - including buying the expansion and stuff packs I didn't yet have for the Sims 3 - I want to have another go at playing all the games I own.  I did try this before, several years ago, with the games I owned on disc.  I think I got to the Bs before giving up on that.  Anyway.  I have 126 games on Steam, and I'm going to try to play all of them this year, either in alphabetical order or based on preference, depending on my mood.  I'm definitely going to try to play the shorter puzzle or visual novel style games, especially those I haven't played at all before, but I may skip the ones I've played before, or at least leave the longer ones till last.

With all that in mind, the first game is my list is the 11th Hour, but since it's the sequel to the 7th Guest, I decided to play the 7th Guest first.  I have played this before.  It was one of the earliest games to be released on disc, and was for MS-DOS.  I played it on an emulator a while ago and, from memory, I don't expect it to take much longer than an evening.  It's a horror puzzle game.  Essentially, you walk around a mansion trying to figure out what happened to a group who were invited for dinner several years ago.  One interesting thing about the game is that it used video clips for cut scenes, which do look a bit aged now but which are still pretty impressive for the time.  Really, TV Tropes has a better description of the whole thing than I do.

A lot of the puzzles are moon-logic based (to reference TV tropes again), which does work thematically, but also makes it a weird one to play.  What you try is either right or wrong, and there sometimes aren't even sufficient hints on how to begin solving a puzzle or what you're trying to achieve - or the hints are in a totally different room that you might not have come across yet - so, honestly, I used a guide just to get an idea of what I was trying to do for some of them.  I found that more rewarding considering how frustrating some of them can be.  For the microscope puzzle, I used the book in the library to skip it entirely.  I also used this to solve the portrait puzzle, because it was 1am.

This post isn't really intended as a review or a guide or anything, more as a diary.