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The 90s were a gold rush for adventure games. LucasArts kicked off the decade with its legendarily irreverent Monkey Island games. Then, Cyan Worlds materialised to deliver a series of atmospheric and boundary-pushing odysseys with Myst and Riven. Nestled between these primary genre texts is The 7th Guest, a lesser-known but still notorious adventure that earned plaudits for its unique FMV visual style, blending live-action filmed footage with pre-rendered 3D backgrounds. It was remade originally for VR, and now has been reconfigured into something playable on PC and consoles, its digital cobwebs cleared and tricky puzzles tinkered with for a fresh (or nostalgic) audience.
We are dropped into the ectoplasmic shoes of an amnesiac apparition, arriving at the gloomy haunted home of a toy-maker. Armed with a time-bending lantern and a Ouija board-shaped map, your job is to solve a historical whodunnit by literally illuminating events from the past. It’s a melodramatic, surprisingly campy adventure that effectively evokes the overzealous CD-Rom horror of its original era.
The dilapidated design of the manor can take some of the credit here, with its dusty ornate chandeliers and garish framed portraits lining the halls. But it’s the haunting spectres that make the most impact as you work through the story. To capture the original games’ full-motion storytelling, this rendition uses volumetric video capture on 3D models, creating an uncanny visual effect. This anachronistic look bolsters the game’s unnerving atmosphere, and I quickly became obsessed with stalking the figures and watching the polygons pop and bounce as if in response to the flamboyant performances of the game’s cast.
Set dressing aside, the real meat of The 7th Guest Remake is its puzzles, which scale from approachable to migraine-inducing. You’ll find yourself rerouting a model train to attach cabooses, playing a theremin to explode runic vases and restructuring the squares of a musty quilt to re-create the cycle of life. Because the answer to each puzzle is crystallised in the past, you’ll need to use your mystic light to explore and scour each area for clues. This could have easily become tiresome over the game’s six-hour runtime, but the well-executed visual trickery and careful theming of each bedroom and rumpus room keep it from feeling like work.
The only problem with this spirited remake is that controlling it can be a nightmare. While you can move around the manor freely, shining your light on whatever you please, when you want to interact with something, you’re back to a finicky point-and-click system. You have to wait for a skeleton hand icon to appear on an item before you can engage with it, and the tracking of your inputs isn’t reliable at all, leaving you stuck nudging your mouse around a millimetre at a time to try to pick something up or press an intriguing button. This may be a result of the transition from VR, but given that The 7th Guest was a point-and-click game in the first place, the controls feel egregious.
It’s easy to see why The 7th Guest was so beloved in the first place. Vertigo Games has given this classic a well-deserved facelift, ratcheting up the impact of its theatrical story and unique historical atmosphere. Frustrating mechanical woes aside, it still feels like essential reading for puzzle-lovers who wish to experience one of the classics that shaped the adventure game genre.
