The 7th Guest
The 7th Guest is a horror adventure set in the mansion of toy maker Henry Stauf, to which six guests have been invited, none of them knowing who the seventh is. The 3DO version from 1994 was among the first titles to introduce home consoles to a game built almost entirely around CD: the house is modeled in 3D, the camera moves between rooms via pre-rendered flythroughs, and actors filmed against a blue screen appear directly in the rooms like ghosts of past events. For its time, it was an image that was hard to ignore in a living room.
Gameplay-wise, it's a series of logic puzzles set in individual rooms — chessboard problems, moving pieces around, a microscope in the laboratory, or a game with tombstones in the graveyard. Some rank among the best the genre has offered, others are notoriously known for their difficulty and could stop players in their tracks for days. Between puzzles, the house opens up gradually, and fragments of unfolding scenes piece together a story of greed, the loss of a child, and a deal that was unwise to make. The atmosphere is held together by music with jazz-tinged, warped motifs and a hint-giving voice that regularly mocks the player. And the hints aren't free — the game remembers every time you use one and makes sure to let you know about it.
At the time, The 7th Guest was regarded as proof that CD-ROM wasn't just an expensive floppy disk, and it became one of the titles that made people buy the drive in the first place. On the 3DO, it felt somewhat less sensational than on computers, since the console had more CD productions of that kind, but it was still a flagship of its library. Today, the game shows its age most in the acting performances — the filmed sequences come across as amusing rather than frightening — while the puzzle design and the feel of an empty, ticking house hold up surprisingly well. It's a title best played as something of a period document, but one that still makes you sweat and, after a few hours, catch yourself bringing a pencil and paper to the screen.
Game 16 of 27 for 3DO Interactive Multiplayer
The same title elsewhere (1)
Both console versions had to bring across the PC CD-ROM original's demanding mix of video sequences and pre-rendered graphics onto home hardware, and both had to work around the limitations of the CD drives of the time. The 1994 3DO version benefited from a console built with video playback in mind, so the puzzles and clips with Stauff come across fairly faithfully, if with loading pauses. The Philips CD-i version from the same year runs on somewhat weaker hardware, and its compressed video tends to look a touch softer, placing it among the more modest ports of the game.
