Part 1: Index

What is The 7th Guest?
The 7th Guest was an early CD-ROM game for the PC, released in April 1993. I personally wouldn't consider it a 'horror game', but a creepy and atmospheric puzzle/adventure game.



The gameplay generally involves exploring, finding clues, solving puzzles, being subjected to puns, and putting together the mystery of what happened in the mansion. Although it's a pretty famous title, I consider it greatly underappreciated.

Underappreciated?
The game was released around half a year before Myst, and they share many similar themes.

Both games start you off as an unnamed, unseen character.
Both games start you out with no information as to what you should be doing, leaving the storyline to the player to discover for themselves.
Both games involve solving puzzles to further progression and unlock more areas, with the player finding more about the few main characters as the game goes along.

However, unlike Myst, The 7th Guest featured beautifully coloured visuals, smooth between-scene animation (as opposed to the low-colour slideshow format of Myst), plenty of atmospheric FMV sequences, and some truly devious puzzles and secrets.

Why am I comparing it to Myst? That'd be because Myst is still receiving all the praise for its 'incredible graphics' and it being 'the reason to own a CD-ROM drive'! Even online reviews still praise how the plotline of Myst was presented, in that it remains an unexplained mystery for the player to figure out for themselves, where it's all finally revealed at the end after the player has worked it out over the course of the game... but when it comes to T7G, reviews completely shun this exact same form of storytelling, labelling it as a cheap way to avoid a solid narrative.

Don't get me wrong, I do love Myst, however I feel it's somewhat unfair that T7G pretty much pioneered its genre and did it all much better, but Myst still gets the credit for it. It's kinda like how Resident Evil gets all the credit for its style of gameplay, when Alone in the Dark before did it all years before, and actually let you drop and recollect items when needed, something that RE0 was then praised for almost a decade later. Back to T7G though, here's a wonderful screenshot comparison!



How will the LP be presented?
This will be a Video LP, with subtitled commentary throughout. I'll be providing links to both Viddler and GameVee, as GameVee has a better quality for a windowed stream, and Viddler has a better quality for fullscreen and AVI download.

Occasionally, I may throw puzzles open to you guys to attempt to solve! Most puzzles require interaction to play though, so don't expect this too often. I'll still be making videos whether you solve them or not, but I think it'd be fun to have a little audience participation.

More importantly to note, I'll be playing the DOS version of the game, with the Windows 95 patch, running in Windows 98 compatibility, on Windows XP.

This chain of backwards compatibility leads to some oddities due to The 7th Guest's game engine. With the Windows 95 patch, all the scene transitions increase in speed greatly, although this isn't a bad thing at all-- the slow transitions of the original game were quite annoying to sit through.

The most notable difference, however, is how the music sounds like its being played by a rusting music box. It's hard to explain, but occasionally notes are very slightly later than they should be. It's an unavoidable issue unfortunately, but hey, it has the unintended side-effect of making everything a little more creepy than it already is!

Everything else gameplay-wise will be explained in the videos themselves as we go along.


Videos

Note!:
For watching the videos in a window, choose Gamevee.
For watching fullscreen, or for downloading the AVIs, choose Viddler.
Viddlers windowed mode does not work well with subtitles!

Part 00: The Introduction

GameVee Viddler

Part 01: Piece of Cake