The 7th Guest - Programmed by Trilobyte
                    Published by Virgin Games RRP œ69.95
               (Puzzle game for CD-ROM only)

                     Review by Roy Sims

What is it about haunted houses? I had never seen a computer game
set in a haunted house before and then two come along at the same
time! (The other, for those who don't know, is 'The Legacy' from
Microprose).

I make a point of highlighting the hardware requirements for PC
games, and it pains me to say that a 386DX with an average speed
1MB SVGA graphics card, even when equipped with the fastest CD-Rom
drive available, doesn't produce the best results from this game.
I should imagine that a 66 mhz 486 would show the game in its best
light, but more on the reasons why later. Super VGA is preferred,
although the game can be run in MCGA (320x200x256 colours) if a
fast SVGA card isn't available. A soundboard is also essential.

The 7th Guest comes in a large (deep) box that is made up to look
like a heavy leather bound book. Inside is a double CD box with the
two game CDs and a small manual. The rest of the box is taken up
with a tacky poor quality 'Making of...' video that has obviously
been thrown in to justify the enormous price tag and the big box.

The story centres on a weird toy maker's house and his invitation to
various people to come and pay a visit. The story of how the toy
maker came to be so odd is shown at the start of the game through
full motion video. The picture quality isn't particularly good
(even in SVGA) but seeing the video move fluidly was quite
impressive the first time around. (This was mainly due to the fast
CD-Rom drive). The intro also allows you to hear a proper fully
orchestrated soundtrack play through the headphone socket of the
CD-Rom player, directly off a CD audio track on the disk. This is
much much better than using soundcards, but there are technical
reasons why this isn't pursued in the game itself. (For starters,
the music would have to stop each time the CD-Rom was accessed to
load in the next rendered room or video footage!)

Once in the game itself you are faced with a fully rendered/ray
traced spooky house. There's none of the 'one bound and he was
halfway down the hall' movement found in 'The Legacy'. When you
move it really does look like you are in the house, or rather it
would if I had a fast enough PC and graphics card. This is where
the speed of the PC (instead of the speed of the CD-Rom drive)
comes into play. Each movement inside the house should be fluid,
but the screen update is so slow at times that you see a very
obvious visual glitch where the screen is desperately trying to
catch up. It improves if you change the graphics mode down to lowly
MCGA, but then the game looks rather grotty as a result. However,
you do get used to this visual glitch after a while and the rooms
are very impressive.

So what type of game is it? Well, take away the flash graphics and
video footage and what you have here is a game where each room has
a head scratching logic puzzle to be solved, before other areas
become accessible. You must ultimately solve all of the puzzles and
finish the end game (whatever that is) in order to survive the
night. The first few puzzles are quite easy. For example, one of
the early puzzles involved a cake adorned with skulls and
gravestone decorations. You must devise a way to cut the cake up
into six equal portions with exactly the same number of decorations
on each. I solved this one first time. Another puzzle involves
constructing a sentence from a pathway of letters, but you can only
jump three or five letters away from the last one. There are over
twenty such puzzles in the game in total, and whilst the first few
are quite easy they do get progressively harder. Before and after
each puzzle you get a snatch of video footage laid over the
rendered room showing the other six guests in action. The standard
of acting isn't up to much and the story that they try and 'act'
out is pretty unconvincing too, but again it is an unusual touch.

Ultimately, it has to be said that 'The 7th Guest' is not a very
good game. It is obvious that the programmers came up with the idea
of a game where you can walk around a totally rendered/ray traced
environment, but then they got a bit stuck when it came down to the
nitty gritty of actually making it an interactive game with an
interesting storyline. The puzzles are hard, but instead of
supplementing the main game they ARE the main game. Be very sure
that you want to splash out nearly œ70. If your PC isn't up to it,
then moving around the house will looking slow and jerky. If your
CD-Rom drive isn't quite up to it then the video will look a bit
naff too. I've heard that the game still looks jerky on a mega fast
486 with the fastest CD-Rom drive going. 'The 7th Guest' looks
great when it isn't moving, but give me a half decent RPG any day.

The actual gameplay side of things has been bettered in the past on
a 48K ZX Spectrum, and this highlights what could be a worrying
trend. The larger software companies are creeping towards a more
permanent liaison with all things Hollywood. Certainly this game is
more flash and less substance. Gameplay is becoming sacrificed to
make room for the games overall 'look'. For a long time, U.S buyers
have equated the number of disks, the look and the size of a game
with its quality. This isn't always the case. CD-Rom makes it easier
to make enormous games (640 mb per CD) but are they any better? I'm
not yet convinced that they are. The 7th Guest is an expensive
diversion, but I for one hope that this ISN'T the future of gaming.