The 7th Guest

One of the first CD-ROM games published that actually took advantage of the capacity of the format. Incredibly brilliant in its time. It was a puzzle/mystery game; you'd move through this large mansion solving puzzles and trying to unlock its secrets.

This game is the result of a combination of two things: A very large amount of storage (at the time, a CD-ROM was a colossally huge medium. Most entire hard drives were around 100-200MB, CD-ROMs are 650MB), and not very much CPU power. Transitions from one area of the mansion to another were pre-rendered and stored on disc. This provided nice looking transitions, but also resulted in great limitation on where you could go.

My grandmother always said that if you were planning a dinner party of 4 to be cautious of the 5th uninvited guest, be startled with the 6th, and to be afraid if you had a 7th.

I dont have dinner parties, so I dont know if this is necessarly true. But she was right about the law of three.

When I first purchased a new 1X CD-ROM for my $1,500⁰⁰ 485SX25 IBM computer, The Seventh Guest was included. The game was made by Trilobyte, and included a very nifty sticker of the fossil. After installing the proprietry card to run the CD-ROM, I popped in the game.

The detail and the colors were amazing. Most of the games of that era were DOS-based, and the graphics were blocky and grainy. The Seventh Guest used smooth animation and rendered graphics, which looked great on my standard 14-inch .39dpi monitor with 256 colors.

My wife and I ended up getting a couple of friends together, and our team of four tackled the game with gusto. Everyone had their specialty. I was good at the logic puzzles like the chessboard in the pool table. My wife was able to solve the word puzzle in the kitchen pantry (no mean feat considering the only real vowels were the letter "y"), and our two friends were able to help solve most of the rest, including the nasty green blobs in the microscope puzzle. It took us about six weeks to get through the game, played together every Friday evening. My wife was creeped out by the actor who played Stauff.

If you compare it with the current bag of "bigger better faster NOW" games that flood the shelves, it seems a bit dated. Should you find a copy, I recommend giving it a chance. Play with a group, and you'll all be entertained for hours.