The 7th Guest: Remastered

I got T7g when CD-ROMs were coming into the mainstream. I bought one of the original discs and ran into the classic sound buffer failure 02/20 that Trilobyte forgot to debug in DOS. Once I got the patch (terminal link and a floppy disk) I played the game to completion. When I had to move to Mac I picked up the equivalent and introduced my friend in high school to it. Henry Stauf became well-known among the geeks of my day. This is a great game, and Hirshboeck owns the role of Stauf like Englund owned Freddy. On the acting: yes, they’re overacting for a purpose…a lot of nuance is lost when compression reduces facial expressions to pixels. This game was produced in the early 90’s. The actors are compensating for the tech. THIS GAME IS A PIECE OF HISTORY. It, along with Myst, popularized the optical drive. There are some bugs, granted, but as long as we keep reporting them they’ll fix them.

I was hesitant to get this since seeing all the reviews that say there’s no sound, but I got it and have played it at least 10 times now, and the sound is actually there! Sometimes if I go to a different room sometimes, the sound cuts out, but it’s fixed just by going to another room again. But usually, the sound is absolutely perfect! I’m using ipados 14.1 if anyone wonders. Awesome game! 5 stars!

I don’t know how this is considered a “remaster” with so many lingering issues still haunting the gameplay. Sure, you can skip audio and video sequences, but Stauf will still repeat the same corny joke dozens of times while you work through a puzzle. “Don’t take all KNIGHT” repeated forty times while solving the knights puzzle, for example. In some rooms, the clickable zones are very hard to hit, such as the cards in the magician’s room and the floor in the foyer, and you end up zooming across the house erroneously. Most embarrassing of all, the smoothing that was promised as part of the remaster holds up in very few areas. Once you advance to the laboratory, nursery and attic, it’s as choppy as the CD-ROM and the audio/video fails to sync up. I had many restarts for the app in order to simply get any audio at all to restore, as it would occasionally fail without reason. This is overall an incredibly lazy and disappointing remaster of a classic game. The original CD-ROM allowed you to replay any puzzle after you complete the endgame. That’s not possible here either, as you get stuck in the attic if you reload past the credits. The best iOS port for the 7th Guest, in my opinion, would be a concise way to play through any of the great puzzles in this classic game, with a focused effort on improved controls and limited/eliminated audio interruptions.