The wonderful thing about 90's computer games is that the media itself carries an uncanny horror with it, possibly due to the fact that as soon as the game boots up, you are reminded of the 90's. For those who are not old enough to have experienced TGIF sitcoms, Pogs, boybands, teased bangs, Buffy, and dialup modems firsthand, this game may appear to be some Satanic computer vomit you only read of in urban legends.

In a way, The 7th Guest is just that. It's not a game where you "just have to get over the graphics." The graphics are not as problematic as other aspects of the game. For example, the cutscenes communicate some story behind the house and all the puzzles in it, but they are so bizarre and disjointed. You finish the cutscenes and hope it was a hallucination, because otherwise that would mean that someone (or more accurately, a whole team of people) willingly unleashed this upon humanity. The gameplay is truly a product of its time: clunky.

Fortunately, the puzzles (the meat of the game) are very challenging and unique, so no matter your thinking style, there will probably be at least one that you can solve instantly, and several that will leave you scratching your head. I consulted a guide quite a bit to get through several puzzles.

TL;DR Don't do this to yourself unless you really, really like puzzles. Recommended because I really, really do.

The 7th Guest is one of the original PC classics from back from 1993. You'll get to explore the full 3D rendered mansion and see the full motion video that made this game so famous at the time. The game is a no pressure, point and click puzzle game that puts you in a kooky haunted house full of human spirits from the 1930s. I can't call them ghosts, so much as spirits, they aren't scary or spooky so much as eccentric.

Each room in the mansion has its own puzzle to solve. There is a good variety of puzzles here, you won't face the same one twice. Some puzzles are self explanatory such as a sliding tile puzzle, a word jumble on a quilt and a maze where you need to flip doors to get to the end. Others are less obvious, such as arranging cans to spell words where the only vowel is Y. Some are just tedious because of the point and click controls, coupled with voice overs. The voices will give you hints and a villain will taunt you, but each time a voice says something, it will halt the game, killing the pace. If you get stumped on a puzzle, there is a library with a hint book.

As you navigate the mansion, you'll see things in first person perspective. To turn around, you need only click the side of the screen. There is no slight turning, when you turn, the camera will turn completely around and look at what the game wants to. In a room, you need to hover your mouse cursor until it changes to let you know that you can do something or walk forward. Some doors you can enter, other doors you can't with no sign that you need a key or anything like that. Instead, you need to assume that solving puzzles will unlock doors to new areas. The game won't hold your hand or tell you anything more than a hint in a puzzle. If you see that as a positive, this might be a game for you.

There game is forgiving. There is no sort of game over. It all just keeps going. If you get stumped on a puzzle, you can restart it. Nothing will kill you. You just keep going. The only real downer is time wasted going the wrong direction or having to listen to voice overs over and over again. You won't find a map except for the basement maze. You can't get lost... except for in the basement maze, where everything is a grey brick wall.

The game takes its time. Just getting from place to place seems like a chore since movement is so slow even on my modern PC. Hearing voice overs will stop the game and there are plenty of cut scenes full of absurd dialog about their past sins. There are nice touches to the game such as a skull face or hands trying to reach through a painting.

If you're in the mood for 1993 nostalgia, midi loops and puzzles, this game is for you. The game is a part of history.

Full disclosure. I've wanted to finish this game for YEARS. I remember when my pops bought a boxed copy and it wouldn't run because it required upgrades such as a 4X Speed CD-ROM drive. Well after getting all the upgrades we got to play it and well, it ended up being a brutal puzzle game with over the top acting and a molasses interface. Well in 2014 nothing has changed but finishing this game was always a itch I'd wanted to scratch. Now that I've done, I wished I played something else. The good? The house in 7th Guest is nicely realized. Great atmosphere and some of the puzzles are fun. The bad? Well, everything else. The aforementioned acting is even worse now and I'm still not sure what the heck the story was. And some of the puzzles are absolutely brutal diificulty wise (a special screw you to the piano puzzle - memory puzzles are the worst for me). Needless to say, the payoff isn't there and while the pure nostalgia had me smiling at times, I was slapped back to reality as I slowly, SLOWLY moved through the mansion trying to find the next puzzle. So the bottom line is I do not recommend this game unless you remember those early 90s where a couple 100 MBs of storage space or a 4X speed CD-ROM drive was a big deal. Otherwise, move on.

EDIT: I'd be remiss if I didn't add you could skip puzzles. You just have to navigate the mansion SLOWLY to get to a book in the study describing how the puzzle can be solved. Do that three times (THREE) and the puzzle will be solved for you. Not great but better than tearing your hair out.

I never played the game when it originally came out so this was my first time playing the game. The game itself is from 1993. and is a adventure/puzzle/horror type of game.You find yourself trapped in a manor with 6 other guests owned by some madman named Stauf.
The story of the game is rather confusing and the cutscenes a lot of times don't make a lot of sense and don't really explain the story that well. The goal of the game is to solve all the puzzles in all the rooms and discover a secret of a 7th guest.

The game has been made using FMV and the rooms are all modeled in 3D which for the time it came out was absolute beauty. Not the case today anymore.Each of the rooms in the house have a puzzle to solve and those really are the game's best trait. The puzzles are quite varied and give a great challenge to anyone willing to invest in this game (although I have to admit I felt the urge to smash my monitor into the wall out of frustration on a couple of occasions).

The bad thing is the game is really slow, thus making the movement around the house a pain. And sometimes during the puzzles the character will keep saying things every time you restart it and it gets annoying sometimes.There are a couple of disturbing scenes and the music / ambiance is quite good at making you feel uneasy.

So, to sum it all up:

+ challenging puzzles
+ great music and sounds

- slow movement
- dated graphics
- not the greatest story

I recommend this game to all adventure fans who don't mind slow movement and enjoy great puzzles. Everyone else, this game is probably not for you! 7 / 10

The 7th Guest is a really old game, and highly nostalgic for me. I remember watching my grandmother play this game- and telling me to get out of the office when a certain scene was played. ;)

Overall, the game has NOT aged well. While the game was graphically advanced when it was first released, nowadays it looks terrible in comparison to more recent releases, primarily due to the FMVs used throughout. One good point, despite the outdated graphics, is that the environment as a whole is pretty well fleshed out. All the rooms of the mansion were unique, creating different atmospheres.

Gameplay-wise, it is slow and clunky. The protaganist walks incredibly slowly, and talks far more often then he likely should. This wouldn't be a problem, if the game gave more hints as to where you should go next - as it is, it's a lot more likely that you'll wander around slowly and aimlessly until you accidently find the next cinematic and puzzle.

The puzzles themselves are either obnoxiously easy, obnoxiously hard, or luck-based - there is even a puzzle that if the randomizer doesn't like you, the puzzle is unsolvable and you need to reset it, possibly several times over before it'll let you solve it.

Story-wise, this game is...special. The story actually doesn't make much sense overall, and due to the poor quality of the FMV, it can be difficult keeping track of the story and what is actually happening. There's a character that actually is never explained as far as I could see, though her presence was likely meant to be a badly placed hint.

Overall, this game is great for the dose of nostalgia - outside of that, though, I'd only recommend this if you really, really like puzzles.

Revisiting this game from my childhood proved to be a mistake.

While the FMV graphics were amazing at the time, they haven't aged well in this game.

A lot of the gameplay is also a bit wonky... You go through a house looking for puzzles to solve but once the puzzles are encountered they give you very vague hints about what you're supposed to be doing. This leads to some very tedious puzzle solving, some puzzles that aren't even remotely clever and others still that are just plain boring.

The story and pacing is also all over the place and features acting that will make you cringe.

This may be considered a classic game, but it really isn't very good. While there are some very good puzzles in it, there's at least one that can spawn without a valid solution, forcing you to retry it. There's another that is more of a board game than a puzzle, but the AI plays nearly flawlessly. The story feels pretty weak. The acting and effects are a bit cheap and cheesy, but that really is part of the charm of the game, so I can't hold that against it. It does, at least, include a map showing you what rooms still have puzzles to solve, but even with that you can get frustratingly stuck at times until you find just the right place to click at the right time. There are far better games in the puzzle/adventure genre, and you should only pick this one up for either nostalgia, or if you really are desperate to see some of the older games in the genre.

I originally obtained this game in a bundle when I bought a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 and CD-ROM kit in 1993. It was somewhat revolutionary for the time, as it was one of the first PC games that took advantage of the additional storage space available on CD-ROM. Full motion video sequences abounded... much to its detriment.

The acting and narration in this game is atrocious. I have seen better acting from children at a kindergarten play. The puzzles are more trial-and-error than actually solved with logic. The long and unskippable animation sequences on some puzzles kills the flow of the game. Worse, when you navigate a maze near the middle of the game, you are constantly bombarded with "Feeling lonely?" from the narrator. By the 30th time you've heard it (no exaggeration if you aren't using a map), you seriously want to punch either the narrator or the game designer.

This game has not aged well at all, and I do not recommend a purchase unless you have great nostalgia for it. Even then, seeing it today might ruin your opinion of it.

Also, be aware that this game is run inside the ScummVM virtual machine. Any configuration will need to be performed by hitting Ctrl+F5 and clicking "Return to Launcher".

If you bought a CD-ROM drive or a PC equipped with one in the 90s, you probably got a copy of the The 7th Guest as part of the deal, and as any gamer over 30 will tell you, it was freaking amazing! Oh man, fuzzy footage of hammy (but commendably enthusiastic) actors against low-res, ray-traced backgrounds? How could such mighty wonders be explained outside of the direct intervention of a loving god?! Yes, those were simpler, more naive times, before even the nerdiest of nerds had dial-up internet, and we took our digital miracles wherever we could find them. FMV games (many hastily produced) rained down like Mana from Heaven, and we gobbled up each glorious glob without a critical thought.

Sadly, most of those once awe-inspiring games from the early CD-ROM era have aged pretty terribly; even if you can manage to get your 21st-century eyeballs beyond their nauseous graphics, the majority of them are simply excruciating to play. Incredible to my 32 year-old self, however, The 7th Guest is a charming and addictive game even today! It's got piles of great puzzles (and a few hilariously awful ones for good measure), B-movie charm oozing in yellow rivulets from its ears, some really memorable MIDI courtesy of The Fat Man, and a lot of genuinely interesting art design! Granted, the appeal will probably be limited to aging weirdos like myself who love puzzles, camp and old things, but those weirdos should have a great time with this delightfully moldy oldie!

(Kid me would think adult me a genius for being able to solve all the puzzles.)

While it may have been revolutionary when it was released, being a FMV game, it does not really hold up after all these years. Released in 1993 as one of the first games ever on CD-ROM, and one of the first FMV games, it recieved mixed reviews upon release, but sold fairly well.

The puzzles are extremely obscure, the gameplay is rather obnoxious and the SLOW transitions between the pre-rendered screens get very furstrating after a while. The only truly redeeming factor of the game is the music, which is made by the legendary Fat Man, George Sanger.

It may have been groundbreaking, but it hasn't aged well, not really recommended.

Horror-themed puzzle & exploration game with pre-rendered 3D environments, cinematic cutscenes, nice puzzles, and abysmal gameplay and interface.

Despite the strong positive vibes of nostalgia I cannot in good conscience recommend this game in this day and age. This game originally came out in '93 and it hasn't aged that well. While the puzzles are still good and the premise and story bits of the game are alright, the game has too many infuriating flaws for most people to be able to look past them.

Basically you wander around the abandoned mansion of a crazy doll-maker Henry Stauf and solve puzzles to unlock new cutscenes and rooms with more puzzles. The puzzles themselves are mostly fun, but there are several annoyances that make it difficult to enjoy this game.

First of all, the movement happens on rails, i.e. when you click to move forward or to sides, you enter a static animated sequence that turns the camera and/or moves it to the next location, during which the game will not respond to input. The movement sequences are extremely, infuriatingly slow and unskippable. It gets even worse when you click on a random interactive object and the game takes you on a completely unpredictable, surreal trip to another location, and you have to slowly walk back to where you came from. You will learn to hate the gameplay for this alone.

While you're solving puzzles, you'll get abruptly interrupted by voice sequences of the main villain mocking you and the protagonist thinking to himself, which make the game unresponsive for their duration. Sometimes Stauf or your character give you clues pertaining to the goal of the puzzle, and mostly these are played back only once (you can retrigger them by exiting from and restarting the puzzle), but there are of course exceptions and it makes you wonder if this game was poorly playtested as it really gets old fast hearing the same lines over and over again if you need to reset a puzzle. Often the interruptions consist of the villain making fun of your inadequate problem solving skills and laughing in your face. For example, there's a chess knight-piece puzzle during which Stauf will say "Don't take all night" every five moves or so, and due to the fact that the puzzle mechanics themselves are so extremely slow that it indeed will take you all night, you will end up muting audio to maintain your sanity.

The puzzle mechanics themselves mostly consist of clicking on pre-rendered at-the-time spectacular 3D objects which are then moved around sometimes at excruciatingly slow speeds which introduces yet more arbitrary waiting to the gameplay. For most puzzles this wasn't such a big problem but there are instances that are guaranteed to frustrate you because you'll feel that the game is unnecessarily wasting your time by forcing you to wait between actions.

Essentially, everything in this game is slow - even the menus are loyal to this quirkiness by forcing you to wait during unnecessary animations and audio clips. You're also forced to write the name of your savegame by clicking on fancy letters with your mouse - it's not like you'd likely be equipped with a more convenient input device for entering letters after all. If you enter the menu while you're in a larger area- if only to check the map to see which rooms have unsolved puzzles - when you return to the game it will teleport you to a default location, forcing you to manually walk back to where you were when you entered the menu screen.

The graphics, while being jawdropping when this game came out, of course ain't pretty by today's standards, but I wouldn't say they're unbearable either. Some of the scenes still look fine and obviously a lot of effort went into designing the interiors of the mansion. Goes without saying that we're used to much higher quality graphics rendered in real-time these days, so being forced to navigate this environment via unskippable animated sequences may drive you mad nonetheless.

The music in this game is actually very good. While the soundtrack consists of MIDI tracks which sound a bit ridiculous and thin, the compositions themselves are noteworthy.

If you can tolerate the myriad of annoyances this game throws at you, the puzzles are still good after 20 years and even the story and setting hold some intrigue, but be warned that the fundamentals of the gameplay are crippled to a point that would be deemed absolutely unacceptable in today's standards.

Oh right, and: Went in through a billiard table pocket. Came out of the oven. 5/5 would trip again.

The 7th guest doesn't hold up as well as it should. At the original release it was groundbreaking and frightening. After roughly 20 years the slow movement system and voice-acting are atrocious. On the positive side, the puzzles are all self contained except one (you don't have to find clues throughout the mansion, just start the puzzle). The downside is there is very little direction or instructions for the puzzles. That difficulty does lend itself to a feeling of accomplishment when you solve one. Some puzzles are very logical and pleasing, some feel randomly difficult and illogical. Also a few are too similar. I still suggest playing through this at least once to see how far gaming has come, and because the atmosphere is still very well set. This would benefit well from a full remake.

Don't listen to the Rock, Paper, Shotgun article. This game is a classic. I admit, time has not been kind to it, as it hasn't aged that well, but the nostalgia still stands tall. The puzzles are inventive and enjoyable, the stroies are scary, creepy, and even a bit goofy at times, and the acting is cheesy goodness. If you have the money and want to reopen that time-capsule from the 90's, I highly recommend this gem and it's sequel; The 11th Hour

as much as I would have loved to talked positively about this game, since it does have good points and a cool concept, I can't look pass the flaws.
this is indeed a game of the older era and it can be seen by some of its charm like the cheesy acting by FMV actors and kinda crappy graphics. but alot of the flaws are NOT solely by the fact that it is a older game:
I liked the story even though it was obious as all hell who the villain is and what his plans and methods are. and when the game then begins, the problems start coming in like an avalanche. the most repetitive problem is a combination of one-liners and how often they activate with the same puzzle: two of the puzzles litteraly triggered the same one-liner for every single action I made in that puzzle. the second great problem with the game is the puzzles; don't get me wrong, there are good puzzles in the game, but for every good puzzle that there is, there is a boring one, one which is pretty hard to sole without a walkthrough or a mensa degree and one that is hard to solve due to the hit boxes. so for every one good puzzle that there is, there are three that makes you feel like you are in purgatory, which by the way SPOILERS: YOU KINDA ARE!!!!!!

but the gameplay isn't just ruined by most of the puzzles: the sequences where you move around the mansion combined with the occasionally meaningless cutscenes that can trigger at any moment, like the one of the white lady, makes its a tedious waste of time. if you are not trying to solve the puzzles, you are in a first-person point and click game, but they can still be intertaining if there are things to interact with, which is in general lacking or just not all that well spread out around the mansion.

But for all of the negatives that I have given so far, I would like to give the actors some credit, because they are actually trying to entertain us when the FMV actors start popping in. but what they are given are not really good and even though they act somewhat hammy, it is like they are just going halfway, which ends up giving mixed results, where I don't know if I should appreasiate their acting as characters or be entertained by there cheesiness.

but the last thing for this,is the fact that this is a point-and-click puzzle HORROR game. and during the entire game, you keep seeing things that could even make a kindergartener say that somehting is wrong. now that can be okay, if it wasn't because it was shown through the use of CGI effects. and here again I will be toughing on the fact that it is an older game, because it is exactly like the remake of the Haunting: the psychological horror and every great element that makes terror writing is replaced by a CGI effect that litteraly looks like crap. there are indeed giving alot of options in the game for short horror events, but I only found two moments where I was legitemately afraid: the mirror of rejuvenation and the labyranth, where the latter unfortunately still was plagued by the repetive one-liners that in the end make me feel more like killing myself rather than feeling afraid. but the music in the labyranth together with the lighting was what made the labyranth scary for me.


if you can look past or just don't see the flawed puzzles, cheesy acting, CGI replacing horror elements, the one-liners and the obvious plot like I had experienced, you might like enjoy this.
but if you get annoyed by the same things as I have listed here, I would say: avoid this game. there are better both point-and-click and horror games out there. this certainly haven't aged well at all.

I have not, as of yet. finished this game. I have, however, played through enough to be able to make my mind up on my overall impression.

This game was recently gifted to me by a friend with nostalgic ties to a game I'd missed out on owing to being 9 years old and not owning a gaming system that wasn't made by Sega or Nintendo. Therefore, I guess, he figured I might have the benefit of forming an opinion without "nostalgia goggles."

Initial impression on boot up weren't exactly dazzling, but entirely forgiveable when you factor in that this game is 21 years old and was, at the time, something that would have wowed me. The opening cinematics featured cheesy and cliche voice acting and pixelised live actors. The story, however, was intriguing enough to press on in spite of pre-emptively deciding that there was no way this game was going to rattle me. After all, this is an old-school point and click adventure and is in one of my favourite gaming categories.

On gaining control of the game after the introductions, the rendering of the house is pleasantly surprising and detailed, given that your expectations may have been lowered. Controlling your orientation feels a little bit clunky and decidedly less interactive than you were expecting. If, from what I've already said is enough to turn you off of this game, and you absolutely cannot get past the feel of a very dated game, you may as well move on. However, first impressions can (and more often than not) be wrong.

If you like games that aren't going to hold your hand and tell you what to do? Read on.
If you like games that give you a rewarding hit of dopamine when your big brain figures out a taxing problem? Read on.
If you like atmospheric games that play on your emotional state? Read on.

Shortly after I got my bearings, my initial impressions melted off into nothingness. Clicking around, solving that first puzzle...excellent. The star of the show, though, is that musical score. It plays so perfectly as you uncover teasing aspects of the narrative and somehow jangles the ever-loving Hello on your nerves.
This game is entirely a creepy experience when played with headphones and dim lighting (for that immersive experience). My expectations were shattered.

The only time my nostalgia goggles ever came into play and tainted my unbiased experience, is that some of the problems within the game harkened me back to the days of playing Myst.

In summary, I have to admit that the mixed ratings of this game scared me off when I first viewed it. If not for my friend, I would have shamefully dismissed affording this game the chance it deserves.

Yep, this game is old. Yep, the graphics are quite dated. Yep, it runs slower than most. (what'd you expect, it's old. lol) However, the house is well thought out, well planned and well organized. The story, if you actually pay attention to it, is quite good and definitely creepy. While it can't hold a candle to most of the newer stuff if you're willing to play a game the way we used to play 21 years ago then it's well worth the nostalgic trip. Back then, they really made us work for our puzzle solutions! Still one of my all-time favorites. Right along with the second part, the 11th Hour, and the Phantasmagoria series.

The first ever CD only game from the early 90s. This game was the top of the line back in the day with Full Motion Video and pre-rendered 3D graphics. However, it hasn't aged well in this day in age. Still fun if you like to reminisce as the puzzles are quite fun, except for the maze puzzle. And of course the Reversi microscope puzzle that can't be beat. I wouldn't recommend this other than for nostalgic reasons.

When you hear the term "has not aged well," this is the game they're talking about...except, it was never really a good game to begin with. 7th Guest was always a shoddy puzzle game with crappy FMV.

I mean, it's no Gabriel Knight 2 for Christ's sake.

Very old and incredibly boring, with mediocre puzzles, laggy animation and yawny gameplay.

"You think you remember liking them? You’re forgetting what an idiot you were when you were 20 years younger. These half-arsed petrol station puzzle book puzzles, draped in the dullest FMV since man first drew on cave walls, were a novelty at the time. . . . It looks like a CAD video by an estate agent crossed with a primary school nativity play, that last for all eternity. It says it’s 11 minutes long, but I didn’t have this beard when I first clicked, and it’s still going." from RockPaperScissors.com.

THIS EXACTLY