Saturday Casual Gaming 241: The 7th Guest

In Which I Discuss My First Big Scare In Gaming

Back when I was a wee little owlet, huddled deep in the cushy confines of childhood and innocence, I saw some things that maybe a bitty babbie should not have. For instance, my father wanted to watch Indiana Jones when I was in Kindergarten, and so we watched it. I was subtly traumatized by the face-melting scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. That wouldn't be the end of it, though (much to my mother's chagrin). See, my dad had his computer office in the basement, and me being a wee little wimpkin, I was terrified of the basement.

It's not even a creepy basement.

Seriously, he had, like, a cute little log cabin style room down there and it smelled like warm wood and safety, especially since there was a door I could shut and keep out anything that scared me. Except for one problem.

My dad like to play video games on his desktop sometimes.

At first, it was dumb stuff like a very old PC version of a Speed Racer game that my very nerdy uncle gave him, but from there we ended up with a rather eclectic segment of early 1990s PC games. Redneck Rampage, Monster Truck Madness, and every Puzz3D game that was published, I think, crossed his screen. Fairly innocuous, right?

Well, then 1993 happened.

And with it came The 7th Guest, and the scarring.

The scarring was real.

And... I don't really get it now?

This FMV game scared me so badly that I still don't like that cellar and it mocks me in my dreams

So what's so spoopy about The 7th Guest?

Everything, when you're a tiny child, to be honest.

It's a big creepy mansion filled with ghosts and disembodied parts from dead people. Of course it freaked me out! And the cellar puzzles were literally impossible. It was basically dumb luck to escape!

You play as the main character, who I didn't know until today was named Tad, and you're stuck in this big house solving puzzles. Please bear in mind that I have literally not played this game since 1994. I don't remember much, and I'm basing this review on what little I can remember about how it messed me up.

It only messed me up a very little bit. Most of the scarring was from the Nazis in Raiders.

Regardless, you, through the eyes of Tad, explore this vast and incomprehensible mansion, encountering FMV clips of ghosts. I did not understand in 1993 what FMV was. To me, it was as though a dozen actual people were stuck in my father's computer and he couldn't help them.

Helplessness is a major theme in this game, I think.

That and really nice 3D environments!

So there are all these ghosts stuck in the house with you, and they're all pretty mad about it, too. You weren't even supposed to be there. I remember them treating me/Tad very shabbily at points. That scared me - I didn't like people being mean to me (I mean, very few people do, and for them, it's probably more of an adult discovery than a thing they liked as kids), and I was very intimidated.

Also, the FMV was super pixellated, so everything had a blurry, half-understood quality
which really was effective, since this was just as my eyes started failing...

You're trying to leave (as Tad), but the scary old man who owns the house and who killed everyone (I think?) has put up a series of really devilish puzzles. They're so tough that I can't remember most of them, though I know that they followed a lot of the same formats as the 1990s Brain Games puzzles I loved like marble solitaire and logic problems.

I remember not understanding how this can puzzle worked at all.

So you find all these puzzles and you try to defeat them, but then there's the basement.

The basement was the worst, and not just because I was in a basement while I played it.

The basement level is a maze.

An unbeatable, nonsensical maze.

More people give up in the maze than at any other point, I understand. And I get it. After the thirtieth time you hear Old Man Stauf (the bad guy) snicker in your ear (and it was even worse with headphones) or ask if you're "Getting... lonely?", you move slowly from fear to rage. It's the easiest game in the world to rage-quit.

I have never, to this day, beaten this game.

I'd like to, though, so until I can buy it off of GOG or Steam or whatever, I'll have to settle for watching other people play it, lol.

Some day, I'd like to record myself or stream myself playing this game so you can all laugh at how silly I was to be terrified of it.

Because as much as it scared the silly little pants off my silly little self (and let's be fair, I was a wee little tot at the time), I also have a strong sense of nostalgia for it.

So Go Enjoy Something!

FC