Happy about: The 7th Guest Remake

While The 7th Guest is a very important FMV point and click adventure that, along with the original Myst, helped popularize CDs as storage medium for games, I never particularly liked it. In fact, the first time I’ve ever fully completed it was about 12 years ago when I’ve decided to give the GOG release a go. I found the story to be way too cheesy, puzzles mostly annoying and the unskippable transitions between each screen got on my nerves. But then 3 years ago the game got remade for VR. And while I don’t own a VR device myself, I did watch a really fun let’s play of that release by supergreatfriend and was looking forward to playing the game myself whenever I can. And now I could do just that, despite still not being able to play VR as the very same version of the game got updated to work on flat screens. This transition isn’t as elegant as it could be, but I still liked the game a lot.

Unlike the original The 7th Guest, that was a point and click adventure with the first person view and screen by screen transitions, the remake works like a more modern first person adventure game. I wouldn’t be surprised, if the main influence on this new updated version, was Myst again. Just the 2021 remake this time around. So you get to freely move around in the 3D space and interact with lots of things in the environment, but for puzzles you must interact with one first, which will lock the view to a fixed camera position and bring up the controls that are necessary for the specific puzzle. Also unlike the original game, your exploration of the mansion that serves as the main setting for the game is limited by story events, which avoids the issue the original game had, where you could experience the story completely out of order.

Interestingly, despite the move to real time 3D visuals, the developers figured out a way to still keep the FMV aspect alive, so the other characters in the game are still played by real actors, who look like 3D holograms, in a way, which is pretty cool. Luckily, the script has been updated, so while it is still very theatric and over the top, it can be taken seriously as a grim fairy tale. Each of the characters get more interesting aspects you can learn about them and the main villain of the game is probably even more charming than he was in the original.

Unsurprisingly, the puzzles have been reworked too. That said, quite a few of them are conceptually similar to ones that were used in the original game. Despite usually being not the person who likes pure puzzles in adventure games, I quite liked most of them. And the biggest issue with them is usually the fact that they are not transferred from VR as well as they could’ve been. In the VR version of the game, you could be looking around and interacting all at once, with no clear transition between the puzzles and exploration. But for flat screens this had to be changed and as a result some of the puzzles are far more confusion or inconvenient than they are in VR. And on top of that, the controls were designed to emulate the VR experience, instead of attempting to adapt it (and, as a result, adjust the puzzles themselves), so sometimes they simply don’t feel good.

But in general, I really enjoyed the game. It’s fun to explore and it’s very cool that you can keep exploring the mansion until a clear point of no return the game warns you about. The puzzles are mostly fine and far better than those in the original game. The plot and characters are also superior and are really fun to follow. The biggest issue with The 7th Guest Remake, really, is that it was a better game as The 7th Guest VR. So if you have access to a VR device, that’s clearly a better way to experience it. But at least both versions are now sold as one package, which is neat. Either way, I enjoyed this game a lot and can easily recommend others to check it out.