The 7th Guest


The 7th Guest is a 1993 interactive movie puzzle adventure game developed by Trilobyte and published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment for DOS. It is one of the first computer video games to initially be released only on CD-ROM. The 7th Guest is a horror story told from the unfolding perspective of the player, as an amnesiac. The game received press attention for making live-action video clips a core part of its gameplay, as well as for its unprecedented amount of pre-rendered 3D graphics and its adult content.
The game was critically and commercially successful, selling over two million copies. Alongside Myst, it is widely regarded as a killer app that accelerated the sales of CD-ROM drives. Bill Gates called The 7th Guest "the new standard in interactive entertainment". The game has since been ported in various formats on different systems.

Gameplay

The game is played by wandering through a mansion, solving logic puzzles and watching videos that further the story. The main antagonist, Henry Stauf, is an ever-present menace, taunting the player with clues, mocking the player as they fail his puzzles, and expressing displeasure when the player succeeds.
A plot of manipulation and sin is gradually played out, in flashback, by actors through film clips as the player progresses between rooms by solving twenty-one puzzles of shifting nature and increasing difficulty. The first puzzles most players encounter are either one where players must select the right interconnected letters inside the lens of a telescope to form a coherent sentence; or a relatively simple cake puzzle, where the player has to divide the cake evenly into six pieces, each containing the same number of decorations. Other puzzles include mazes, chess problems, logical deductions, Simon-style pattern-matching, word manipulations, and a difficult game of Ataxx, similar to Reversi. For players who need help or cannot solve a particular puzzle, there is a hint book in the library of the house. The first two times the book is consulted about a puzzle, the book gives clues about how to solve the puzzle; for the third time, the book completes the puzzle for the player so that the player can proceed. After each puzzle, the player is shown a video clip of part of the plot, if the hint book was consulted three times, the player does not get to view the clip. The hint book can be used for all but the final puzzle.

Plot

The game begins with a flashback to 1935 in the town of Harley-on-the-Hudson. A drifter named Henry Stauf kills a woman to steal her purse, beginning a series of deplorable acts. He has a vision of a beautiful doll, and the next day begins carving it. He trades the doll for food, drink and a place to stay at a local tavern. Stauf has other visions of dolls and toys, and crafts and sells these as well. Stauf becomes a successful toymaker. He uses his fortune to build a mansion at the edge of town, following another vision. At the same time, several children possessing Stauf's toys contract a mysterious illness and die. Stauf disappears into his mansion and is never seen again.
In the game's present, the narrator named "Ego" awakens in the Stauf mansion. The mansion is deserted, but as Ego explores it, he has ghostly visions of events in the past. These visions all take place on a night sometime after the deaths of the children, where six guests were invited to the Stauf mansion: Martine Burden, a former singer; Edward and Elinor Knox, a dissatisfied middle-aged couple; Julia Heine, a bank worker who reminisces of her youth; Brian Dutton, a fellow shop owner; and Hamilton Temple, a stage magician. The six arrive but find no sign of Stauf or anyone else. They discover a number of puzzles that give them instructions. They learn that Stauf wanted them to bring him a seventh, uninvited guest: a boy named Tad who entered the house on a dare. The guests debate what to do. Elinor and Hamilton feel they must find Tad and help him escape Stauf's plan. The others search for Tad in earnest to claim their reward from Stauf. The evening becomes bloody as the guests turn on one another or become trapped by Stauf's machinations. Julia, the last survivor, drags Tad to the attic where Stauf waited for them. Having made a pact with the evil force that gave him his visions and killed the children, Stauf has transformed into a horrific creature. He needs Tad's soul to complete the pact. Stauf kills Julia and entangles Tad with a prehensile tongue.
Ego realizes that he is the spirit of Tad, witnessing the events of that night over and over but previously unable to help; the house has been a purgatory for him. Ego finds he can now intervene in the events, and helps Tad to escape. Stauf is unable to recapture the child, and the evil entity consumes Stauf for failing to complete the pact. Tad thanks Ego for his help, and then Ego steps into a sphere of light and disappears.

Cast and characters

  • Henry Stauf – The owner of the mansion in which the game takes place. Stauf was a homeless drifter who became a successful toymaker after a series of visions showed him the toys he would create, but the people of Harley know nothing of his past. They only know him as the eccentric old man who makes marvelous toys for their children and became a hugely successful "rags to riches" story. His name is an anagram of Faust.
  • Ego – The player's character, a disembodied consciousness that moves through the house solving puzzles and observing the events of that mysterious night at Stauf's house as they unfolded long ago. The entire game takes place in first-person view through Ego's eyes. Ego does not know how he came to the house, or why, he only knows that there is a reason for him to be there that he hasn't figured out yet.
  • Tad – A boy who lives next door to the Stauf mansion. On the night of the party he enters the house on a dare by climbing in through a window, then discovers that he can't get out again. He spends most of the game dodging Stauf's guests while he tries to find a way to escape the house.
  • Martine Burden – Young, pretty, and ambitious, Martine Burden was once named Miss Harley-on-the-Hudson, but she hated the small town and left as soon as she had the chance. Now she is back after her wealthy boyfriend dumped her. She is immediately attracted to the older Edward Knox, whose desires for wealth and a new life away from Elinor are quite compatible with her own desires for power and status. In one scene the player sees her apparently being pulled underwater in a bathtub and hears a long drawn-out scream.
  • Edward and Elinor Knox – An older, married couple. Elinor is a decent woman who still loves her husband and seems to want to help the boy, Tad, as much as she can. Edward is having severe financial difficulties, and he shows little love or concern for his wife, instead teaming up with the younger Martine Burden to try and solve the mystery. His greatest desire is to start over with a new life, a full bank account, and no marriage tying him down. The desire of Elinor is also to start over again, but with Edward still at her side. Edward is killed by Hamilton Temple, who slams his head into the side of a coffin in order to save Tad. The player does not see Elinor get killed, but the last time she's seen, she is turning into a mannequin, pitifully calling out to Tad for help.
  • Julia Heine – An older woman, and quite vain. She is unhappy with her life, and recently lost her job at the bank due to a quickly developing drinking problem. Her heart's desire is to be young and beautiful again, when she felt like she could take on the world. Julia succeeds in bringing Tad to Stauf, but instead of making her wish come true, Stauf mercilessly kills her by spitting acidic bile at her.
  • Brian Dutton – A middle-aged man who walks with a cane, Brian owns a shop in Harley-on-the-Hudson, and has sold goods to Stauf. Brian admires the way Stauf had grown wealthy and the way he had solved his own problems, and his greatest desire is to be as successful as Stauf, but he is also haunted by memories of seeing his brother fall through thin ice and drown when he was a child. Brian is stabbed repeatedly by Edward while they fight over Tad, but he survives. Later, when he returns to his room and sees the suitcase of money Stauf had left him, his excitement causes his wounds to open up, and he dies.
  • Hamilton Temple – A professional stage magician nearing the end of his career, he is a kindly man who also tries to help Tad, and he gets along well with Elinor Knox. His greatest desire is to know if there is such a thing as real magic. After trying to convince Tad to trust him, Hamilton is later strangled to death by Julia.

    Music

The second disc of the CD-ROM set included a single audio track playable on a CD player. In total, the track was almost half an hour long and it included both the in-game music, composed by video game musician George "The Fat Man" Sanger, and two live music recordings: "The Game", whose melody in various permutations and stylistic variations became the background music for most of the game and whose lyrics were based on Stauf's twisted plot, and the ending credits theme, "Skeletons in My Closet", a jazzy tune with a female lead voice, parts of which are used in the game as Julia's theme. A few years later, Sanger independently released an album titled 7/11, which was a little over an hour long and contained all the music from T7G as well as its sequel, The 11th Hour.
The in-game music had conventions similar to the use of leitmotif in Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, wherein each guest was assigned a musical theme; where Peter and Wolf used instrumental changes for its characters, The 7th Guest, conversely, used stylistic variations on the melody of Sanger's "The Game".
Where two characters interact in the story, the styles are fused, counterpointed, or even sounded simultaneously and when tension abounds, the characters' themes are reflected thusly.