The 7th Guest - Gameplay

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 ("We'll all be dead by the time you solve this!"), and expressing displeasure when the player succeeds ("Don't think you'll be so lucky next time!").

A moderately complex plot of manipulation and sin is gradually played out, in flashback, by actors through film clips as you progress between rooms by solving twenty-one puzzles of shifting nature and increasing difficulty. The first puzzles most players encounter is 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 even an extremely difficult game of Infection similar to Reversi that utilizes an AI (and would later go on to make an encore appearance in the sequel). For players who need help or simply 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; on the third time, the book simply completes the puzzle for the player so that the player can proceed through the game. After each puzzle, the player is shown a video clip of part of the plot, if the hint book was consulted 3 times, the player does not get to view the clip. The hint book can be used for all but the final puzzle.

The 7th Guest was one of the first games for the PC platform to be available only on CD-ROM, since it was too large to be distributed on floppy disks: it came on 2 CDs. Removing some of the large movies and videos wasn't an option as they were essential to the gameplay. This game, along with LucasArts' Star Wars: Rebel Assault and Brøderbund's Myst, helped promote the adoption of CD drives, which were not yet common. The game's POV footage of walking through the house was originally planned as live-action video in a practical set, but the idea was abandoned after pre-rendered 3D sequences proved feasible and more cost-effective.