7th Guest type games

Cafe Society
1

Anyone remember The 7th Guest? It was a semi-spooky PC game from the 90’s that required the player to figure out logic games in order to solve a mystery. My wife and I played the game continuously for several weeks before we finally beat it. We refused to use any of the walkthrough or cheat guides, just our own brains (maybe that’s why it took so long).

Anyway, I was wondering if it is available for XP (I only find the original DOS version around). Also, does anyone know of any games like that? I’d rather solve logic puzzles than be shooting and blowing things up.

Thanks!

2

Try Myst…it is a whole series but I and II are deemed the best

3

You know there was a sequel, right?
From that era, my roommate at the time said Darkseed was similar to The 7th Guest.

As for more recent games, you might like The Longest Journey (sequel : Dreamfall)

4

Oh, man, the 7th Guest… I still have my copy of it, but I can’t get it to run on XP, no matter what fixes I download. I was 17 when I first played that, and I, too, refused to look for walkthroughs. I used to scare my little brother with that picture of the hands pushing from inside the painting at the top of the stairs. The music freaked him out. Ah, good times. What a great game.

As for recommendations, I agree with EuroMDguy, go for the Myst series. They were great, too. I played them shortly after the 7th Guest, and found the puzzles to be of a similar difficulty. I really enjoyed Riven.

5

My favorite part was the maze. If you took a wrong turn a deep, spooky voice would say, “Feeling lonely?” Creepy.

I tried the sequel and liked it too, not as much as the original though.

Will Myst and Riven work on XP?

6

I run The 7th Guest in DOSBox under XP with no problems.

7

Not available yet, but there’s a third sequel currently being created by fans of the games. It’s titled “The 13th Doll”, here’s a website:

http://www.t7g3.com/

8

RealMyst works fine and Riven runs fine. I’ve played all 5 Myst games on XP.

9

There’s a Myst MMORG in beta right now. I may end up checking it out.

10

There’s a game called Shivers that came out in the mid 90s that was almost all puzzle based. You “broke” into a museum owned by a dead archaeologist. Turns out some spirits killed him and you had to figure out how to capture them. Nice graphics, lots of difficult puzzles, and loads of fun to play. I wish I had time to go back and play it again.

11

I am SOOOOOO getting this when it’s done!

12

Check around the abandonware sites for The Fool’s Errand and 3 in Three. The first is an adventure game based around the Tarot, and features a great mix of puzzle types. The High Priestess has stolen several magical treasures from each of the four kingdoms, and made it look like the other kingdoms were responsible. You play the Fool, and you have to recover the treasures before war breaks out. The second game is about a computer error in a spreadsheet program. The twist is, you play one of the numbers on the spreadsheet. Both were cool, innovative puzzle games.

13

Ha, are you my insane husband? He loved 7th Guest and recently got his old game to play on XP using some program he downloaded to force it to run on our computer. It was fun, and we liked the puzzles, except for that one with the blobby things that jumped over each other, but you don’t need that to win anyway.

Another game we played together after 7th Guest was Scratches … it’s not exactly the same, the puzzles are more integrated into the plot of the story (as opposed to “find puzzle, solve puzzle, move to next room”), but it was neat. I’m not really much of a gamer, and he is, and we both enjoyed this one.

14

Shh, don’t tell my wife!

I’ll have to look for these other games. Thanks for all the suggestions.

15

What is it with people encouraging abandonware? Software piracy violates international copyright law, and most of the rationalizations used by the people who prefer to call it abandonware simply would not hold up in court.

16

Of course, someone has to care enough to take it to court first. Which is the entire point.

17

The sequel to The 7th Guest is The 11th Hour.

18

I also love to play puzzle games and would recommend the following (in terms of spooky ambience, there are loads of excellent puzzle games e.g. from LucasArts if you’re just interested in solving puzzles):

Zork Nemesis, which is most like Myst or 7th Guest, both in spookiness (one scene in particular was so gruesome I opted to read the walkthrough instead of doing the puzzle) and GUI.

Phantasmagoria which was similar, but which I never finished, because it crashed at one point and was not restorable (I think it was a well-known bug at the time, maybe they fixed it at some point, however, I did not bother to play everything again) and…

…darn, I forgot its name, but maybe some other Doper can remember it. You had to escape from an asylum, and I just remember this level with the demented mutilated children - they kept singing and it made me have nightmares…it was called something like “Asylum” or “Insanity” or…ah! I remember. It was Sanitarium. Man, did that give me the heebie-jeebies.

19

Phantasmagoria was pretty awful though the end was damn fun. You had to do a very long sequence of events and every time you made a mistake your avatar was brutally killed nearly made up for the rest of the game being horribly dull and poorly written.

Sanitarium on the other hand was a great game any puzzle fan should pick up. It’s like a nightmare on acid every level brings some new ‘WTF?’ moment to it. Does have some really lame action sequences to it that ruin the flow but those are thankfully easy and short.

20

Why shouldn’t one encourage it? Much of it is no longer in production, or for sale, or works on non-obsolete hardware, or is from defunct producers. It is no more immoral or unethical than going to antique stores or garage sales.