izigame.me

“Let's take the time to find ourselves again
Away from daily stress and pain
Though we may find we'll not come back the same
That happens sometimes when we play
The Game
~The Fat Man and Team Fat, The Game

So, the 7th Guest. One of the most important games of 1993. The one that, together with Miller brothers' MYST, revolutionized the whole genre by introducing us to CD-ROM powered entertainment. The one that didn't need to look back to the inferior media. The one that was free to use as much storage as developers needed. What was it? Well, it was a first-person adventure, full of jaw-dropping animations, FMV scenes and beautiful CDDA music (some of it was still in MIDI, but hey! It was 1993!). What's even more cool was that, unlike MYST, it was a horror game that wanted us to explore a spooky mansion full of dark secrets, the most important one of which was... You. Your own identity. It was a brilliant, era-defining game.
A bit too simple (unlike MYST, The 7th Guest relied too much on its visuals, while puzzles in it weren't really unique or complicated), a bit too buggy (there were some minor bugs and even game-breaking one, even though there was also both puzzle reset option and cheat that allowed us to jump to any point of the game), and, of course, there was that infamous microscope mini-game problem. The one caused by Trilobyte's attempt to make it less heavy on processor. While on slow machines mini-game did indeed work quite fine, on faster ones the AI was able to look on many, many moves ahead (depends on how fast your rig was). Nowadays? There's even a Java app that lets you make one AI to play another. And even then the third-party AI will lose quite a lot as long as you won't lower your settings in DOSBox. Unfortunately, the previous Steam version didn't use DOSBox. It used ScummVM. I won't repeat myself, though. I've already reviewed that version, so feel free to check my review if you want more details about the old release. What we have here is a new one. So... let's check it out.
But first, let's take a quick look on versions we had before it. 1993 – two versions of the game. The original one for DOS and CD-i port that used its own engine, yet somehow managed to get some old bugs and even the new one (still pretty cool port, though, looks great too). 1994 – a Mac port. Unlike some other CD games from that era, it wasn't a “hybrid” (multi-system) release and only contained Mac version with no Windows support. Thankfully, Mac port had microscope mini-game fixed. 1997 – long-awaited Windows release. Came with the native Windows 95/NT support, different dev / publisher videos, skippable intro, faster animations and an exclusive picture after the credits that showed us the Stauf's mansion burned. And yes, it also had microscope mini-game fixed (by slowing it down). Bugs were still presented, though (including game-breaking one that rendered final puzzle unsolveable), but hey! They've fixed the microscope. It was too late for The 7th Guest and therefore not so many remember that version nowadays, but still, it was a thing. 2013 – Steam/GOG release. Pretty lame stuff that, despite being based on DOS version, used ScummVM instead of DOSBox and therefore there was no way to fix microscope mini-game manually (ScummVM uses its own methods instead of original executables). GOG also provided us with a free Mac version to use with ScummVM as an alternative. Steam did not. Finally, the year 2015 – The 7th Guest Remastered. A mobile-oriented port on ScummVM with the achievements, enhanced visuals, subtitles and some other minor changes. Like the ability to skip animations, for example. That's it. Sure, there were also revisions (the initial CD-i version, for example, suffered from its own hardware-related bug that caused game to stuck during the cake puzzle, which led to a revisited version), re-releases and other things, but that's the main stuff. Now. Ladies, gentlemen, everybody else. Time for us to finally look at what we've got here. In a shiny new 25th Anniversary Edition.
And, unfortunately, what we've got here is... a mobile version. Yeah. They've changed the name, but Steam version is exactly what we had on mobiles in 2015. No differences whatsoever. It's one of them lazy port from mobiles. Which was especially easy to do, since, like I already said, it's powered by ScummVM. It's using a modified version of it and blah-blah-blah but who cares, it's still ScummVM with 1993 DOS version in it. Which doesn't sound good and, well, it isn't. First – while looking somewhat tolerable on tiny screens (lots of people weren't happy, but you know how it is – things look better on small screens), this game looks like crap on big monitors. Remember how awful cutscenes in the remastered version of C&C (which was otherwise quite good) looked? That's exactly what we have here. They've took low-res originals and put a quick smoothing filter on it, which turns visuals into a blurry mess, in which it's hard to tell what's what. Thankfully, there's an option to switch back to the original, which can also be played in “modern” aspect ratio, so... Yeah. Do that. What's even worse is that main menu and game itself are done in different resolutions. Which will cause awful flickering and delays every time you'll try to save or take a hint (which are a thing now). Thankfully, sound that was cleared from noise doesn't suffer from such terrible aftertaste, but visually? This version is a joke.
Another big problem is controls. Despite this being PC version, those stay unchanged and feel very touchscreen-oriented. Which is bad. Not only because controls feel nothing like the original (together with our typical “highlight” feature it pretty much kills the whole joy of exploring), they can actually screw you up now and then. All thanks to the awful “aim assist”. You'll think you clicking on one thing, while game will “help” you by making you click on another. Which turns the piano puzzle into a bloody nightmare. Thankfully, they've fixed the microscope mini-game. Only in update (originally, they've just made it optional), while “legacy edition” (that was added as a free DLC), is still “broken” and is hard to beat even with the AI from third-party app involved, but still, it's playable now and I've finished it from my first try. Personally, I would like microscope mini-game to be at least a little challenging, but hey! It's still better than no fix at all.
Another good thing is that MojoTouch guys who are responsible for this, added subtitles on many languages (Italian, Spanish, Polish, Swedish, Portuguese and Hebrew) and both official dubs (German in French). They've even salvaged unauthorized russian translation by Home Systems, which was made during early post-ussr times. It's pretty meh, but still comes with the AAA actors (who were ready to take any job back after the previous evil empire fell apart). You can change voices from menu at any time and all three voiced translations also have “subtitles-only” option. Pretty nice stuff.
All in all, though, this version is a one fat “no”. Despite the fact that they want us to believe that this here is a remaster, what we've actually got is... Remember Weekend at Bernie's movie? The one about two guys carrying a dead guy around in order to make people believe he's still alive? That's pretty much it. While the truth is... Yeah. He's dead, Jim!