The 11th Hour

I didn't care for 11th Hour at all. Not one bit. The game was visually appealing to be sure, but the gameplay itself was repetitive and dull. Throw in gawd-awful acting for the FMV cut scenes, and you have a title I simply cannot recommend in good conscious.

The puzzles and riddles are very well done in this game. The movie in this game has some disturbing and far fetched ideas, but is still entertaining. The ending it far too simplistic, but it does fit what Stauf would do. Lots of things in the story really don't have much logic to them.

So many games of this era sacrificed game quality in favour of using lots of full motion video. The 11th hour is one of the worst casualties. Some of the gameplay was close to being really good but all the effort seems to have been spent on the full motion video interludes. The gameplay is as follows. You play a man whose girlfriend has gone missing while investigating a series of murders related to a haunted house (Stauf mansion of the 7th Guest). You follow her into the house and explore. The ghostly owner of the house forces you to solve riddles and puzzles and each time you are succesful you have a video clip that reveals some of the background plot. The reason you might want to play it: Some of the puzzles and riddles are really quite elegant - properly enjoyable. The reasons you should think twice about buying it: -About 1/3 of the puzzles are either nonsensical or you are playing a game against a frustratingly difficult to beat artificial intelligence. The hint system is so slow it is near useless. The riddles vary in quality from 4 letter obvious anagrams to things which I nor anyone else I know can fathom. -The game hasn't aged well. Most modern screens don't cope well with the video clips. - The story is ridiculous. They should have stuck to 7th gues cheesiness rather than trying and failing to make this plot serious. - The soundtrack isn't great and the sound balance is completely wrong. Choose between being deafened by the music or not hearing the voice acting.

I have SSD (Single Sided Deafness), and while the first game in this series had captions this game decidedly does not. Not only that, but the background music was really loud and you couldn't change that in the settings, so I had no hope of trying to strain to hear what was said. There's absolutely no reason that a game that conceivably has a script can't have captions. This is an easy hurdle that they fell face first over.

Had to edit the ddraw file to get the game working. Tinkered around with different settings and resoultions in the file till i got it sorted. Try this if you have any issues with the game. Once i did the game looks pretty good and i enjoyed the atmosphere, puzzles and the fmv.