The 11th Hour

The mansion is back! The graphics are better, the puzzles are more diverse and easier, and it's just a joy going around and exploring everything again. It's still scary but FMVs...well, at least it's a good backdrop/diversion. Also the ending.

The 11th Hour tries to capitalize on the first game in the series - The 7th Guest - by wrapping what little gameplay it has in a slick FMV movie with a story that feels straight out of fanfiction.net by a writer trying to create some Twin Peaks/X-Files lovechild. It's completed by some truly laughable acting by most of the cast and some very strange practical/visual effects. On an odd level I began to enjoy it because of the absurdity. What I couldn't enjoy were the "puzzles". Good luck getting through most of these without a guide... which you technically have in game but doesn't do nearly a good enough job nor do you really want it to because you'd rather it all be over than to continue on another step much like our protagonists. The "gameplay" consists of you getting a clue from a PDA that you must somehow decipher in order to find either another clue you must decipher or the next puzzle which you must solve to unlock a video snippet of the movie which will eventually tell the entire story of the house and your current situation. An example of these clues are "Winter coat worn for a mixer" and then you have to somehow understand what object the clue is pointing to and in which what room. Did you guess tonic water... because that's what it is. The puzzles are mostly retreads or variations of some you find in The 7th Guest. At their worst they'll have you moving pieces around a board forty-some times in a specific order before you finally solve it; at their best they'll actually test your mind trying to find a solution and you'll feel good about yourself for a split second before you realize you're only a couple hours in this trainwreck. Overall, as bad as the writing and acting are, they are the best thing about this game. Everything else is just a delivery method of completing that story. If you buy it, follow a guide and revel in the B-rated glory.

Storyline better the The 7th Guest, puzzles more difficult. Good game.

This mini-review is from my memory from way-back-when. I plan on getting this and replaying it, so maybe I'll change my mind... After playing and loving The 7th Guest, I was really looking forward to The 11th Hour. However, after actually playing the game, I think my favorite part of it was actually the packaging that it came in. This might have been because my computer was out-of-commission when I first got the game, and so I had to wait for weeks before I could play it, and so I spent a lot of time studying the box and reading the manual before I got to enter Stauf's mansion again! The game itself felt very forced. Like they tried too hard to make it different from the first, but couldn't quite figure out how to make it work. The awe of the video, while pretty advanced at the time, wore off quickly. The acting was not that great, and honestly I did not like any of the characters. It's not that they were boring, they were actually very unlikeable! I kind of felt like they deserved what they got by the time it was all over. The mansion itself was beautiful. The aged look was really cool. I don't remember any puzzles actually standing out. They seemed to mostly be rehashes from The 7th Guest.

The 11th Hour is the sequel to The 7th Guest and is primarily a puzzle game. Unlike it's predecessor, whose puzzles were inventive and thought-provoking; starting off relatively easy and becoming harder as the game went on, this title is nowhere near as intensive. To begin with, about half of the "puzzles" are actually board games you play against the computer, one being, very obviously, Connect 4. The problem with these is that the computer is annoyingly precise at choosing the best possible move and victory often comes down to luck. There is a guide that can attempt to solve these for you, but even then, I have still lost. The 7th Guest had only one of these games and it could be skipped with no repercussions. The puzzles that are actually brain teasers, which The 7th Guest excelled at, are poorly arranged as well. One of the mid-late puzzles involves spiders on an 8-pointed star. It would be very easy if you did not have to complete it in 7 moves. Compare this to the knight puzzle, one of the first you encounter, which is much more challenging and has no arbitrary move limit. Had they simply swapped the two, the progression would make much more sense. There are so many cases where the puzzles do not equate to their point in the game. I liked the word-play, scavenger hunt part. In here you had to figure out a clue Stauf gives you and identify which item in the house he is referring to. The logic to some solutions requires quite a stretch at times, but for the most part, it was enjoyable in a Carmen Sandiego sort of way. Finally, the story. It was very superior to The 7th Guest in the sense that it had a clear progression, with a beginning, climax, and resolution that was easy to follow and was unveiled the more you progressed through the game. Was it particularly moving? That is up to the player, but I enjoyed that you had your choice of endings. Overall, The 11th Hour was a sequel that delivered in style, but felt lazy in creativity.