The 7th Guest: 25th Anniversary Edition

Well, nice project, -- however, this clearly needs some work: 1. I am German and want to play in English (as I did 25 years ago), so I changed the audio language to English and restarted the game. Now the game itself (videos, voice-overs, subtitles) is in English all right, but the main menu did not change from German to English, including the voice-overs ("Come back!", "Back for more?" etc.) which is all still in German despite the language change. 2. If I copy the English audio from Assets\T7G\wav\en to Assets\T7G\wav\de to get the English menu sounds, the sound for e.g. "Come back!" when leaving the game is cut off in the middle. 3. The above-mentioned menu voices are way too loud; apparently the volume slider does not work for them. 4. There are quite some typos in the English and German subtitles. 6. The subtitle font is really ugly and does not fit the theme and design of the game. 7. The mouse cursor is a) much too large and b) way too ugly. All these may be minor issues each -- but unfortunately they add up to a quite annoying experience.

I really appreciate the number of new localisations, the possibility to skip the cut-scenes, the option to highlight all hotspots in each game screen. Shortcuts to save/load, open the map are confortable indeed. Without the source code (due to the harcoded text-pictures are not translatable), this is the best the developer can do.

I do appreciate the features allowing me to skip cutscenes, highlighting hotspots, the easy-to-access map screen, but it feels a little slipshod. I was bummed that the opening title charged ahead without the thunder and the music stings, but perhaps that's due to my system. The "high res" mode is pretty muddy, using a high degree of interpolation that makes everything smear together. You also get a standard cursor, with the old cursor icons appearing as hotspots, which I wasn't a big fan of. Still, it's probably the best modern port of T7G you're gonna get. I appreciate they're giving it any love at all for its anniversary. The extras are worth the price alone, in my opinion.

There are several things I like about the anniversary editions: the sound levels are perfectly balanced, there's closed captioning, you can skin scenes and animations, faster movement and puzzle animations. I confess, I still prefer the previous version of The 7th Guest, inlcuded with this edition as the 'legacy edition.' I would love to see an additional option to play with the oringal graphical formatting. The new format does stretch the graphics a little. Plus, I'm not particuarly fond of seeing the corner icons or the pointer arrow. Nevertheless, I think this is a very nice remaster that make some much needed updates to a delightful game.