I've bought The 7th Guest five times now. I had the original game, I bought every possible release between that and this one, including the previous GOG release. It's been a decade since I bought the soundtrack, "7/11," from The Fat Man's website. I once transcribed the musical notation for the theme from the piano puzzle. I love this game. ...which is why I wonder why anyone would do this to it. It looks awful compared to the original. The animation is either identical or timed badly--in some places, it is just missing (the opening Trilobyte logo was a mood-setter in the original... now it's just a too-bright screen that cuts out in the middle of the introductory music track, killing the mood). The video looks the same as it ever did (which is not surprising, since foul-ups with its quality are why the entire thing was rewritten to make the characters ghosts, so I can't imagine anyone being able to improve it). The voice-over, like the animation, seems largely identical to the original... except in those places where the timing is off and the dialogue is now rushed and awkward. And, for no reason I can fathom, the subtitles were transcribed (badly) from the audio instead of copied from the script, so they get words wrong frequently, creating grammatically-insane sentences that distract from the story and dialogue. Then there's the "improved" gameplay. Did anyone *really* find it too difficult to watch for the cursor to change as it passed over hotspots in the original? The highlighting doesn't actually accomplish anything except ruining the mood. Frankly, most of the "improved" UI is just insulting to the player's intelligence. On the bright side, the Anniversary Edition comes with the 7th Guest novel, which, while being exactly as good as one would expect a lazy adaptation of a video game in the early '90s to be, was something I desperately wanted as a thirteen-year-old and wasn't able to buy, so this fulfills a twenty-five year desire.
