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Whither The 7th Guest-Style Puzzle Adventure?
Deunan writes "While poking around on the Internet, I discovered a DirectX front end for the classic The 7th Guest CD-ROM puzzle adventure. After some further searching, I stumbled across a more recent pitch for 7th Guest III: The Collector [apparently the game was in development in 2002/3, and there's an interview with designer Rob Landeros about it, but it seems to be stalled.] I was wondering what killed interest in it - are 'thinking' games just not popular anymore?"
There are plenty of "casual games" that are puzzle based out on the market. Heck, research says they're the dominant economic power in gaming, not EverQuest. But tied to a story / adventure game? Not anymore, not since marketing flacks decided the adventure genre was "dead".
Frankly, the 7th Guest series hasn't helped. 11th Hour was just pathetic. Terrible merging of puzzles and story with the little "PDA" showing all the cutscenes; it wasn't mixed into the surreal astmophere of the original game very well, where the puzzles were blocking your progress because of the nature of what was happening.
The best you can do right now is the Myst games, which carry on the notion of merging adventure with puzzles. Uru does a decent job of it and Myst IV is coming down the pipe.
The best puzzle or adventure games were like Grim Fandango, where the puzzles didn't all have to be solved in order. If one puzzle had the player stumped, they could work on another one. Completing one puzzle took items out of inventory so the other puzzles were a little bit easier. Games that don't let me move forward until I figure out one hair-rippingly hard puzzle, suck.
Personally, I really miss 7th Guest style games. 7th Guest was actually what first sparked my interest in computer games. I played it at a friends house and thought it was amazing. I then purchased a CD-ROM for my 386 and bought the game. I was in heaven!
;-)
Anyone know if 7th Guest (or 11th Hour) can be run on Linux somehow?
Then I realized to play the 11th Hour I needed four more megs of RAM (to up it to 8).
...but only if you're 'thinking' about picking hookers and killing people while playing.
7th Guest was my first adventure game after Myst, and I loved it; between the music, the characters, and the atmosphere, I was entertained for hours and still look back with fondness upon those simpler days. I recently saw footage for The Collector, and while it did bring back some memories, I do not believe such a game can succeed anymore. The prime thing to consider is that these days, games as a whole can and are more complex so why should gamers be forced to play mostly mundane puzzles to progress a decent plot? There are different adventure-puzzle fans, some like them woven into the story, others like them part of the environment, and others still prefer the 7th Guest style of actual puzzles placed throughout the game.
These days, many years later, I personally lean towards the first two options, since these days it is technologically possible to weave puzzles into games & environments, where as 7th Guest smells slightly of playing puzzle games just to play puzzle games. We've all heard the mantra, 'Adventure games are dead' which I wont bother debating for or against since I think the statement is a bit overly dramatic, but games like 7th Guest lived for a reason, and they have died for a similar reason. Gamers no longer need games-within games to enjoy them, for the games themselves are plenty enough, so the successful adventure games have moved on with this for the most part.
I honestly hope that 7th Guest style games move on, and start with something new; I feel we need games that make the environment an intrical part to the story & gameplay, not abstract puzzles placed in locations, a tired concept. We need games in which the story is not merely a device to drive gameplay; we need games that the gameplay has many levels of depth, and offers freedom for different types of players; we do not need another adventure puzzle-game. Harsh and sad words, especially coming from a genuine fan of these games, but honestly spoken...
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Or, if you really miss those old masters, check out Tierra Entertainment, who have remade King's Quest 1 and 2 (so far) so that it's playable on modern computers.
Long Live The Adventure Game!
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
The problem of adventure games is that they were very easy to code, and so there was a flood of utter crap where the gameplay consisted of hunting the right spot to click, and the puzzle solving was so illogic that people had to brute force it by trying every item with every other item...
The ones that were actually logic (like the lost files of sherlock holmes and most of lucasarts's stuff) got labeled as "too easy" which encouraged people (*cough*sierra*cough) to churn out crappy illogical ones.
Myst-esque games didn't hold up very well through the years... It's tough to come up with a significant list of decent ones.
This is awesome!!!
I think I'll try KQ2 (don't think I ever beat it), but I'm hesitant because that which was amazing then might be better remembered than attempted to be relived.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Yes, but these games are more a lot more "graphic- storytelling-with-lots-of-just-walking-around"-foc used than puzzle-focused (and the "puzzles" that are in there are mostly trivial).
I think the OP was more after games that were more or less pure puzzles - not the LucasArt kind.
It wasn't unlike the now-deceased Mega CD - when that first came out, you had two basic game types. There were Mega drive games with the odd FMV sequence thrown in, and and then there were the full FMV games along the lines of Dragons Lair/Cobra Command etc. But whereas CD-Roms become commonplace, so few people actually bought the Mega-CD, it died a death. FMV heavy games such as the 7th Guest are best left dead and buried. If you really want puzzles, you can buy a decent paper and pen puzzlebook for about two pounds.
RPG like the Final Fantasy series have lots of the puzzle solving elements, along with complete, interactive stories. I remember the pure simple fun of playing 7th Guest, but the plot and gameplay of RPG give me more motivation to solve puzzles.
I've heard very good things about the Syberia games, though I've never played them - I'm a huge fan of Myst though. The Myst games have always been at the top of my list for absolutely amazing "thinking" games. I can't stand puzzle games that force you to solve puzzles for nothing more than plot advancement, where it feels like half of the puzzles were only put in for the sake of having puzzles, with no thought to how they relate to anything.
Myst has always felt more like the puzzles were just there - parts of the environment. Most of the time they're some mechanical contraption that you need to figure out. First you need to figure out what it does, then how it does it, and finally what you need to do to make it work. The way everything fits together so neatly, it feels like the designers actually went to these places and wrote down what they saw, rather than creating it out of nothing.
Aside from having fantastically designed puzzles, and beautiful graphics, the Myst series has one of the most intriguing settings I've ever seen. The story and environment are top-notch. I'm eagerly awaiting Myst 4 to see how the story unfolds.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
I still hunt around for adventure/puzzle games. I'll admit, though, that there are a LOT of bad ones. The one that sticks out in my mind as being absolute crap was "Safecracker." The story-line was that you were interviewing for a job with a company that makes safes, I think. All the interview process is is going around the company mansion and cracking the code on different safes. It was super easy and was just all around bad. I played another game called "Schizm" not too long ago. This one played more like the Myst titles and definitely had some nice scenery, but the story-line seems like it was written so that they could throw in any puzzle they could think of. Essentially, you're investigating a planet (if I remember right). So everything's foreign, of course, and none of it really makes sense. There aren't many clues to let you know what they're looking for. So maybe this puzzle requires that all switches (that flip based on some wacky algorithm) be placed in the up position, or maybe it requires they all be placed in the down position. Or maybe they have to been in the up position and you have to press a button. While nice to look at, the game didn't make a good impression.
Another popular (but horrid) game in this genre was Phantasmagoria. Horror movie inspired hackishness.
The Myst games were great, but Riven was silly hard. The marble puzzle at the end haunted my very dreams. Uru seems to be much easier, so maybe Cyan got complaints about Riven's difficulty.
Cliff Johnson is still working on his excellent puzzle-driven games. He has always (intelligently, in my opinion) kept the graphics and sound simple and out of the way of the real, fiendish puzzles and metapuzzles. You can download the old games, like The Fool's Errand and 3 in Three, from his website; he's even updated them to work on Mac OS X and modern Windows. The second in the Arcanum series (The Fool and His Money) is due out this fall.
I quit 7th Guest pretty quickly, when I realized that pretty much all of the puzzles in it were just old classic puzzles, which I could get from books I already had, and doing them on paper was more convenient then doing them via a clunky GUI.
I think the reason they don't seem popular now is just because they were over-popular a while ago, around the era of Myst. Kind of like MMORPGs right now.
Speaking of Cliff Johnson, I figured out how to easily solve the 3 in Three puzzle "Whale of a Time" (when I played it again this year). Man, if you don't figure it out, that puzzle will kick your ass. The ending to that game rocks.
I can't stand puzzle games that force you to solve puzzles for nothing more than plot advancement, where it feels like half of the puzzles were only put in for the sake of having puzzles, with no thought to how they relate to anything.
You mean like Myst? Though that game didn't even have plot advancement, really.
Myst singlehandedly ended the LucasArts/Sierra Golden Age of computer adventure, and we're all the worse for it.
Rob (Sam & Max 2, RIP)
Check out many other games written with AGS, like the KQ remakes (and make your own if you like) at http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/
There are tons of games there; I've only played a few so far. Also see the "No Action Jackson" game topic a few days ago.
Meanwhile, an adventure game doesn't reveal its wonders (or failures) for at least an hour, perhaps more. It is hard to separate out bad games from very very good ones, and I think the market soured as people gave up after too many bad experiences.
Essentially, adventure games have similar problems to literature. You don't need a million dollars and a team of writers to code together a game, and you have such freedom to innovate that there is no easy box-checking to do to determine if what you've written is up to scratch.
The interactive fiction people have really come together to produce detailed game reviews and open competitions (see IFcomp) as a sort of homebrew version of the book-review and annual prizes that help readers cull through the tens of thousands of books each year.
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It had rather poor gameplay, just a collection of old puzzles. The whole interest of this game was that it was the first PC game that was available only on CD-ROM and was based on videos. As such, most people who bought a CD-ROM drive at the time bought it, just so that their expensive device would have some use (or at least some respectable use ;)
True warriors use the Klingon Google
TriloByte had made DirectX/Windows versions of the 7th Guest and 11th Hours "viewers" available before they went under. Unfortunately I cannot find them anywhere on the web. tbyte.com is now some other company. They worked great.. actually used DirectX to render the movies/sound.
If anyone knows of a link to it, please post it..
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
just note that Tierra's version of KQ2 is a bit different than Sierra's. so you can see it as another game.
I don't know what makes people think the adventure genre is dead.. Are european games (of which many fall into the "adventure" category) not being sold in the US?
how did this nonsense get a slashdot thread?
Isn't it bad enough that every single time a pc magazine/site reviews an adventure game they insist on putting in a paragraph about how adventure games are a dead genre? (Missing the obvious logical problem...)
They're not as prevalent as they were, but they exist.
I loved playing 7th Guest until I got to the Microscope puzzle that was kinda like Othello. I could never beat that stupid fucking puzzle so I would only play the game up until that point and quit or else I would have died from a brain hemorrhage years ago.
-my other sig is your mom
Those looking to quench their thirst for the PC graphic adventures of the mid-90's need look no further than Adventure Game Studio, the freeware adventure game creation software.
No, I'm not suggesting that you make your own adventure game. There are plentyof great ones already. The "Games" section of the AGS website is full of extremely inventive titles made by ambitious adventure game fans. I recommend Six Day Assassin and Five Days a Stranger (which, despite both titles starting with numbers, are not at all related) if you're looking for something reminiscent of 1990ish Sierra/LucasArts.
The artwork is pretty lackluster with most AGS titles, but the design, puzzles, writing, and story are completely top quality for many of the games. Of course, after looking at Slashdot all day they probably won't look that bad to you anyway.
I came across the exact same queen puzzle in my Scheme programming class at university. The horse one, I can't recall if it was placement or movement ( I think it was movement of a horse to the other side of the board), but an actual board was useful for that too.
I would accept those kind of puzzles in a game with a similar format, if the payoff in story was big enough. I like chess! :)
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
.. try those in Silent Hill 3 (hard mode). Tied in with atmosphere you've got yourself a good follow up on 7th Guest and 11th hour right there.
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I can't stand puzzle games that force you to solve puzzles for nothing more than plot advancement, where it feels like half of the puzzles were only put in for the sake of having puzzles, with no thought to how they relate to anything.
:)
You mean like Myst?
Every puzzle in Myst is part of a larger system of puzzles - they may not appear to have any connection to each other at first, but when you look deeper, you realize that each puzzle in an area relates to all the other ones. Together, they form a complete system, and that system exists in the game world for a purpose. Figuring out that purpose is the key to solving the puzzles. Once you understand what the system exists to do, solving it becomes rather simple.
Though that game didn't even have plot advancement, really.
The Myst series does, in fact, have a plot. A rather good one, especially if you read the accompanying novels. The plot doesn't jump out and beat you over the head, and like the puzzles, it takes a while to figure out, leading to the (apparently common) perception that Myst had no plot. It's there, but you have to think to see it. And isn't that the whole point of a "thinking" game?
As the series went on, the plots have gotten more and more obviously stated. Myst 3 focused on the plot a lot more than Myst or Riven did - it helps that the technology has advanced to the point of allowing them to insert actors into their world more convincingly. Myst 3 had Brad Dourif in the prominent role, who you might recognize from A recent movie.