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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.
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.
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.