A remake has been announced for the 1993 "interactive movie" exploration puzzle game The 7th Guest, dripping with classic murder mystery and escape room energy.
The original game debuted in the era when 3D games were first having their moment, and in the company of games like Myst it was regarded as one of the big sellers of fancy new CD-ROM technology. With that phase pretty well behind us now, a new edition arrives to drop us back into the eerie Stauf mansion with all sorts of remastered puzzles and performances awaiting us:
The story goes that six of you have been invited to this creepy haunted house in the middle of a dark and stormy night (stop me if you've heard this one before), but when you arrive your mysterious benefactor Henry Stauf is nowhere to be seen, and instead strange recordings and even stranger contraptions, clues and puzzles litter the house, waiting for you to investigate and figure out what's going on. Flashbacks and big twists add layers to the narrative as you navigate the machinations of a mad toymaker.
The full-motion-video recorded actor performances of the original game are definitely some of the charm of that now archaic aesthetic, and along with a mansion remade from the ground up, they seem to have been recaptured in "newly recorded volumetric video" allowing you to see the scenes from new angles and walk around inside them.
With a little digging on Steam you can find many versions of The 7th Guest floating around from over the years: there's the original (which doesn't have great reviews on Steam), a 25th anniversary edition which was a remaster rather than a full remake like this new one, and then there's a version made for VR from 2019. This one struck me as looking very similar to this upcoming release: it seems to me that all these graphics and performances were reconstructed to first build this VR edition and are now being repurposed for a general console/Steam version of the remake.
The 7th Guest Remake is expected to arrive on June 4th, and you can wishlist the game on Steam now.
Disclaimer: Thinky Games is a Carina Thinking Games Initiative and may have professional relationships with individuals and businesses related to the subject of this article. Please see our Editorial Policy for details.
