The 11th Hour

"A not-so-good sequel to an above-average game"

Ah, The 7th Guest. The first "killer app" for the now-standard CD-ROM drive, and in fact one of the first CD-ROM games ever. Released before even the graphically inferior Myst, the CD-ROM drive's real killer app that held the PC sales record until The Sims came out. The 7th Guest was certainly a technological marvel. The entire game consisted of a combination of prerendered cinematics and live-action video - something never before seen in a computer game. The game sold like hotcakes, so of course people wanted more! Which brings us to Trilobyte's second project, The 11th Hour: The Sequel to The 7th Guest.

A little recap for those who haven't played The 7th Guest: The game told the tale of Henry Stauf, a drifter who managed to make a fortune by creating and selling toys for children. Unfortunately, Mr. Stauf was also completely evil, and his toys started to kill their owners. The last thing Stauf ever built was a gigantic mansion, where he lived in seclusion, until one day, he invited 6 guests to stay in his mansion. The guests were told that a 7th guest was to arrive, and they were tasked with finding said 7th guest and bringing him to Stauf. The player takes the role of a man who has amnesia and is trapped in the mansion, and must solve the puzzles in the mansion to uncover the truth. Well, throughout the course of the game, it's revealed that the 7th guest is a young boy who entered the mansion on a dare. Sure enough, he was taken to Stauf, who killed both the boy and the guest who found him. In the climactic ending, the player is actually the spirit of the boy who is forced to witness the events until he discovers that he is, in fact, the 7th guest. Yeah, it's not much better than a typical B-movie, and The 11th Hour certainly doesn't fare any better, but more on that later.

As far as graphics go, The 11th Hour is definitely an improvement on its impressive prequel. The game takes place almost a century after The 7th Guest, and the mansion has long since been abandoned, and it shows. The entire mansion looks old and damaged. Your character holds a flashlight that provides the only source of illumination in the mansion. The flashlight even bobs and weaves when you traverse the mansion, as if you were actually walking. One downside to this, though, is that the walking animation plays at the speed of your computer, so if you have a slower computer, even one that meets the minimum requirements, you'll find that it takes several minutes for a simple animation, like walking up the stairs, to finish. On the other hand, if you have a fast computer, like even the worst computers you can buy today, you'll find yourself zooming around the mansion with superhuman speed. All the other animations play correctly, though. There are hundreds of items in the mansion that are actually integrated into the gameplay (more on that later), and the level of detail is astounding. The creators even managed to squeeze in an entire hour-long movie onto the 4 discs (which was really impressive for the time). It was amazing for 1995, and it still holds its own today.

Some people might call The 11th Hour an adventure game, but this really isn't the case. There is a little exploration to do, but the main focus of the game is the puzzles. Unfortunately, it seems that Trilobyte has exhausted all their creative efforts on The 7th Guest, as many of the puzzles in The 11th Hour are old, tired, generic puzzles with a beautiful coat of 3D rendering.

A new gameplay addition to The 11th Hour is a mandatory treasure hunt minigame. In the treasure hunt, you'll receive a riddle on your GameBook, an electronic device that Stauf and various other characters use to communicate with you. After you decipher the riddle, you're supposed to find the object mentioned, and click on it to activate it. Unfortunately, there are so many items strewn about the mansion that you can click on that it's nearly impossible to find the one you want. That, coupled with the fact that the riddles are absolutely ridiculous (for instance, the riddle "Winter coat worn for a mixer" is trying to tell you to find a bottle of tonic water) makes the treasure hunt a horrible experience full of random clicking and guessing. (The game tells you you'll be penalized for making too many incorrect guesses, but in reality this is just a way to try to get you to actually play the game rather than guess you way through it.) Luckily, though, your GameBook has a handy hint function that will provide clues for the riddles to help you along the way. You'll definitely find yourself using the hints often, even just the first few to help you figure out the riddle, but if you keep going, the game will give you the answer to the riddle. The hint function also works on the various puzzles in the mansion, so for nearly all the puzzles you can get hints on how to solve it, until you eventually get the option to have the game finish the puzzle for you. As you can imagine, this takes the entire challenge out of the game, since there's no penalty for using hints (despite the game's claim to the contrary, again to make you actually try) it's really up to you to make yourself not use hints.

Those who have played The 7th Guest most certainly remember the infamous microscope puzzle, the only puzzle in the game played against Stauf, which had notoriously difficult AI. You may not be so enthusiastic about the news that that are even more you-vs-Stauf puzzles in the game, but luckily the difficulty has been toned down quite a bit and all of the puzzles are most certainly solvable. The last puzzle in the game (which is you-vs-Stauf) gets harder the more you beat it, which is certainly a nice touch. And again, if you get stuck on one of these puzzles you can always have the game solve it for you, and you don't even have to walk all the way to the library this time, like you did in The 7th Guest!

And now for the story. It is truly awful. If you really care about the story, you might want to skip ahead when I tell you to because I'll be spelling out the whole of it for you.

The game puts you in the role of Carl Denning, a reporter on a television show called "Case Unsolved." Robin Morales, your producer-slash-ex-girlfriend-that-you-still-have-feelings-for, wants to feature the mysterious Stauf Mansion, rumored to be haunted, on her show. Clearly it's possessed by a supernatural force, as the entire house has managed to move itself from its creepy cliffside location from The 7th Guest to a large and dull grassy field. So, after doing a little investigation that is revealed piece-by-piece throughout the game, Robin enters the mansion and disappears. One day, Carl receives a GameBook in the mail, and is instructed to go to the Stauf Mansion to look for Robin. Since there would be no game if he didn't drive all the way from Connecticut to New York to enter the mansion, he naturally does.

This is the paragraph with all the spoilers in it, so skip down if you still care at this point. So, as for Robin's investigation, she heard of the only survivor of the mansion, a woman named Samantha, so she decides to interview her. Samantha is reluctant to give information, but she reveals that her sister, Eileen, is also a survivor of the mansion, where she got her hand ripped off after the gate closed on it while she way trying to escape. Anyways, Robin learns that while the girls were in the house, they were raped. No, not by Stauf, but by the house itself. That's right, the girls were raped by a house. So, both girls end up pregnant. Samantha gets an abortion and ends up wheelchair-bound. Eileen has her kid, an evil daughter named Marie. By the time Robin starts her investigation, Marie is all grown up, and you know she's evil because she does evil things like smoke and have affairs with married men. One of these married men is a man named Chuck. Marie makes Chuck do evil things like cheat on his wife and murder people to sacrifice to the mansion. In one memorable scene, Chuck is ordered to murder Robin and sacrifice her to the mansion, but he murders the wrong person, and gets sucked into the mansion when he tries to feed the body to it. Once inside, he goes to the kitchen where Stauf and Julia Heine, one of the six guests from the previous game, are making a delicious pot of soup. Both characters know that Chuck has betrayed the mansion, so they offer some clever ideas as for what to do with him. Shall they eat Chuck roast? Chuck steak? The soup then comes to life an offers a suggestion: Chuck him into the soup! (I really wish I were making this all up.) Anyways, after Robin is trapped in the mansion, Stauf manages to convert her to the dark side. After Carl solves the final puzzle in the game, we are treated to the dramatic conclusion: Carl finds himself on a game show called "Let's Make A Real Deal" with your host, Monty Stauf. I'm guessing (read: hoping) that by this point in time the writers realized how absolutely ridiculous the rest of the story was and just decided to go all out with it. Anyways, you're offered three choices: behind Door #1 is Marie, who is hot, so if you're horny and want to bang Marie than you choose Door #1. Unfortunately, while you're doing the deed, Marie transforms into Stauf, who proceeds to pick up a plate and eat some ribs. Of course, since Stauf and Marie are both evil, they are eating your ribs, in an incredible plot twist. Behind Door #3 lies Robin, who is interested in getting back together with you. But since we've seen Stauf turn her evil, we know she's the wrong choice. If you decide to choose Door #3, you'll find yourself murdered by Robin. And finally, the obviously correct choice is Door #2, which holds Samantha. If you choose Door #2 you'll wind up at Samantha's house watching the mansion burn down on her security cameras. You could also decide not to choose any door, in which case the game will inexplicably end once time runs out.

As I'm sure you could guess, the story was certainly not up for any awards. The acting isn't much better, and according to the behind-the-scenes the entire movie was filmed in a week due to time constraints.

The sound is probably the game's best quality, aside from the graphics. The game uses General MIDI music, which was new and exciting back then, in an era when most people had Adlib-compatible Sound Blaster cards playing all their MIDI music. The soundtrack, composed by George Sanger (better known as The Fat Man), is phenomenal, and really sets the mood for the game. (Some of the tracks are subpar though, such as the theme for wandering around the foyer, but overall the soundtrack is excellent.) Many of the themes are recycled from The 7th Guest, but they still sound great, and many of them are catchy. Stauf's infamous little quips are still in the game, and help lighten the mood when you're stuck on a particularly difficult puzzle. The sounds the various items used in the puzzles make all sound like they should, so no complaints there.

Overall, the game is certainly a technical marvel, but is plagued with an atrocious story and mediocre puzzles. If anything, you should play through the game once just to get a few laughs out of the (intentionally?) horrible story, but there's not much reason to play beyond that.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 03/17/08

Game Release: The 11th Hour (US, 11/30/95)