The 11th Hour: The Sequel to The 7th Guest

(Virgin/Trilobyte, 1995)

While the graphics nearly warrant a marginal thumbs down, not a burnout, the rating is based on how fun the game was, right? Okay, then; with that in mind, this is among the Worst Games I Ever Played. As the long-awaited sequel to The 7th Guest, this was a severe disappointment; a mistake so dire, the then-infamous Trilobyte game company went out of business shortly after making this, their second-last game release.

What made it so bad? Simple: the original game was a time consuming effort, while this game was clearly a rush job. The storyline in particular seemed to be typical of film sequels when a studio wants to make money more than tell a worthwhile contiuation of the story. In short it seemed like one big repeat of the same old game, only not as good. This even included the audio. Looping voice effects led to Stauf saying the exact same 3 or 4 insults probably 100 times each (that isn't as much of an overstatement as you might think). Music was more often just retreads from the original game (if not, it sounded way too similar). Puzzles were equally of the variety of least-favorable brain ticklers : you solve the puzzle, thank heaven, and never attempt it again!

I will admit that the CGI artwork was cool (as always), even though society was starting to have their fill of the whole still-picture, Myst-clone craze. The evolving story (shown via FMV clips after every solved puzzle) was equally amusing; no problems there. In fact; this game truly tried to push the envelope, and offer almost DVD-quality video at a time long before video game technology had perfected such video elsewhere.

However, the ending was quite bad. It is among my choices for the Worst Game Endings of all Time. This isn't even getting into the final puzzle, with AI that was so bad it was nearly impossible to complete. Yet the real annoyance --spoilers notwithstanding-- is that you enter the mansion to save a life, and you can't. Then what is the point of this whole adventure, may I ask??? Such game endings make all your frustrations all the more worthless to have attempted at all...and far more frustrating than they already were.

Rating : Burnout.

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