The 7th Guest: Remastered
A fun but flawed Faustian affair
$5.99 From Liron Barzilai, mojo-touch.com Made for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch Needs iOS 8.0 or later
The 7th Guest was a classic creepy ’90s puzzler and, to celebrate its 25th anniversary, it’s been remastered for iOS. Sadly, in this house of mysteries, not all is as it seems.
You play a guest of the mysterious toymaker Henry Stauf, who has trapped you and six other guests inside his seemingly haunted mansion on the promise of an entertaining soirée. Solve the puzzles and he will grant you your heart’s desires — but only one guest will see through this Faustian bargain.
Unfortunately, “remastered” is used in only the loosest sense. The developer
promises “stunningly rendered” graphics, but now instead of heavily pixelated scenes, you’re greeted by blurry, low–poly ones. Some audio snippets retain raspy compression artefacts. Some icons — like the hotspot indicator — are high quality, which only goes to highlight the disappointing graphics elsewhere.
There are improvements, though. The save/load system is a welcome addition, as is the ability to highlight all the touch hotspots in each room; the music has also been re–recorded. The original was a point–and–click classic, and that system translates well to a touchscreen device. Most of the riddles are easy to play but hard to solve, which is just how we like it. The game is still as fun and tricky as it was 25 years ago, and it’ll provide plenty of entertainment, but we’d hoped for more from a remastered edition.
the bottoM liNe. A fun game that will test all ages, but very disappointing graphically. Alex blAKe