The 11th Hour

The Good
The 11th Hour is exactly what it should be: the sequel to the very successful 7th Guest. A ghost story, inside a strange house, with many weird elements. And blood. And gore. And everything that could scare the player.

The best thing about the game is undobtely its technical parts. The graphics are really fantastic (and they are still great). The 640x480 Super VGA backgrounds had 16 million colors and demanded a powerful hardware when released. Not only the panoramas were beautifully designed, but also the videos were amazing. The 11th Hour was everything an interactive movie should be (and interactive movies were very popular back in 1995). The over 2 hours of full-motion videos (30 frames per second, just like in TV), spread over 4 CDs, were much better than most videos at the time, including the acclaimed Phantasmagoria ones. Everybody wanted to test the capabilities of their new multimedia hardware in 1995 and The 11th Hour was the ideal game for doing that.

The music was also great and contributed to a great atmosphere, although not remarkable. The sound effects were also magnific. They were both very well executed.

Of course, if you want to create a scary ambience, you have to affect the player senses. Trilobyte used unprecedent graphics and sound to do that.

And, if you like solving hard puzzles, this is the game for you. Although there is a story and there are adventure games elements, the game basically consists of a series of puzzles to be solved. The puzzles were more difficult than they were in The 7th Guest could take hours or even days to be sorted out.

The Bad
Nobody could ever complain about The 11th Hour technical qualities. But there are lots of problems in this game.

First, there's a problem which concerns interactive movies in general, and that's why they were practically abandoned. They were, with a few exceptions, much more 'movies' than 'interactive'. You just had to sit and watch the game do everything because videos are just videos: they were filmed, they cannot be changed by the player. So, they are not interactive.

The 11th Hour was just the case: it was less interactive than most interactive movies. There's no actual adventure in it. It's just puzzles. It is nice in the beginning, when everybody is stunned with the beautiful graphics, but it gets annoying very quickly. You cannot really take part on the events, as your main role is to solve puzzles which are not exactly connected to the story. So, it seems like the story is just a background to give a proper atmosphere.

Besides that, the acting is terrible. The actors are definitely not professionals.

These are basically the same problems of The 7th Guest. Compared to its antecessor, we could say that the story in The 11th Hour is not so good and involving. And that the atmosphere is not quite the same, despite the much improved graphics and sounds.

And, as the puzzles are too difficult, the game is definitely not a choice for beginners.

The Bottom Line
The 11th Hour is a very nice strategy game, which features difficult puzzles and a great atmosphere, just like its predecessor. And it is a crap adventure game, as it lacks interactiveness.

The Good
Trilobyte upgraded the groovie engine, with better graphics and interaction. The videos were clearer and not nearly as pixelated as in 7th guest.

The acting was about the same, hammy, but interesting. Stauf came back with a whole collection of snarky comments for the player. The puzzles were as good if not better than the ones in the original game. Some of the anagrams were pretty cool.

The Fatman came back to create the soundtrack, a definite highlight of the game. You can even play the tracks as the 2nd CD has CDA tracks on it.

The developer did a good job of aging and destroying the house so it looks like several years have passed since the original.

The Bad
4 freaking CDs. Swapping wasn't bad because the game swaps out only during milestones in the game.

The story makes even less sense then the original. The raunch, as mild as it is, was kicked up a notch to give it a more adult feel.

And the really frustrating anagrams brought the gameplay to a standstill.

The Bottom Line
Plays solidly on XP machines, give it a try and see a could've been classic.

The Good
Well, I have to admit this game is technically amzing. The video compression engine is unbelievably smooth - I managed to play this game on a 486 with quad speed CD-ROM at 640x480, 16 bit in full framerate - it appears Graeme Devine really took his time in writing a new engine from scratch. The video playback is truly phenomenal.

The puzzles are great and as difficult as they were in the first, with the nice addition of a bizarre PDA thingie and another type of puzzles (where you have to find an object by using a clue) and the graphics were revamped to 16 bit - a definite improvement.

The one truly great thing about this game is the music - as fluent and atmospheric at it was in The 7th Guest, simply magnificent.

The Bad
Well, the storyline is much less interesting, the acting is quite horrible (better than the first though...) and the game is simply not as polished as the first. The sequel to one of the best games ever wasn't done with nearly as much teamwork and it shows - the game somehow leaves a sour taste in your mouth. There's also a great deal of pointless profanity and sexuality in the game which adds nothing to it.

All in all, it's inferior to the first and not much fun to play... but maybe it's just me.

The Bottom Line
A technically amazing game which lacks the amazing WF (wow factor) of the first.

The Good
First of all, let me say that I rated The 7th Guest fairly high, mainly due to the fact that it was groundbreaking technologically when it released.

Which is why I think that The 11th Hour isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

The only 2 things I liked are the Graphics and the Sound,

Graphically, the game (although mostly in Black and White) is good. Gone are the days of smoothly walking around Stauf's Mansion. Now head bobbing movements are added along with a flashilight.

The sound/music is pretty much the same as the original. Creepingly eerie, but childish in a way.

The Bad
OK....

First of all, for a puzzle game, the puzzles are kinda stupid. Your PDA holds all the clues for the puzzles, along with a helper (the girl you are looking for) to help with the anagrams. Although you can get clues to the puzzles, the game offers to solve them for you EVERY time. Why bother publishing a game that you can easily walk through without doing anything?

The anagrams are particularly weird. Some are real easy to figure out, while others are SO obscure, you'd have to be a Cryptic Crossword specialist to figure the meaning out. Couple that with the fact that after you solve the anagram, you have to look through a DARKENED house, armed with only a flashlight, and you have to find the item described by the anagram to unlock the next room. All in all, it produces tons of needless mouse-clicking and re-re-re-exploring the house.

And Control... Well if you thought it was bad in 7th Guest, it's EXACTLY the same here. Once you click on an area... you are sunk. The fact that it spans 4 CD's doesn't help much either. Sometimes you end up swapping CD's back and forth... which gets tiresome after a while.

The Bottom Line
Bottom Line: Hardcire 7th Guest fans will flock to this like birds attacking a human dipped in honey and rolled in birdseed. Other people... It's iffy. You may or may not like it. Basically it's a game you'll either love or hate. No recommendations for this one.... and I hate doing that to a game.