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.