It is 1993 and the Wales family has just welcomed a new bundle of joy into the world: a rather fancy 486 DX2/66 desktop PC, sporting 4MB of video memory, 8MB of RAM, a whopping 260MB of storage, and - crucially for this story - like the far-flung future suddenly made manifest, a CD-ROM drive. I'm sure I must have presented a lot of compelling evidence beforehand about how we, but of course it was about the games.
And that's not even speaking with hindsight; reviews weren't particularly kind to The 7th Guest at the time. Atmospheric it most certainly was, as you swooped from pre-rendered room to room in evil toymaker Henry Stauf's desolate mansion, watching the final moments of his six desperate guests unfold, but it was also pedestrianly paced, hammy as hell , and with arbitrary, abstract puzzle design – an anagram! a maze! another maze! – that largely felt like an afterthought.
Despite its gorgeously atmospheric VR makeover, Stauf's Mansion is still immediately recognisable - just don't expect things to beBut that's only the start of it; soon enough, you're gifted a new toy that lets you exert your influence on the world in fun new ways. Armed with a magic lantern conveniently abandoned near your disembarkation point, you're able to temporarily restore the dilapidation around you to its former glory simply by shining your beam upon it.
I gasped when I first saw the volumetric video in action, then grinned after seeing what was under that weird-looking dome. |Let's talk a bit more about those puzzles, though, as, in another reversal, they're the real meat of the experience this time around. Gone are the perfunctory brainteasers of the original in favour of puzzles more carefully integrated into the whole.