Разработчик: Trilobyte Games
Описание
Only when journalist Robin Morales vanishes while investigating the rotting abandoned mansion of the legendary toy maker Henry Stauf, do events resurrect a malignant past.
AS ROBIN'S COLLEAGUE and lover, Carl Denning, you come to the ravaged estate to find her. What you uncover in its decaying chambers embroils the entire town in a deadly legacy of madness.
WEAVING A FEATURE-LENGTH, powerfully graphic video through The 11th Hour: The Sequel to The 7th Guest, the renowned developers at Trilobyte have created the most cinematic challenge to date. A wide array of games, puzzles and quests cleverly underscores the time-bending, contemporary adult mystery. only the deepest horrors of the mind could spread such terror in the night.
FEATURES
- Fully Explore over twenty-two beautifully-rendered rooms with faster, smoother 3-D graphics than ever before.
- Participate in a suspenseful interactive drama directed by David Wheeler, written by The 7th Guest author, Matthew Costello, featuring first-rate actors and a new musical score by The Fat Man.
- Solve three CD's worth of diverse and perilous challenges.
- Get on-screen hints instantly with the GameBook, No backtracking necessary.
- Watch high quality, full motion video without any additional hardware required.
EVERY MOMENT is riddled with intrigue. Three mysterious women are your only guides. Will you find Robin and unearth Stauf's fate at last? Or seal your own forever? It all must come together at The 11th Hour.
Поддерживаемые языки: english
Системные требования
Windows
- OS *: Windows XP / Vista / 7
- Processor: 1.8 GHz Processor
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: 3D graphics card
- DirectX: Version 9.0
- Storage: 2 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX compatible sound card
- OS *: Windows 7
- Processor: 2 GHz Processor
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: 3D graphics card
- DirectX: Version 9.0
- Storage: 2 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX compatible sound card
Mac
- OS: Mac OS X 10.6.8
- Processor: 1.8 GHz Processor
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1GB of RAM graphics
- Storage: 2 GB available space
- OS: Mac OS X 10.8
- Processor: 2 GHz Processor
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1GB of RAM graphics
- Storage: 2 GB available space
Отзывы пользователей
“Well I can't take a breath without seeing Mr. Death”
~ The Fat Man and Team Fat, Mr. Death
Ah, yes. The memories. Unfortunately, this time? Those are anything but good. I'm a huge fan of The 7th Guest since the moment it came out. It was simple, yet extremely atmospheric game with jaw-dropping visuals, FMVs, juicy horror scenes and brilliant music by The Fat Man himself (the man who wrote music to treasures like LOOM and Wing Commander). What was not to love? Even today, as long as we won't count that awful 25th Anniversary Edition, 7th Guest stays quite strong, while back in the days? I played it weekly. Just because. Should I say I was extremely excited about the sequel? Used to read magazines about it to death. Game looked stunning on screenshots (especially that skeleton of you-know-who in the bathroom) and when I learned about it coming on not two but four CDs? I mean, come on! They did so much good with two CDs. Imagine what they can do with four! Unfortunately, it turned out that... not so much. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
The first thing we should remember here is that, while back in 1993, the original 7th Guest had close to no competitors, the moment sequel came out two years later? Market was full of those. Presto just dropped a sequel to Journeyman Project, Legend went into space in their Mission Critical, horror fans got Tim Curry in Frankenstein and so on. Also, for those who didn't care that much about FMVs, there were games like Lost Eden, which had both lots of juicy animations and the unique gameplay mechanics. In other words, The 11th Hour needed to be good. No “buts”. Was it? Well... About that.
First of all, this here is not really that big of a game. See, they've made a movie. A cheesy b-movie. Hour-long (game's not called The 11th Hour for nothing, everything here is about hours somehow). And, of course, they wanted to show it to us. Badly. You starting to smell bull – you're correct. Every CD contained about 15 minutes of video. And at the end of each disc (one disc = one chapter called, you guessed it, “an hour”), we were supposed to see the whole thing on it from A to B. First, though, we needed to collect all the short clips (the big thing was cut into smaller pieces, so expect some hiccups while watching its full version). How? *SIGH* I honestly don't know what they were thinking. Instead of pushing deeper into interactions and animations, they gave us... riddles. That's right. Just riddles. Ol' man Stauf would tell us riddles, while our goal would be to find the right item and... click on it. In order to see the short clip from bigger video. That's it. That's the core mechanics here. No, seriously, what were they thinking?! It was bloody 1995! Who wanted things like anagrams?! This game was supposed to be the next big thing for the genre! Yet somehow it failed to deliver even what its predecessor had! I mean, in The 7th Guest video elements were smart. They were properly integrated into the environment to make presence effect like in no other game before it. Here? Click the right item and watch the video. Da hell?
Sure, there are still puzzles. But if something, those'll only make things worse. How? Well, first of all – sometimes the game will need you to solve the puzzle before item you'll need for your current riddle (which are quite terrible BTW, pretty confusing too) will become active. And those puzzles? They can be somewhat hard to notice. In other words, not only the game revolves around some poor riddles, it can also lock answers from you. Without even telling. And no, there's no logic in that. Sometimes you do need to solve puzzle, while sometimes you don't. Good luck guessing. There's an in-built helper this time, though (11th Hour takes place many years after the initial game and our main character carries a PDA with him, so no need to visit the library every time you need help). But that brings us to our second problem. Remember the microscope mini-game from The 7th Guest? The one that everybody hated thanks to it being both simple and unforgiving at the same time (mostly due to some technical problems which made it way harder on faster machines)? Bad news, guys. The 11th Hour is full of those. Again and again we'll need to play against Stuff and even though helper would offer, well, help, there'll be times... when it won't. The endings (there are three this time for you to choose) are locked behind the unskippable game of pente, while there'll also be times when helper will... lose. That's right. You'll use the help option and yet Stuf will still win. Just because the help system will fail to lose its job. Brilliant. Just brilliant. Even the regular puzzles feel bad now. Those are even more basic than before, those are poorly designed (it's way too easy to reset puzzle by mistake, which is annoying as heck, while some puzzles can be pretty confusing and won't count as solved even if you'll do exactly what help system will tell you to do), while very often there'll be a move limit. Which is a bull.
Maybe that hour-long movie is good, though? Maybe it makes everything worth it? Nope. It's stupid, it's illogical, it has close to nothing with The 7th Guest story and it feels like those cringey novels with shirtless men on covers. You know what I'm talking about. There's a “manly man” who'll get not one but three ladies, there's a lot of sex and somewhere there, on background, there's our man Stauf being weird. Awful. Just awful. In my case, The 11th Hour was a biggest disappointment of 1995. Still, it's nice to have it in my Steam library. Just because. The problem is... Yeah. Time to smell more bull. Because this version sucks butt.
What I do like is that, unlike 7th Guest, Steam release of The 11th Hour uses Windows version instead of the one for DOS. But it looks like they did that only because ScummVM didn't support it on time of release. When you'll start the game, most likely, your monitor will give you “no signal” message. Why? Because nobody cared to add proper config. In case your monitor (like, pretty much anything nowadays) don't deal with those ancient resolutions, you'll need to manually go to ddraw.ini (they've used FunkyFr3sh's cnc-ddraw here, so don't be surprised to see references to good ol' Command & Conquer) and adjust settings there through notepad. It's not a hard thing to do and there's always PCGamingWiki to help, but come on, dude! Seriously? How hard was that to make basic launcher? Compatibility mode may also be needed and again, nobody cared to pre-set it. Nightdive (new publisher) just took Windows version of the game, added cnc-ddraw and here we are. That's our Steam release.
So yeah. Years later, I actually hoped to make my peace with this game, but no. It's still a pretty bad game. Not the worst. But bad. That movie was like an attempts to add limitations to microscope puzzle from previous game. It ruined the whole thing. What we all wanted was interesting puzzles, more interactions, more funny animations, more atmosphere and so on. And while this game still has some of that, it's pretty clear that the main dish was sacrificed in order to show us a movie. Which, like I already said, isn't even good enough. Watching a movie on your monitor was quite “wow” back then, but even then I was not impressed. Nowadays? It's a no. Even despite the fact that again, they gave us the official script and OST as a free bonus (located in game's folder), it's still a no. New publisher did exactly nothing to make this release to feel good. Looks like some things are better stay in the past. Dixi.
FMV cutscenes are so godawful, but funny on their own right. The puzzles are even more difficult than on the first game of the series, I have a dislike for the ones that pit you against the AI because it barely makes any mistakes so you're guaranteed to give those puzzles almost a hundred tries. I couldn't beat the microscope puzzle of the first game without using a bot against the bot of the game and it still lost a couple times. Here you're give the choice to skip puzzles if you find them too demanding. People find "Stauf's" berating annoying in this game which I agree with, albeit some of the lines were hilarious. Play if you can look past the clunkiness and enjoy some good challenging puzzles.
If I could give this a side-ways thumb, I would. It's not bad per se, but it isn't great. For gamers like myself that enjoy revisiting older games and seeing how things have changed, and how games like this shaped the future of gaming, I totally recommend a play through! I don't regret the purchase or replaying this by any means. However, for those who are wanting a good, enjoyable puzzle game, skip it.
The 7th Guest (which I replayed recently) remains an incredible and important game in the history of horror focused games. However, this one doesn't just fail to live up to it's predecessor, it falls flat on it's face.
This game is similar in play and in graphics. Which leads to a familiar and nostalgic environment right off the bat. The mansion and the puzzles are definitely reminiscent of the first game, but that's were the relative resemblance drops off.
Onto the story.... The story is just plain weird. I have no idea how I had forgotten how weird the story is. I usually like weird and cheesy, but this was uncomfortably strange. Acting was bad (which is expected for the time period and genre) and the video cut scenes showed the age of the game the most. On my 4k screen the image was very, very pixelated. Though this was also not unexpected. I did really enjoy the bits of story scattered through play, with the full chapter reveal shown at the end of the "hour".
The graphics for gameplay were very good for this time period. I think it's why the poor video quality seemed so bad, was that there was such a stark contrast. Graphics were never sluggish for me, and the game played smoothly.
Puzzles felt strangely repetitive. By the end of the game I was feeling rather annoyed because the puzzles were so similar to each other, and I felt like I had already solved the same puzzle over and over again. How many times do you have to switch items from one side to the next? Too many. Replace the black knights with white knights, and the white knights with black knights. Replace the black bishops with white bishops, and replace the white bishops with black bishops. Those weren't the only two puzzles that had that objective. Now don't get me wrong, there was variety. No puzzle was identical, just enough were similar to each other for it to be down right irritating. I will also never forget that train puzzle. What a pain in the *#@!^$! *#!. Least favorite puzzle EVER. Ever EVER. There were also a few puzzles that it was very hard to select the item that you wanted to move. Either it would select the wrong item, or reset the level. Not a pleasant experience at all.
SThe puzzles where you play against Stauf were very difficult. Not undoable, but frustrating. Now there is an option where you can skip a puzzle, but I never resulted to that, so I have no idea how that affects the game over all. I also could not find out from other sources if it does effect the endings or not.
There is an appreciated hint system, that doesn't give away puzzle solutions. This is something I wish the first game had have, since it gives you your objective if you're having trouble understanding the point of a puzzle. It is also especially helpful for solving the riddles that you are given through out the game. But, oh the riddles... those terrible, nonsensical riddles. I love riddles, I really do. At least I think I do. I'm not sure after this game. I also used to think I was good at riddles, until I played this. A handful, if that, made sense. However so many of them were just as strange and out of left field as the story is. In the end, what should have been a fantastic addition to the game mechanic was more often than not just down right maddening.
It holds on to some of the original score (which remains fantastic all these years later), but different, "newer" music is also added in. Music that's simply not as good, and at times obnoxious and irritating.
There are three endings, all three are bizarre. None of them are great.
Over all, the game's just not that great. It fails where it should excel, and it breaths little life, energy or believability into a completely disappointing sequel.
Well, I didn't play much of this before requesting a refund. Maybe I don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing, but I found the experience very unpleasant, you start with a FMV movie that's fairly interesting as those things go, and it leads you to believe you're going to play something like Gabriel Knight 2 or a Tex Murphy game or maybe Phantasmagoria, but then you're dropped into a dark ugly mansion where a voice that wasn't introduced insults you whenever you try to inspect anything.
I managed to find two puzzles, one was an okay puzzle where you switch the positions of some knights on a modified chess board the other was a dumb puzzle where you had to do some things with some keys on a cash register. The only way to know what to do with the keys is to press the hint button which provides the instructions (and it's not something you can figure out without instructions by fiddling about since what you have to do is arbitrary and you only get any feedback once you've successfully completed it) so you have to press the hint button, but nothing really tells you how many times you should press the hint button to get just the instructions and not actual hints. That's very poor design in my opinion.
I don't know. I prefer story driven mystery adventure games, but I'll play puzzle collections too, I think why I won't play this is the annoying narrator constantly insulting you for clicking on anything.
It's mint!
Дополнительная информация
| Разработчик | Trilobyte Games |
| Платформы | Windows, Mac |
| Ограничение возраста | Нет |
| Дата релиза | 22.11.2024 |
| Отзывы пользователей | 48% положительных (99) |