Zarf Updates

Not a Monty Python reference (unless you really want one), but rather: it's still spring (barely) and here's some games that surprised me. They popped up suddenly out of nowhere; I hadn't heard much about them; I enjoyed 'em.

(Okay, 7th Guest was announced a couple of months ago, and in fact has existed for three years in VR. Still, in the span of 1993 to now, that's sudden.)

Have some brief commentary, plus one design rumination.

• The Archives of Trevosa
• Hypogea
• The 7th Guest Remake (2023)

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The Archives of Trevosa

• by Jamwitch -- web game

A free browser-based mini-Roottrees-like. Pin down the names and titles of thirty members of the royal family of Trevosa. The gimmick: all of their documents use Trevosan terms for familial relations. (Not to mention clans, animals, and so on.) It's not a full conlang but you have to figure out the words relevant to the family tree. To the Archives!

It took me a bit to internalize the setup. You can only search the Archives for Trevosan words and names. The search shows at most three documents at a time (hey, a Her Story-like too!) so you can't just flail; you have to focus on specifically-relevant terms. On the flip side, the list of documents that you've found is not so limited. There, you can search for English words and browse any number of matching results.

The game uses the now-standard "lock three correct guesses" mechanic. With only two blanks to fill in per person, you can probably brute-force anything you get really stuck on. But the clues are all fair and reasonably findable.

This only took me a couple of hours and I enjoyed the time. As with all these database-searching games, everybody's path through will be different. But at least in my case, the pacing was really good. By the time I hit 100% of documents found, I had 90% of the names filled in, and I was cackling over my answer to the bonus question: "Who are these people and what has kept their kingdom secret?"

Hypogea

• by Charlie Wagner -- game site

A sweet little nonverbal-narrative platformer. You're an acrobatic robot with a staff. You and a companion bot make your way through the ruins of an underground megastructure. Other friendly mechanical beings help you along the way.

The game is focused on the traversal puzzles rather than physical reflexes. You need some button skills. (Run towards edge, pole vault, jump, swing on hook, catch chain...) But the timing is generous and "push X to snag with staff" usually saves your ass. Mostly you're looking around to see where you can go, then deciding what moves will get you there. And feeling like a ninja while you do it.

No, not a ninja. Nonviolent game. Feeling like a robot monk, then.

The environments are rusty-industrial-ruin, which isn't my favorite genre of megastructure. But it does feature wonderfully vast depths and heights. Towers of collapsed machinery, cables trailing into misty-dark chasms. As long as I'm the robot-guy scaling the scenery, I have no complaint.

It occurs to me that the Steam page's key art uses a rough painterly style which I liked a lot more than the game's PS2-era lo-fi-lo-poly. Could the whole game have been done up with, I dunno, shaders? Well, the dev ran solo; I'm sure he scoped to what he could ship. No argument there. The lighting is excellent, regardless.

The machine-people you meet are beautifully animated and expressive. I wasn't so into the human prehistory, which you glimpse through brief recorded recollections. Those meat people looked like jerks. I would rather have had more about the robot times. Ah well.

Short, excellently designed. Well worth your time.

The 7th Guest Remake (2023)

• by Vertigo Games -- game site

I never played The 7th Guest. It was a big title in the 90s when I was excited about all sorts of Mac CD-ROM games. I somehow never got to it. Did I hear through the (Usenet) grapevine that the puzzles were bad? Maybe I was just lazy. I can't remember.

The puzzles were terrible. See Jimmy Maher's writeup. One of my Usenet compatriots made this comment, which was a popular sig-file quote for a while:

I mean, what the hell kind of villain thwarts the hero's              
progress with soup cans in the kitchen pantry?                        
  --Russ Bryan 

So when I heard there was a modern remake, I said: As long as they rewrite all the puzzles from scratch. And they did!

In fact I was behind the times. This 7th Guest Remake was a VR remake a few years ago. I paid no attention because I'm not interested in VR. Happily, the developers then decided to make the jump to regular flatscreen PC. I shall hope others follow suit.

(To be clear: this is the same game as the 2023 VR release. Same design, same graphics, same puzzles. Only the controls have been updated. So I'm referring to it as The 7th Guest Remake (2023), even though the Steam release is dated 2026. And even though "Reboot" or "Reimagining" would be more accurate.) (There was a literal remake in 2019, for some reason, but this isn't that.)

Really, you can tell this is a VR-native game. The core interactions are:

• You walk around an awesomely detailed creepy house.
• Spectral people appear and perform little scenes. You can walk around or even through them, but not interact.
• You can pick up any piece of scenery and numbly rotate it in space, but you can't do anything with it. Then you drop it -- doesn't matter where; it zaps back to where it belongs.
• Solve puzzles, but all the elements are selected with d-pad or arrow keys, not mouse.
• Swirls of spectral energy fly impressively around the room or turn into butterflies and flutter around.

In short, everything is visual and all around you, but there's no tangible interaction. Because you're waving a pair of plastic wands! (With d-pads on them.) No fine manipulation at all. It's the exact opposite of Myst's native mouse-focus or The Room's native finger-touch interaction.

(The one exception is a theremin puzzle, which is of course the perfect "wave your clunky hand extensions in space" interface. I suspect they simplified that one for mouse control.)

None of this is a complaint! It's just a distinctly weird experience after 35 flippin' years of "normal" (mouse-centric) graphical adventures. It took me a while to peg it as "Oh, VR controls!" and then it all made sense.

I don't have much to say about the puzzles. I'm sorry about that! They're most of the game. They're competent. They are, if not completely original, at least creative takes on stock ideas. Almost every puzzle is a notch easier than it could have been. I completely understand; the hardcore puzzle nerds were never going to show up for this party. But it means that the difficulty ranges from "took a bit of thought" down to "there were only three moves and I did them and that was it".

On top of that, there's free hints and nearly-free puzzle bypass tokens. You have to hunt around for the tokens, which is of course fun, but you'll find plenty.

As for the story, they kept the bones of the original plot. (I flipped through a video walkthrough of the original game to compare.) Same setup; some of the same dialogue even. They added quite a bit of new stuff to make the story flow better. They punched up the struggle between the six guests as the backbone of the plot. They added a bunch more backstory for evil old Henry Stauf. The narrative decisions are all reasonable. Again, it's competent work. But not compelling.

You'd think that in a game called The 7th Guest, there would be a story arc where the six guests realize that there is a seventh guest -- but who? Dramatic tension! But no. Some kid wanders in, and then at some point everybody is chasing the kid around, and that's the story.

The actors are fun to watch, sure. The original 1993 game was famously shot in a two-day rush with no-name community actors. How do you play a nostalgic remake of terrible acting? You can't make it good; fans would complain! The solution seems to be to find talented actors and tell them to ham it to the nines. That way everybody is in on the joke.

It's the overall shape that's missing. Stauf tells everybody that his house is full of clues about what to do. The house is not in fact full of clues. Buddy, I have been in a house full of clues, and this is not it. This is a house full of puzzles, but there is no metapuzzle. No surprise meanings or hidden patterns. The puzzles are purely a gating mechanism: solve all the puzzles in this chapter's room, and the next chapter unlocks.

There's exactly one puzzle where you're supposed to think about the story and the clues from elsewhere in the house... and then the game doesn't make you do that. You can ignore the story clues and solve it based on mechanical feedback.

The designers added a big climactic challenge, which I gather the original game lacked. But it's not dramatic either. It's not presented as you staking your life or taking a stand. It exists so that Stauf has a way to lose and thus get his comeuppance. It's not even a puzzle; it's a board game. You play Parcheesi against the forces of darkness. Stauf says he won't explain the rules, but you get an abundance of hints, and then winning is straightforward. It's just a slog.

I think the designers took the premise of The 7th Guest for granted. They didn't do the work to sell it to players in the game.

So: a perfectly good lightweight puzzle game, and the environment is wonderfully rendered. I loved poking around in all the corners. (The obligatory magic-lens-or-lantern is used to excellent effect.) But it's not a must-play unless the original is a hallowed creepy memory of your youth.

I will put in a rec for Jonathan van den Wijngaarden's soundtrack, though. It's a sweet blend of eerie ambience and mellow jazz themes. Appropriate for a game entirely populated by Jazz Age ghosts! And of course it's headlined by the classic theme from the original soundtrack. Props for getting George "The Fat Man" Sanger back as a performer.