What's Wrong with The 11th Hour?

I've been feeling a bit nostalgic as of late regarding the golden age of PC gaming as I came across my old copy of Trilobyte's The 11th Hour, The Sequel to The 7th Guest.

It's been years since I've completed it and figured it was time to revisit it using more modern hardware.  Since the original game was designed for a system in the era of the original Pentium with Windows 95 I decided to repurchase it using the Good Old Games port so that it would work with my Windows 10 laptop with minimum fuss.

The first thing I noticed is that the Full Motion Video (FMV) ran in interlaced mode.  I haven't played the game since it was released back in 1995 so I couldn't remember if this was normal or not.  It turns out that both interlaced and progressive video was supported on the original game however only the most powerful hardware of the time would run the game using progressive scan.  The GoG port had to be modified in order to run the game on modern hardware otherwise the animations would play too fast.  One of the casualties of the port was all the FMV would play with the black lines characteristic of interlaced video which really hurts the quality.

Technical issues aside, the gameplay was as I remembered it, which is not very fun.  I was a huge fan of the original "The 7th Guest" which was groundbreaking back when it was first released in 1993 due to the high quality graphics, fantastic musical score, spooky themes and a great mix of puzzles to keep you engaged.  The storyline and acting quality was cheesy at best but this only added to the appeal and campy tone that the original developers may or may not have intended.  

The 11th Hour for all purposes should have been a better game than the original.  Computer processors were faster, video cards were a lot more capable and the budget greatly increased from $650,000 for The 7th Guest to a reported $2 million for The 11th Hour.  Various development issues caused the project to be delayed almost 2 years late and still the game feels a bit unpolished compared to its predecessor.

Let me first address the "fun" issue, or better yet "the lack of fun".  In a word, anagrams. For some reason almost every riddle feels like it involves anagrams.  I suppose some people love solving them, however even a native English speaker like myself would rather play a puzzle involving logic or trial and error then to sit down with a pencil and paper and try to unscramble words into other words.  There is no way possible to complete the game unassisted without solving these demons of word play which for myself is no fun at all.  There is a feature called the "GameBook" which allows you to get hints and may also provide actual solutions for the various puzzles, however resorting to it always feels like cheating.  Again NOT FUN!

If you haven't already played the game and wish to remain unblemished before you attempt this feat I would stop reading at this point and continue once you complete it.

*** SPOILER ALERTS ***

Unlike The 7th Guest which involved solving puzzles while exploring the mansion, The 11th Hour is more of a treasure hunt, looking for items in a very specific order.  The GameBook will provide you with riddles that you have to decipher in order to know which object you need to find.

As an example of how difficult the anagrams can be is one of the first ones you come across:

Winter coat worn for a mixer.

Half the battle is trying to figure out which words comprise the anagram and which ones you can ignore.  In this example can you determine which words are relevant?

Relevant words: WINTER COAT

Now you have to solve the anagram using just the letters in these two words in order to get the solution:

Anagram solution: TONIC WATER

Now how in the world were you supposed to know that WINTER COAT were the correct words to focus on?  I have no idea.  Some anagram fiends say you should look for words that seem out of place or are not very common however WINTER COAT are common words.  Once you have the anagram solution there is often another play on words in the riddle for an extra bit of verification.  Tonic water is often used as a mixer when making drink cocktails.  Very clever Stauf, very clever.

A possible solution to this difficulty problem is to highlight the words involved in the anagram.  The game does this one time and only one time.  This makes me think the developers toyed with the idea of making the anagrams easier and then changed their mind (forgetting to undo this particular case).  The did this with the following riddle but by highlighting the relevant words in uppercase.

Blend a TEAPOT SHOT and the pearlies won't rot.

Ok this makes the anagram easier to solve as TEAPOT SHOT = TOOTHPASTE, also the "pearlies won't rot" part makes total sense.  Unfortunately the other riddles aren't this transparent. 

There is one non-anagram riddle which I freely admit to looking up the solution on the internet as it made no sense to me.  See if you can figure this out...

500=100=0

Apparently these are Roman Numerals where 500 = the letter D and 100 = the letter C.  Mix these letters and you get CD and the object you are looking for is a CD-ROM located in the mansion.  Where does the 0 come into play?  I have no idea and neither does the internet. Another clever interpretation of this riddle is that "D is C" or "DisC" if you put those letters together.   How a "normal" person is supposed to figure this out? Only Stauf knows.

By the way, I didn't realize until halfway with the game that Stauf itself is an anagram for Faust, which according to Wikipedia is the protagonist of the German legend who made a deal with the devil for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures.  If you played either game you know each character seems to have made a Faustian deal with Stauf.  This is the only anagram I approve since it doesn't need to be solved in order to progress.

There was another riddle that appears to only be solvable with knowledge of a US Standard keyboard layout so good luck international gamers!  See if you can discover the logic here:

Riddle: Zu gotdy od mpy nrmy stpimf

Hint: My first is not bent around

Not all the puzzles high level of difficulty can be blames on cryptic anagrams. The 7th Guest infamously had an extremely difficult Microscope puzzle involving the computer AI (Stauf) as your opponent.  Most people complained and declared it unwinnable but fortunately you could skip it and still successfully finish the game. Rather than learn from that lesson, Trilobyte doubled down and created a few more AI based games for The 11th Hour, one of them just as difficult as the Microscope puzzle but based on a the classic Pente board game.

I've spent quite a bit of time explaining why the puzzles were a downer but there were a few more aspects of The 11th Hour that detracted from my overall gaming enjoyment. Although I give a lot of credit to Graeme Devine for developing a full screen, 24fps video decoder that ran entirely in software, I didn't like the fact that the videos you were forced to watch took place outside of the mansion.  It's like you were playing a cool video came and then taking breaks to watch TV that didn't mesh well with the 3D environment.  The 7th Guest handled this much better as all the video's took place inside the 3D world and were fully integrated.

Another feature I didn't care for in The 11th Hour was the lack of "creepyness" the original had.  Some of my favorite moments of The 7th Guest was touching a painting and then seeing it come to life with hands poking out and watching a ghostly woman drifting slowly away from you down a hallway.  In The 11th Hour there are only a few of these creepy moments such as the toothpaste turning into a bug and my favorite, the "Soup's On!" scene however these gems are few and far between.

Just in case you weren't convinced this game has issues, just refer to the ridiculous game show conclusion scene, although I do give them credit for providing multiple endings.  Unfortunately you must replay the horrible Pente game in order to see all three versions, each time getting a more difficult AI to play against. 

Give the game a try if you must but don't say I didn't warn you!

BONUS Content:

Here's a nice comparison of the graphical differences between both games.