1. Renegade Ops (PC)(Multidirectional Shooter)2. Borderlands 2 (PC)(FPS/RPG)3. Gunpoint (PC)(Puzzle Platformer)4. Robotrek (SNES)(RPG)5. The Tick (SNES)(Beat 'Em Up)6. Alien vs Predator (SNES)(Beat 'Em Up)7. X-Kaliber 2097 (SNES)(Action Platformer)8. Metal Slug (MVS)(Run and Gun)9. Shadowrun (SNES)(RPG)10. Quake II (PC)(FPS)11. The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang (SNES)(RPG)12. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (PC)(Action)13. A Story About My Uncle (PC)(Platformer)14. Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (PC)(FPS)15. Star Wars Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith (PC)(FPS)16. Catacomb (PC)(Top-Down Shooter)
17. Catacomb Abyss (PC)(FPS)18. Catacomb Armageddon (PC)(FPS)19. Catacomb Apocalypse (PC)(FPS)20. The Catacomb (PC)(Top-Down Shooter)21. Catacomb 3-D (PC)(FPS)22. EarthBound (SNES)(RPG)23. Quake II: Ground Zero (PC)(FPS)24. Quake II: The Reckoning (PC)(FPS)25. Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader (PC)(RPG)26. The 7th Guest (PC)(Puzzle)The 7th Guest is a puzzle game, it just has horror point-and-click trappings to navigate the mansion which serves as a hub world. Old Stauf the toymaker invited over 6 guests to his creepy old house and hid 21 puzzles throughout, so now you have to navigate them to discover why the 6 were invited and who is the 7th. Solving the puzzles reveals bits and pieces of the story, often out of sequential order, and in a few cases with red herrings tossed in to make you doubt portions, but always showing something.
The game is also nice enough to give you a hint book for your puzzles hidden in the library, and if you return to it three times for any particular puzzle, it will automatically solve it for you, though at the expense of costing you the scene for beating the puzzle on your own. That's ok though, as there are still plenty of other little scenes hidden throughout the house, such as a haunted painting, a doll that asphyxiates a baby, and Chuckles, the clown with a red balloon. I think Chuckles is my favorite part of the game. He would terrify several friends of mine.
Of note is the use of CG to make the house and FMV with live action actors to explain the story, often with some visual effects which range from goofy, such as suddenly getting a long tongue, to creepy, such as phases sometimes turning into skulls but in a sort of haze to make you question whether you really saw it. Of particular note is the magician, who ended up my favorite character. It's a shame he didn't survive, but then no one did, so it can't be helped. The acting is often hit or miss, and the video is low resolution, so it can often be hard to see exactly what is going on. The volume on the dialogue is good, but it can often suddenly fluctuate with an ear-piercing scream, which made me wish for two things: subtitles, and a volume control. Seriously, this game is loud, so for most of it I just hung my headphones around my neck to avoid going deaf. That said, the music is actually quite nice, and a definite high point for me.
But the puzzles are the real meat of the game, so I suppose I should talk about them. All of them are apparently designed on children's puzzles from the 19th century, and they have a lot of variety, though you will see a couple of ideas repeated. Some are quite easy, some are just time consuming, some are ridiculously cryptic, and one in particular is considered nearly impossible at this point because you have to play a AI.
There are two problems I had with the puzzle design: 1. There is often little instruction, and 2. you are often stopped to hear voice clips from either your character or Stauf. These voice clips generally provide the only instruction you will get in solving the puzzle, unless you consult the hint book up to two times. Sometimes these hints are helpful, but not always, and there were a few times I really wish the game had flat out told me that I could not do something. The bishop puzzle in particular annoyed me, mainly because at no point did the game say that the bishops could not be on a diagonal line with each other. If I had known that when I did the puzzle, I could have saved an hour of frustration. A few puzzles can be cheesed as well, such as the skeleton coffins and Stauf's portrait puzzles, since they start out with random arrangements.
As for the nearly impossible puzzle, it is a game similar to Go called Infection played against an AI that is hidden in a microscope. Unfortunately the AI was apparently designed to plan ahead based on your processor speed. This was intended for folks with a 486 processor to make it challenging but not too difficult. Unfortunately processors have gotten just a tad bit faster, so the AI is now able to do all the necessary calculations to plan ahead. Think of it as playing the equivalent of Deep Blue, only you're not Gary Kasparov. You're going to lose. A lot. Thankfully the hint book can skip it. I highly recommend doing that.
So, does 7th Guest hold up? Well...yes and no. The puzzles themselves offer a lot of variety and were based on old designs anyway, so beyond the issue with the microscope, they're pretty much fine and still challenging. You will find some easy and some hard simply based on how you think, so what I found hard, you might find easy, and vice versa. The use of live actors is hokey and something we don't do much anymore, and the game's lack of audio options really serves as my biggest annoyance, but I can see why this was such a huge deal in 1993. It was quite technically impressive for it's time, and it was fun finally playing through such a pivotal artifact of gaming history.