The 11th Hour Logo © DotEmu

Last week I revisited the classic 1992 game The 7th Guest. This week I’m all about its sequel, the much anticipated “The 11th Hour” and sadly, this review won’t be nearly as glowing. In fact, I’ll be fully honest and say I didn’t play this game for very long at all because I just found it so irritating.

The 11th Hour was released in 1995, three years after its predecessor. The game was very late to market, and this partly contributed to it’s failure to meet sales expectations upon release. Other contributing factors were that the game had been developed specifically for MS-DOS, despite Windows having become the standard gaming platform for PCs at the time leading to many customers being unable to run the game properly. Reviews at the time of its release were not that favourable either, a 1996 Gamespot review stated that producers Trilobite had failed to deliver on their promise of “broadening the interactive entertainment market by creating and delivering original, high quality products with mass-market appeal”.

The official 1995 trailer for “The 11th Hour” 

Robin begging for help inside the "gamebook" © Sophie Brown/Trilobite

“The 11th Hour”  is set 60 years after the events of The 7th Guest and sees you returned to Stauf’s mansion which is now in a significant state of decay. As with 7th Guest there is a long video introduction which sets up the plot in which you play Carl Denning Jnr, an investigative reporter for a fictional TV show called “Case Unsolved”*. The show’s producer (and your lover) Robin Morales has vanished after going to visit Stauf’s mansion several weeks earlier. You receive a package containing a form of electronic device referred to as the “gamebook” which is somewhere between a mobile phone and a netbook – think 1995 – and when opened it plays a video of poor Robin pleading with you to help her escape. We are then treated to a video sequence that looks almost painfully Twin Peaks-inspired as Carl hops on his motorbike and speeds off towards the house. Impressively, when Carl arrives there, it appears to have moved from the cliff-side outcropping we saw in The 7th Guest to a field near a small village. Maybe it is possessed after all? This is interspersed with clips of Robin and Carl’s relationship as they get together and break up. There’s also sex clips – quite a few of them which gave me something of a surprise and made me very glad I didn’t have the in laws over as I was playing. The 11th Hour pushed the mature rating far more than its predecessor ever did. Alongside the sex scenes there is also far more graphic violence than was seen during The 7th Guest along with references to rape, abortion, extra marital affairs and human sacrifice.

The "gamebook" shows you an unfathomable riddle © Sophie Brown/Trilobite

As Carl enters the house, the game itself kicks in and you find yourself once again in the hallway of Stauf’s mansion. The overall gameplay is broadly similar, actually make that virtually identical, to The 7th Guest as you move around the house solving puzzles in the different rooms. You walk around the darkened mansion carrying a flashlight which waves around as you walk, giving the scenes an early X-Files feel. One amusing fault with the game is that the speed at which you walk around the house is dictated by your computer, meaning that if you have a very slow system you will effectively crawl from room to room. Those playing on a dedicated gaming system on the other hand may find themselves zooming around as if they were Superman which can detract somewhat from the mood of the game. A new aspect has been added in to this game to differentiate it from its predecessor however – riddles. The Ouija board menu screen has been replaced by the gamebook you saw Carl receive in the opening video and it is here you will receive the riddles that need to be solved along with saving, loading, exiting and looking at the house map. The riddles are beyond obscure, in fact I have no idea how you’re supposed to solve them without looking up the solutions. The first once is received immediately upon starting the game (your skeletal hand cursor will pulse with a blue circle to indicate a new message) and is this:

“Winter coat worn for a mixer”

You then have to look around the house and find the solution to the riddle which will be an object, or perhaps something in a painting, I would honestly still be looking now if it wasn’t for an online walkthrough. The later riddles don’t become any clearer and many require you to beat a puzzle before you can solve them. Many are based around anagrams, others get you to think laterally and still others are just insane. At least one ended up being an anagram of a word I then had to look up in a dictionary to find out what it meant, and in another only half of a word was part of the anagram. In my book, that’s cheating. I sent some of the riddles to my mother to see what she thought of them. You see my mother is something of an anagram fiend and she was able to figure out far more than I did. She can spot something that looks like an anagram inside a sentence almost instantly, an odd choice of words or phrasing that jumps out like a red flag to her and signifies an anagram is present. What she couldn’t get was what on Earth you were supposed to do after you’d worked out the riddle, and neither could I. The solutions rarely tell you exactly what you need to find, instead most are more like vague hints so it’s up to you to work out what you need to hunt down next.

A typical puzzle in "The 11th Hour" © DotEmu/Trilobite

The puzzles themselves are similar to the ones in The 7th Guest with multiple games based around chess and others with pool balls, spiders and mirrors. Several puzzles have you playing against the game’s AI and in these cases it is often not actually possible to win depending upon the initial configuration of the puzzle, which makes the game as a whole incredibly frustrating. The walkthrough I used actually recommended getting Samantha to solve them instead, Samantha being part of the gamebook that you can turn to for hints and clues. As with The 7th Guest, the game claims it will penalise you for using too many hints or getting the gamebook to solve the puzzles for you. This is quite simply a lie; you can use the gamebook as much as you want and if you choose, have it solve every puzzle for you, a fact which succeeds in taking most of the challenge out of the game. Samatha is also a human character who you will meet during the game’s frankly ridiculous conclusion in which you have to make a decision about who to save from the evil mansion.

The dining room at Stauf's mansion © DotEmu/Trilobite

I didn’t finish The 11th Hour, in fact to be quite frank with you, I didn’t even get close. The game’s layout was so similar to The 7th Guest that it didn’t inspire me to want to investigate the house at all, I already knew what was in the different rooms before they opened. The plot was both completely insane (I think it might even rival Twilight’s Breaking Dawn” for complete nonsense factor) and failed to pull me in. I felt no connection to the characters and the style in which the video sequences had been shot gave the whole thing a bad soap opera feel which clashed terribly with the gothic horror story feel of The 7th Guest. Where Henry Stauf had once been a genuinely frightening presence within the house, here he feels more like Scooby Doo”villain mixed with the unnecessary bloodthirsty violence of the Saw franchise. The little changes have detracted, rather than added to the game and removed its generally disturbing sense of evil. Rather than having Stauf scream “come baaaack!” whenever you exit as he did in The 7th Guest, a woman’s completely monotone voice simply intones “don’t give up Carl.” It’s just lacking that certain something which the first game had in spades.

Back on it’s original release, The 11th Hour showed the gaming industry that sequels don’t always equal success and that it didn’t matter how much top of line graphics technology they threw at a product if the story and game play itself wasn’t engaging to the audience. Today this game is little more than a footnote hanging on the shadow of its much more famous and beloved older brother. Whilst certainly a technological achievement, the disjointed and inconsistent style of the game means that it hasn’t been remembered fondly. If you enjoyed the puzzles in The 7th Guest and want to try something much tougher, then I do certainly recommend this game. Time has not simplified it and those looking for a challenge will almost certainly find it here. The game is completable without the use of walkthroughs if you have almost unlimited patience, in fact my cousin completed it on its release although it took him several months; incidentally his name is Carl which must have added something for him when the game told him personally not to give up each time he exited. If on the other hand, you are looking for a bit of light hearted retro fun, or you are simply a fan of The 7th Guest then I suggest you stay away and not allow this game to sully your memories of a classic game.

*This game came out several years before the short lived real life crime TV show also called Case Unsolved.

A copy of this game was provided free for this review. The 11th Hour is available to download via DotEmu for $9.99. The iOS re-release has been postponed indefinitely at this time due to “serious technical challenges”.

Sophie Brown is a busy stay at home mother living in England with her husband, one year old son and two middle aged cats.  She is currently studying for a Bachelor's Degree in Natural Sciences and also writes the blog The Geek Arts. Sophie can frequently be found wasting time on Twitter.