The Quest For The Worst Adventure Game Puzzle: Mike, The 11th Hour Is So Much Worse Than The 7th Guest [Part 1]

The 11th Hour Is The Beginning Of The End Of Trilobyte!

The 11th Hour was a big deal at the time, and despite selling well, was as a big disappointment even for defenders of The 7th Guest

Trilobyte, Inc. is the Hootie & the Blowfish of the video game industry. Like Hootie, you can't call them a "one hit wonder." Still, considering their meteoric rise is contained within two bodies of work, and they plummeted back down to reality shortly thereafter, they're only a scant one or two steps away from that dubious label. And for as much as I'm going to lay out the reasons why Trilobyte's approach towards game design had a minimal window of opportunity to make any tangible sense to mainstream audiences, you have to give them some credit; their legacy and high points are unquestionable. Along with Myst, The 7th Guest is considered a "killer app" that sold people on CD-ROM drives as a sound improvement over floppy drives. The 7th Guest was a massive technical achievement for incorporating pre-rendered 3D graphics, and its mature storyline and content paved the way for later experimentation in the adventure game genre. And what is often overlooked is that The 7th Guest immediately outsold Myst, even though the latter eventually won out over time. The 7th Guest broke the one million copies sold mark in 1995, months before Myst, and ultimately earned approximately $40 million in revenue in the United States alone.

So, Trilobyte's second video game being a rehash of the same design principles as The 7th Guest? It's shitty, sure, but it makes perfect sense if you put yourself in the shoes of its developers. Trilobyte was dumping millions into their elaborate sets and FMV cutscenes, and that's what people wanted out of multimedia games. Furthermore, unlike the Miller brothers of Myst fame, Trilobyte's lead designers, Rob Landeros and Graeme Devine, aren't exactly innovators when it comes to puzzle design. They also weren't great at budgeting game projects, though; a large share of that is due to Virgin Interactive Entertainment being a financial disaster by the time The 11th Hour came out. Nonetheless, you also have to consider that Landeros's first project after leaving Trilobyte was Tender Loving Care, and that was a notorious financial boondoggle. Yup, the Giant Bomb East classic we all know and love came from the guy who led the development of The 7th Guest! Nevertheless, while The 11th Hour was being developed, Trilobyte emphasized that it would be darker, feature a more mature storyline, and showcase even more FMV cutscenes than anything ever previously attempted in games. On the flip side, they remained relatively mum about gameplay improvements in almost all of the game's advertising. The puzzles and gameplay were not the priority, and boy, howdy, do you realize that almost immediately upon booting it up!

You can really tell Trilobyte wanted to get as close to movie-like production values as possible, but 90s CD-ROM tech only allowed them to do so much.

Now, to be generous, I loved the story. Hopefully, with Mike's retrospective of The 7th Guest, you all have come to appreciate Robert Hirschboeck's performance as Henry Stauf. Sure, his performance has "peak FMV energy," but he's fully committed to his role, and I can't help but tip my hat to him. He's a thousand times better in The 11th Hour because the game has fewer characters than The 7th Guest, which means Hirschboeck has more opportunities to ham it up while standing in front of a blue screen. Yes, the issue of him saying the same four to five taunts whenever you lose at a puzzle remains, but his delivery is always on point. The other performances have their moments as well, and it's clear that Trilobyte was riding high on the fat wad of cash they received after The 7th Guest sold like hotcakes, because The 11th Hour features more cutscenes with a far better budget. The costuming has improved, and several scenes were shot on sets and don't involve dated pre-rendered backgrounds. And also sometimes people transform into horrible abominations like this for no reason! It's great!

When this game gets weird and wacky, it's a delight. Unfortunately you have to play it.

The game even has special effects and pyrotechnics during action sequences! They have the production prowess of a Cannon Films action slop affair, but they're there and that's what makes them special. Trilobyte was riding high during the production of this game! Unfortunately, the narrative begins 70 years after the events of The 7th Guest and takes place in 1995. This 90s aesthetic is immediately less interesting than The 7th Guest's 1930s one, and there are production shortcomings to mention as well. Those flashy cutscenes I mentioned are primarily displayed to you via a PDA or media player, and the fidelity isn't the best. Additionally, the entire interface is extremely slow, mainly due to the game having numerous processes running in the background. And HOT DAMN, I get that it makes narrative sense, but the backdrop of The 11th Hour being the same goddamn mansion from The 7th Guest, but now more dilapidated, sucks. There are some changes here and there, but the rooms are exactly where they were the last time, and some of the warp points or secret passages are the same as well.

So, what is different in The 11th Hour compared to The 7th Guest? Well, the word problems or logic puzzles are more treasure hunts this time around. The 11th Hour is a bit more rigid in its structure and railroads you into distinct chapters or "hours" by having your PDA play an audio clip of Stauf reading a brain teaser or riddle, and you need to find and click an item or piece of furniture in the game's mansion that connects to that. These riddles GENERALLY do a good job of guiding you to where you need to be and ensuring you don't miss a random puzzle that is blocking your progress, which was a real problem with The 7th Guest. Still, more often than not, they have barely any connection to their supporting puzzle or even what's happening in the story. They're there to pad out the time and leave you wondering if you need an Ivy League college degree to finish the game. A feeling I know all too well after having played every game made by Trilobyte. And before you ask, yes, this game does indeed have chess puzzles and even a rehash of the microscope puzzle from The 7th Guest. If you're asking for my advice, look up a supercut of the FMV cutscenes in chronological order, and avoid actually playing the game. Even with its "Autoplay" feature, which allows a supporting companion to solve a puzzle for you, this game is an absolute chore not worth the effort.

The fact the actual game entirely takes place in the same mansion as the first game is a complete bummer.

Puzzle Rankings

Author's Note: I attempted and completed every puzzle in this game without using the game's "Auto-Solve" option which is a repeat of the Hint system from The 7th Guest. For those unaware, both games have a hint system wherein after you exhaust every possible hint, the game offers to solve the puzzle you are on for you, at no penalty to the player. All of the rankings for the puzzles are based on what the game expects you to do not involving that system.

Also, because The 11th Hour is such a more significant game than The 7th Guest, I'm breaking this feature into three parts. Because the preamble of this post went a little longer than expected, I'm just be reviewing the puzzles during the game's first "hour" or chapter. Episode two will review the puzzles during the 8th and 9th hour and the third and final episode will review the 10th and 11th hours.

7th Hour

Riddle #1: "Winter coat worn for a mixer."

Your GameBook is where the riddles are presented and besides being a vehicle for fun sound clips of Stauf, it's an annoyance more than anything else.

Solution: A bottle of tonic in the library.

[Rating: 4/10]: When I saw this, my first assumption was to find a bottle of anything that could be considered a "mixer," and lo and behold, there's a bottle of tonic in the library. However, and this is going to be a bit of a recurring theme, the game designers hid an anagram in the riddle, which is meant to be your "real" hint on what you need to collect. In this case, "Winter coat" is an anagram for "tonic water." Now, there are times when the hidden anagrams are your only viable hint on what you need to collect, and there are other times when they are completely ancillary, with this obviously being the latter case. From a design standpoint, these anagrams are a form of game design malfeasance, as they lack logical consistency. The text you need to resort is never highlighted, and there are plenty of riddles with no anagrams at all. Sometimes the words that are anagrams are the subject of the whole passage, and other times it's just a bunch of random words you need to play around with! In this particular case, because you can arrive at a logical object that has some connection to the riddle unedited, I'm not too upset.

Cash Register Puzzle

No, I did not crop this image incorrectly. This is indeed the camera angle for this puzzle.

[Rating: 3/10]: You have a few choices on which puzzle to do first, but I usually opt for the cash register puzzle in Brian Dutton's room, which, might I add, the fact that the rooms are still labeled by their residents over 70 years ago is just weird. The objective of this puzzle is to make both sides of a cash register equal, with the default position having one side starting with 162, and you needing to press a variety of buttons to add, subtract, and divide that number in half. Obviously, you can't just divide the starting number by two, as you can only edit the numbers in currency-based increments from the 1930s. I was able to solve this puzzle by pressing 5, 25, 10, and 10 on the top row and then 10, 10, 1, and 10 on the bottom row. After reviewing a guide, there are four total solutions, which is nice, but if you are mathematically challenged, this game does NOT make a good first impression. Nonetheless, it's relatively easy to deduce what you need to do and what you need to manipulate to solve this puzzle, so I give it a pass.

Riddle #2: "Rolling rock, bottle cap."

Solution: Click on a champagne bottle next to a TV after solving the cash register puzzle to collect a cork.

[Rating: 2/10]: This is by far one of the better riddles in the game. It makes sense, and it also forces you into a room that has a story-required puzzle, as you can't immediately solve it until AFTER you have resolved the cash register puzzle. I'm adding an extra point only because the bottle is easy to miss if you don't know what you are looking for, and there's the additional step of needing to click on the cork to collect it. If every riddle in the game were as cleverly integrated into the gameplay as this one, I wouldn't mind them as much.

Four Knights Puzzle

Ah, cool... the chess puzzles are back. Goody!

[Rating: 6/10]: And just as I was starting to feel good about things, The 11th Hour hits me with the first example of a puzzle palette swap from The 7th Guest. Here, the game presents you with an arrangement of knights and instructs you to swap the positions of the white knights with the black ones. Explaining the premise of the puzzle is far easier than solving it, as the best or most efficient solution appears to be 40 moves. It is the opening act, and the game whollops you with a forty-move chess puzzle! I played scholastic chess and can perform basic calculations at least twenty moves ahead; however, this still caught me off guard because the limited playing area restricts the movement of the playing pieces. Also, there are no markers to remind you of where the pieces need to go, and you can easily get lost mulling over your moves and forgetting what the end goal even is. One of the trickier parts of the puzzle is knowing when to transition from one playing piece to another so you can open up "forks" to adjust knights to new sides. It's not impossible, but the fact remains that even if you have memorized the solution or are following a guide, this takes way longer than expected, thanks in part to the game's elaborate chess piece animations, but mainly due to how many moves you need to make to solve it.

Riddle #3: "Artsy, excited lecher."

Solution: Click a Satyr picture in the gallery.

[Rating: 6/10]: This riddle is when the treasure hunt puzzles started to lose me. I know what you're thinking, and, no, "lecher" isn't the intended hint to remind you that historically satyrs have done some pervy shit in their many depictions. Instead, the word "artsy" is an anagram of "satyr," and you're meant to figure that out on your own. As I mentioned earlier, there are random riddles where the crux is that one of the words is an anagram for the object you need to find. The game never warns you when that's the case, and it's only going to get worse from this point forward. Also, the art gallery requires you to find a secret passage by walking up to and clicking the grandfather clock in the foyer. Again, none of these secret passages are communicated to the player, though some are repeats of the secret passages in The 7th Guest.

Library Book Puzzle

With the easier puzzles, I can't help but think they were last minute placeholders to get to the planned number of 19 puzzles. Because that's what they feel like

[Rating: 1/10]: It is time to check out the library, though you can do this room earlier, and complete the puzzle involving green and red books between two skulls. The goal of this puzzle is to move the green books to the left and the red ones to the right with two books moving with each selection that you make. The order of the books doesn't matter, and you can solve this puzzle in four moves. This puzzle is one of the easiest in the game. Much like The 7th Guest, there are some WILD difficulty swings in The 11th Hour with puzzle groupings that then lead to playing something mind-numbingly easy immediately after something that feels like you need a doctorate in string theory.

Riddle #4: "A heart attack could put you in the ground."

Solution: Click the globe in the library.

[Rating: 6/10]: So, much like the last riddle, there's an anagram you need to figure out, but the connection between the deciphered word and what you need to click is a leap. "Heart" is an anagram for "Earth," and the globe is our planet. I can at least see what they were going for with this riddle, and I could be convinced that the line including "ground" could also lead you to the globe. This riddle is not as bad as the previous one, but not by much. As written, the riddle references a heart, and there's a room with a deck of playing cards and even other puzzles that reference or feature blood. There are a TON of red herrings that can lead to endless frustration, and the game gives you nothing to lead you along your way. I guess it's nice that the globe is right next to you after you solve the book puzzle. Still, the game has already broken its rule that the treasure hunt objects are in the same room as their connected puzzles, so it's reasonable to assume someone could end up aimlessly wandering the mansion thanks to this riddle, clicking on unrelated items for hours to no avail.

Mouse Trap Puzzle

Cool... we have a game against Stauf where he's capable of almost perfect calculations. Great!

[Rating: 9/10]: What are the worst parts of The 7th Guest? It's absolutely the times when you need to play board games against a 2000+ ELO Stauf AI. At least in The 7th Guest, the game has the decency to hold off on those games until the second half. Not so in The 11th Hour, as your first match against Stauf is within the first act! What you need to do here is make a mechanical mouse travel to the orange side of the playing field. The initial board is random, which means there's no set solution for you to follow. When you click all the pieces in a row or column, they shift, and the first piece that you clicked gets replaced by the piece outside the board. The one that was already being held off the board takes its place, and whatever new piece is being held will be the next piece to be used when the next player takes their turn. Only the grey pieces will move, though, and the playing field has a handful of orange pieces which will always remain in their position. You cannot undo previous moves by clicking a button or by clicking the same column or row as the last player. That previous point works in your favor, as Stauf can't choose the opposite side of a row you clicked to negate your most recent move. The mouse moves to an exit at the end of every turn, and when there is more than one path for it to take, you can click where you want it to go.

And the lighting for this board game is absolutely atrocious.

So, again what's the problem with all of the Stauf AI games in The 7th Guest? Why, it's the fact that his AI is way too hard, and he rarely makes mistakes and always knows how to take advantage of yours. That's what makes the microscope puzzle such an ordeal, and trust me, it's way worse in this game! In this case, it is incredibly easy to misinterpret how a held piece will be played on the board, and you accidentally give Stauf the win. The fact that the playing field isn't well-lit doesn't help, but the bad angle isn't great, either. Also, because the order and placement of the pieces is randomized, sometimes you are dealt a playing field that immediately favors Stauf over you. The good news is that you always go first, and your best bet is to go on offense and work backwards from the orange hole, making sure you maximize how far the mouse can move towards your side. Nonetheless, there's a soul-crushing amount of luck involved with this puzzle. In fact, to gain a better understanding of what it involved, I consulted three guides, and two of them outright advise players not to bother and instead use the game's hint or "Autoplay" feature to have someone else solve it for them. The highest-rated guide on GameFAQs explains the basic rules and wishes you good luck. Interestingly, I found a Deja News Usenet forum thread from 1995 in which players all express frustration with this exact puzzle, and one of the game's lead designers is present in the comments, essentially telling players that they designed it to be hard on purpose and to pound sand. It's not the most challenging puzzle in the game, but it is the first that feels like a complete kick in the teeth, and much like The 7th Guest, Stauf's taunts cycle through one of five possible choices, and they get old really quickly.

Riddle #5: "Battleground" [Yeah, this riddle is just one word. Incredible stuff, Trilobyte.]

There are also a bunch of pill bottles but only one of them is the correct one.

Solution: Click on a pill bottle on the counter next to the mouse trap puzzle.

[Rating: 8/10]: Oh, this riddle can fuck right off. So, sure, the pill bottle is right there next to you after you solve a puzzle, and at this point, your first reaction is to click on everything on your screen, especially things that newly appear in front of you after resolving a puzzle. But here's the thing. Why is medicine in a bottle the solution to this particular riddle? Well, first you need to break the word "battleground" into "battle" and "ground," and know that the former is an anagram for "tablet," which is then your clue that you need to find medicine. You have to cut out half of a word and then scramble the remaining part to form a new word. I shit you not, that's what the game wants you to do. Fuck that.

Riddle #6: "Bars deter cuckoo birds."

There are so many random paintings in The 11th Hour that all feel like red herrings for the riddles. Also, you can thank me later for including casual nudity in this blog.

Solution: Clicking on the robins on a painting outside the dining room door.

[Rating: 6/10]: Okay, I'm going to be real here. I thought the clue was "birds" and to find a painting with birds on it, and to click on the birds. And you know what's weird? That got the job done, but it's actually not the correct way to solve this riddle. Once again, you have a hidden anagram with "bars deter" being an anagram for "red breast," which is your hint to find some robins or red-breasted birds. Admittedly, if you used my logic on most of the riddles, you'd end up lost, but it should be noted that "red breast" could lead you to the MANY nude statues or even blood-covered female figures in the mansion. The intended way to solve the riddle can result in you ending up down a variety of red herrings or dead ends, which could add literal hours to your overall playtime. Whereas interpreting the riddle verbatim, which generally can cause problems, is the best strategy.

Riddle #7: "Modern art flourishes under the sun."

Solution: It's time to revisit the art gallery, and this time, click on the painting that resembles something Piet Mondrian would have painted.

[Rating: 2/10]: There's no anagram, and the riddle is precisely what you first think it means. You think it wants you to find modern art, and there's only one logical place to find it. I'm going to bump this up a point, considering the art gallery can only be accessed using a secret passage. Otherwise, this is a weird end to the first "hour" of the game, except....

The Painting Puzzle Against Stauf

The game not even bothering to properly zoom in on the board game you are playing is the least of its problems right now.

[Rating: 5/10]: After clicking on the painting, you initiate the final puzzle for the first hour, and it's a game against Stauf. Luckily, this game is one of the easier board games against Stauf. To be clear, there are seven of these, and the only one you can't use the game's auto-solve feature on is the final one. So, if Stauf's AI does have you dazed and confused, that's always an option. With this game, the different segments of the painting are pieces you need to click to illuminate. You can't click a piece that is adjacent to a previously chosen one, as when you do click on a piece, all the pieces around it brighten. When Stauf clicks on a piece, the piece he clicked and its surrounding pieces develop a green hue. You win if you click the last piece on the board, and you lose if Stauf can click the final piece. Once again, Stauf's moves are random and contingent on your opening moves, so there's no set solution.

Additionally, there are only two pieces worth starting with; otherwise, Stauf has an insurmountable advantage. These are the vertical rectangle to the right of the center of the painting and the blue L-shaped Tetris piece at the bottom of the middle. The good news is that if you pick one of these pieces, you can end the match in about five moves. The problem, obviously, is figuring that out. Luckily, this game, even when you lose, is short, with Stauf winning in no more than six moves.

Also, the game re-using the UI from The 7th Guest verbatim was the wrong call. It feels completely out of place.

It's still tough, don't get me wrong, but I enjoyed this puzzle. You get to test strategies and openings, and can quickly determine if they are worthwhile in just a few minutes. One nitpick is that the glow of the pieces, especially with Stauf's sickly green glow, isn't bright enough. The game takes place in a room with no lights, making it difficult to see certain pieces. Nonetheless, the real problem is that Stauf's AI is near perfect and never blunders, which means you need to find one of those two optimal opening moves, or else winning is impossible. That will inevitably result in some amount of trial and error. However, once you realize that you need to leave a piece open that doesn't connect to everything else, you can still find those opening moves in due time.

But hey, every time Stauf is on camera, it's great.