The 7th Guest gets VR remake using volumetric video | Hacker News Reader

The 7th Guest gets VR remake using volumetric video

the7thguest-vr.com

157 pointshanswannop58 comments

Lead Developer here, for those curious there is a great video on the inner workings of the project’s volumetric video here. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FjbngDVdL6s

That's really cool to test new grounds with this game. It's only appropriate since it was one of the first CD-ROM hits, one of the first real-world examples of 3d studio (DOS) usage, and of course amazing video compression by Graeme Devine.

Could you share more about your experience with AVV and how involved Arcturus was in the development process?

And this might be out of scope, but while their Holo tooling scales VV to commodity hardware, did it also reduce overhead in your capture to asset pipeline?

This is one of those silent pivotal advancements, and I can only imagine how cool it must have been for you.

The AVV technology and Holomesh are developed by Arcturus. During the technology’s development there was close collaboration between Vertigo Games Rotterdam (who initiated the project with Trilobyte and handled the creative aspects - design, art, music and video production), Arcturus and my employer Exkee, where we handled the technical/code side of things. Vertigo could speak more to the capture and production side of things. On the tech side Arcturus were wonderful to work with. We couldn’t have done it without them, and I am excited to see where things go next.

Really excited to play this, the made for VR puzzles look great! I hope that VR creates a bit of a renaissance for adventure games, they just fit so perfectly with the immersive nature of VR and interactive puzzles are so satisfying to do with your "hands". Did you invent any novel mechanics for the puzzles?

Thanks, and agreed! VR is great for adventure games! There are a broad range of puzzles and I certainly don’t want to spoil anything. There was an ambition to give a uncommon level of physical responsiveness between your hands and the world. This presented a great technical challenge, and I’m proud of work the team has done there.

Have you addressed the Slime Go issue, where having a faster processor makes the game practically unwinnable?

I tried replaying the original using dosbox and everything was fine until that. I spent over an hour trying to beat it and ultimately had to use a program specifically written to beat that game to beat it, whereas when I was a kid playing it on our old family computer I beat it easily on the first go.

Can confirm, there is no Slime Go issue here :) If you are looking to play the original, the 25th Anniversary edition also avoids this problem and is available on PC, Switch and iOS.

As someone who played the "The Room" series, including the VR title, this looks really interesting to me. Could you maybe share if the game features any jumpscares?

A concrete answer on this would be too far into the spoiler zone. In my personal opinion the overall tone is very faithful to the original, and I think a broad range of players should be able to enjoy it.

Wow, this looks amazing. I am super excited to play it. I have a pretty beefy PC. Is there any benefit in playing it on steam and streaming to my quest, or is the quest native as high quality?

I’m happy to say that I have trouble recommending one version over another. We’ve optimised the experience for each one. Your PC in all likelyhood has more raw horsepower, which we do use in various ways. But the Quest version comes with its own advantages in terms of autonomy and ease of use, the Quest 3 especially is a great piece of hardware that I’m excited for more people to get their hands on.

Of course standalone is easier. But if you have a quest 3, would you get the best experience with streaming the PC version? Or are the graphics kinda the same?

I have a quest 3 and 4090. I prefer playing on the quest itself however if the PC version looks better I'd use that. Hence the question (though I'm not the person who asked first)

There are a couple answers in this interview with the game’s director, Paul van der Meer, and art director, Jeroen Backx that might help you make up your mind on this.

https://www.heypoorplayer.com/2023/10/11/the-7th-guest-vr-an...

Thanks - that makes it clear that the PC definition is definitive. Ill get that and stream to my quest :)

Thanks that's clear! I'll get the PC version. After all I'm lucky to have a 4090. I think I would prefer the more atmospheric realistic look.

Is this fully faithful to the original in terms of puzzles? From what I remember the puzzles are pretty outdated, but it’s been a while since I’ve played it.

There is an almost entirely new set of puzzles, built from the ground up for VR, with many nods to the original.

Ah that’s great to hear!!! I unfortunately don’t have access to VR but that’s going to be at the top of my list when I do.

Hoi Hans, nice to meet you here... Interesting... I have not looked into depth, but this uses newly recorded material?

Note: The page at the moment does not load...

Thanks for letting me know, this is being escalated. For now the launch trailer can be seen here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jsuDYswhtaE

Yes, all newly recorded material! As noted by Keyframe below, the video quality and compression tech was very impressive 30 years ago, we wanted to try to deliver something equally new in 2023.

The 7th Guest was a hit puzzle game in the early days of PC CD-ROM entertainment. It wasn’t the gameplay that made it so popular, but the unprecedented experience of seeing real video on a computer.

The Digital Antiquarian has an excellent article (as always):

https://www.filfre.net/2020/04/the-7th-guests-new-clothes/

The gameplay was unique, especially with the voices, and it was very effective at creating a mood with its music that I can still remember.

Let's take some time, to find out what's inside, away from all this wind and rain.

The six arrive, the fire lights their eyes, invited here to learn to play...

...a game.

The full band track on the soundtrack were definitely a highlight! [0]

I used to put the CDROM in my discman and listen to the CD audio tracks [1] all the time :)

0: https://youtu.be/4m5SDmVNo-I?si=gBuHTt6DcfAN7f71

1: https://thefatmanandteamfat.bandcamp.com/album/the-7th-guest...

Whoa, I hadn’t heard of DA before this. Amazing! What great reads… rich trip down memory lane.

Loved the Defender of the Crown article too.

Thanks for the recommendation.

Do not miss his 9-part series on the history of Windows through the 16-bit era: https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/doing-windows-part-1-ms-dos-a... It's one of the best pieces of technology history writing I've ever read.

It was both. It was the first game that offered a "multimedia" experience and yet a compelling gameplay.

Most of the early multimedia games were more like tech demos and were boring.

7th Guest had amazing graphics but I never felt it was a good puzzle game. Most puzzles were too obtuse, unfair and out of place in the game. Despite the cool graphics, the overall story was also silly and poorly acted. Myst was much, much better; no wonder it had longer lasting appeal, despite not having aged as well as, let's say, the Super Mario games.

I remember excitedly asking for it for Christmas, getting it, and being underwhelmed when I actually played it. I was hoping the puzzles would be integrated into the story like a murder mystery, but instead it felt like puzzles were just tacked on. Myst was definitely much better as an overall game and experience.

The game definitely had some creepy vibes, however. The setting was really well done.

What really?? I was only a teenager when I played but still managed to complete it. Sure some puzzles took a while but it still felt like an accomplishment when you got past them.

It kinda defeats the purpose of going to a 3D game if you lay out a clear linear path with trivial puzzles.

Sure, so did I (with the exception of that Microscope puzzle). But they made up for the relatively small number of puzzles by cranking up the difficulty in boring ways IMHO. There is a middle ground between 7th guest and trivial puzzles - Myst, perhaps?

I thought the only unfair puzzle was the microscope one. It's the only one I used the library for.

I beat it on my own as a kid, but it required extensive note-taking, anger, and a week worth of trial and error. It still feels like one of my greatest achievements. I'm glad I stuck with it. Nowadays, I would never sacrifice so much time to a single puzzle, in part because it's much easier to get hints nowadays, and that makes me sad.

I was around 10 years old when I played this game for the first time.

There's a Knight puzzle that was, in retrospect, my introduction to state machines. I got frustrated with it and mapped out every possible move of the pieces from the wonky shaped board into a 'linear' board on graph paper. Looking at it that way, the solution was so simple it was obvious.

Mostly played with a friend, it was such a fun game at that age.

I wonder what a VR version of Maniac Mansion would look like.

This I would love to see!

I played it on a 486DX33 in 1993. This game left a deep impression on me. I recently bought the CD-i version for 50 cents, found in a second-hand CD bin. I don't have the console to play it (yet) but the second CD is an audio CD and contains the soundtrack.

Does it have the same music? That was my favorite part of the original game. You could even put the second cd in a regular stereo and play it. The Fat Man has re-released it and music from the sequel:

https://soundcloud.com/the-fat-man/sets/7-11-music-from-the-...

The game also cost $99 which was super expensive at the time.

Jonathan van den Wijngaarden has collaborated with George “The Fat Man” Sanger to produce a wonderful new soundtrack.

I played the 7th Guest on my Mac Centris 610 when I was 12 or 13 when it came out. Was fun and the visuals, if you can believe it, were really impressive.

There were a lot of games coming out right around that time that were essentially just large quantities of still images or video made interactive by software. Other such games included titles like Myst and the Journeyman Project. They came along right when CD-ROMs showed up, giving computers access to a lot more media storage but when they still lacked much computing or graphics processing power.

Omg I haven’t played games in years, but this is the first remake I’m fully stoked for. I remember playing this when I was like… 8? Great game, and the VR treatment looks really well done. Congrats!

Same. “The sky is ruddy, your fate is bloody” will forever be burned in my mind.

As a youth, I had a computer that was not capable of running The 7th Guest, but I wanted to play it badly. I spent many hours learning about computer hardware and working a summer job so I could upgrade my computer appropriately. I listened to the soundtrack and watched the "making of" video many times before I could actually play the game I had purchased. While the gameplay itself was a bit of a disappointment when I finally experienced it, I have very fond memories of the game.

Amazing! I had the exact same experience and hadn’t thought of it in years.

The full motion video era of gaming in the 90s (e.g. Phantasmagoria, 7th Guest, Gabriel Knight 2) was brief but exciting. Most were more about showing off the tech than using it to make better games, but my personal favorite, Under a Killing Moon, still holds up. I replay it every few years.

I would love to see the Journeyman Project series given this treatment. Not sure who owns the IP at this point though.

Bigscreen Beyond developer here. This game is incredible and moody to play in VR on the OLED-based Beyond headset. Congrats to the team on shipping a fantastic game. I love what you've done with it

Thanks! Great work on shipping Beyond! We’ve had really positive feedback from players who love the clarity they are able to achieve there.

My dream is to play Phantasmagoria in VR. That would be terrifying.

Is the Phantasmagoria the one which came in 7 cds? I remember having one of those games as a kid, but with no hardware powerful enough to run it. The other day my dad was taking to me about that, how he wanted to play it but never got the chance. I'm thinking about getting a modern version for him.

I'll probably buy the 7th Guest for oculus too. The company I work for gave us all oculus during the pandemic, so we would interact together, now they're just laying around. Need to put them to good use.

Yep! It's on GOG and Steam if you still want to play it. There's also the sequel, Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh, which came on 5 CDs.

I can still hear “He was a drifter…” in my head.

“Old Man Stauf lived in a house…”

1993 was the year for CDROM games.

7th guest

Myst

Gadget

Return to Zork

I would love a VR Zork.

Brings back memories, I remember being blown away by the graphics of the transition going up on the stairway.

This is one of my favorite games of all time, probably largely for nostalgia reasons. They have it on iOS fyi.

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