"You are getting closer... not. At this pace, Robin will save YOU!" - Stauf

The 11th Hour is the slightly inferior sequel to 7th Guest, Trilobyte's classic horror adventure and a Herculean Puzzle game challenge published in 1993. After the prior game's success, The 11th Hour is published in 1995, yet eventually failed to deliver the achievement of its predecessor and became Trilobyte's last game. Following the horrors of Stauf's mansion, the narration takes place 60 years after the original game with a new vicious challenge as the product of Stauf's ingenious evil.

The opening FMV movie introduces our protagonist, Carl Denning; the investigative reporter for the television series "Case Unsolved". Being the semi-educated and sensitive as a door knob douchebag, Carl gets into a relationship with his producer, Robin Morales, only to end the relationship a couple months after with cruel remarks, implying that he'd wish that Robin would be one of the missing people that she's been investigating about in the little town of Harley-on-the-Hudson. Wait a minute, isn't that Stauf's town? Not so curious enough, Robin actually gets missing on investigation and a mysterious little device called "The Gamebook" is dropped on Carl's doorstep. Opening the device, Carl encounters a video of Robin, stranded in Stauf's mansion, desperately calling for his help... You can see where this is going, right?

The moment Carl steps into the mansion, our gameplay begins. Stauf sends us the most confusingly complicated riddles through the Gamebook and asks us to antique hunt in the whole deserted mansion to grab the item that would be the answer for his riddles. In the meanwhile, we solve a handful of frustratingly hard puzzles - in some we compete against Stauf's AI - and witness many short movie crops retelling us the background of Robin's investigation as the series of events prior to our arrival at the mansion. Will we manage to save Robin from Stauf's evil mansion?

I think we already know the answer to that question, knowing Stauf's sense of humor and resourcefulness from the prior game. Anyhow, let's take a look on the game itself. Camera angles and the movement pace got slightly better and faster in adventure interface. Our encounters are not as much as uncanny though, and the acting of characters in the movie crops is plain bad with needless dramatization. The dramatization in 7th Guest was a success considering the tone of the environment and time - 1935 - but in this game, which takes place in 1995, characters' attitude and reaction simply end up being ugly. They are all portrayed as shallow as shallow can be.

It should be proper to note that the Steam Overlay doesn't work at all; and the game crashes regularly if you wouldn't use a compatibility mode. The soundtrack consisting of midi-music are mostly okay, but the repetition of chosen songs and their suitability to scenes that we encounter is questionable. In some of the puzzle scenes, the soundtrack gets silenced completely. I remember a joke coming from a streamer about that issue: "Maybe Trilobyte wanted you to hear the sound of your own aneurysm."

The environment display is a bit better compared to 7th Guest yet the mansion itself didn't age gracefully. Everything is practically in ruins now and Stauf's riddles are suicidally hard with anagrams, cypher codes, synonyms, word associations, cryptograms, accent remarks and even bilingual references! Knowing your art history doesn't hurt either! After the first 2-3, solving these riddles and finding the answer within the mansion becomes a frustrating chore rather than being fun. The starting point of the whole riddle and the actual answer rarely corresponds with each other, leaving you confused and annoyed most of the time. Randomly choosing objects makes you no good, considering there is a truckload of rooms and a good amount of clickable objects in each of them - and Stauf relentlessly mocks you with each wrong answer. Puzzles themselves are not as half as bad, they are relatively possible to figure out with patience but considerably troublesome to arrange with given angles and the slow pacing of puzzle interfaces.

In and all, 11th Hour is less remarkable compared to the first game, being subpar on acting and nauseatingly frustrating in terms of riddles. By the end of the game, you'll be given the chance of making a choice between 3 different endings, yet none of the endings are satisfactory or somewhat meaningful. I'd really like to recommend this game, I remember having a lot of fun with 7th Guest but this is not an educative challenge like the first game. This is a trial of association with little to no indication for the wanted associations given to you. Good luck if you'd like to try anyway.

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It keeps crashing in modern pcs.Dont buy it until they fix it.

Really bad port. Game can't handle modern graphics cards, crashes constantly.

Avoid, even at $1.50

The 11th Hour, the sequel to probably one of the coolest games of time, and probably one of the biggest let downs sadly. Creative direction and internal struggles within the original developers company made what was probably the most anticipated sequel a complete and utter flop. This game feels less polished than the first, though I can see glimpses of what made the original stand out. The Groove engine was an interesting push, though at the time when it came out, wreaked havoc on machines if would work at all. Due to nostalgia, this game is a must in my list, but I can honestly say, its not a game to own if your not into the nostalgia of it all.

TLDR; Do you enjoy being berated constantly, especially in situations where your abuser is withholding information and context from you? Yeah, me neither.

First, I want to make it clear, this game is definitely playable on modern hardware, with a few caveats:

- Run in Windows XP SP3 Compatibility Mode
- Intro credits and room transitions will be sped up
- Random crashes. Save after every single event.
- Type PP then right-click to skip unwanted cut-scenes
- No volume control, in game music drastically overpowers the voice acting

So, you ought to be able to run the game. But should you? Probably not. One of my complaints on 7th Guest was the lack of items to interact with. 11th hour has the opposite problem. You can now interact with nearly all objects. The problem is that only one item is the "correct" one at any given time, and if you choose incorrectly you get berated by Stauf.

Oh, Stauf, you cheeky bastard. Didn't solve a 100+ character cryptogram right away and started clicking random objects? "I'VE MET BIRD DROPPINGS SMARTER THAN YOU!" Didn't beat an AI at connect four? "IS THERE A LOT OF INTERMARRIAGE IN YOUR FAMILY?" I stayed for the exploration and the puzzles, but Stauf's incessant blistering insults were a bit too much.

So the puzzles must be worth the effort of dealing with the other crap, then? Not really. Remember that nearly impossible microscope AI mini-game that was arguably the worst part of the 7th Guest? For some reason the developers decided to make about half of the puzzles nearly impossible AI mini-games! The game does give you hints if you ask, and will even allow you to solve most puzzles with the click of the button. But if you are using the Gamebook to skip the puzzles, that defeats the sole purpose of playing the game. Try as I might, I did end up using two skips: the chess knights puzzle and the honeycomb mini-game. The rest I powered through on my own. By the way, roughly half of my playtime was spent screwing around with the damn furniture puzzle alone.

After all is said and done, I have no regrets playing through this title as yet another re-visit to a bygone era of gaming, but I wouldn't recommend firing this one up unless you absolutely know what you are getting yourself into. This one is more frustrating than fun.

My computer is so advance that it cannot run correctly a FMV adventure game...

The game is unplayable unless you download the newer version of Scumm and run the game in the emulator. Sad.

Can't play the game as it keeps crashing when you start the game.

The production values went up a lot, but the gameplay itself is almost completely identical to The 7th Guest. It starts out with an almost fifteen minute long stupid montage that looks like it was ripped straight out of some mid-90s made for tv movie where some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on a motorcycle rides a motorcycle and reminisces about the hot babe he seduced and then got mad at for some reason and told her he wished she'd die or disappear.

Spoiler: She dies or disappears into the house from the first game, which is in more or less the same state as it was in the first game, just with evidence that some ♥♥♥♥ stumbled around dropping puzzles everywhere. And to be honest, I would rather play this game, if I had to play one of these, but that's mostly because this game allows you to fast travel around the house. But that's also a problem in its own way because, again, this is just a series of disconnected puzzles that have nothing to do with each other, so we have to wonder why they even bother with the wrapper of the computer generated mansion or the threadbare plot or anything at all.

I guess the answer is that games were still mostly just a novelty at the time and we let ourselves get caught up in the power of the CD drive, allowing for games that weren't really games at all to slip through the cracks. But it's clear that a lot of the novelty of this style of game had already slipped away in the two year span between 7th Guest and 11th Hour because this game just seems pretty quaint and forced in comparison. That probably has a lot to do with my lack of nostalgia for this, but I guess that's just the way she goes. I've played worse, but I think that looking back at this series it's pretty easy to see about a dozen games (it struck me while I was writing this how similar, in essence, this series is to the Professor Layton games, for example) that have done what it tried to do so much better.

Was excited to play this game after completing 7th Guest, boy howdy was I wrong. Game throws deliberately obtuse riddle scavenger hunts at you in between the puzzle sections that I just can't get around. Resorted to looking up a guild and continued slogging through until I came to the conclusion this game is an absolute trash fire and stopped playing it.

Well, I didn't play much of this before requesting a refund. Maybe I don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing, but I found the experience very unpleasant, you start with a FMV movie that's fairly interesting as those things go, and it leads you to believe you're going to play something like Gabriel Knight 2 or a Tex Murphy game or maybe Phantasmagoria, but then you're dropped into a dark ugly mansion where a voice that wasn't introduced insults you whenever you try to inspect anything.

I managed to find two puzzles, one was an okay puzzle where you switch the positions of some knights on a modified chess board the other was a dumb puzzle where you had to do some things with some keys on a cash register. The only way to know what to do with the keys is to press the hint button which provides the instructions (and it's not something you can figure out without instructions by fiddling about since what you have to do is arbitrary and you only get any feedback once you've successfully completed it) so you have to press the hint button, but nothing really tells you how many times you should press the hint button to get just the instructions and not actual hints. That's very poor design in my opinion.

I don't know. I prefer story driven mystery adventure games, but I'll play puzzle collections too, I think why I won't play this is the annoying narrator constantly insulting you for clicking on anything.