The 7th Guest VR review: Dust off your puzzle skills in a maniac mansion

Now 30 years on, the core idea has been modernised in this VR remake of the story about a macabre toymaker who invites six guests to his opulent manor on an island sometime in the 1930s. As in the 1993 original, the twist is that the player journeys by boat to the crumbling pile many years later to unravel the mystery of what happened to those visitors.

Are you the toymaker’s seventh guest? What are you getting yourself into? How did you get there? Opening the creaking front door and exploring the dusty rooms is the only way to find out.

The horror genre works particularly effectively in VR and the unnerving feeling of being alone in a scary house manifests itself immediately. Ceiling plaster flitters down at random. Strange voices follow you. Then you encounter your first flashback to the guests arriving, themselves oblivious to the danger into which they’ve just blundered.

When you first stepped off the boat, you picked up a lantern that turns out to have magic properties. Hold it up and its light reveals the past, revealing clues and briefly transforming the dilapidated rooms into the colourful splendour of their former glory. More disturbingly, it also illuminates nightmarish versions of the many paintings on the walls – a charming portrait of a smiling woman might become a snarling ghoul with burning eyes. These are among The 7Th Guest’s most effective illusions to build an uneasy tension.

At the heart of the game, though, lie its puzzles. Each room in the mansion holds one or more physics-based brainteasers, ranging from logic to mathematics to object manipulation. Thematically, they hold little connection to the overarching storyline, although notionally they’re connected to the personalities of the six guests, who range from bitter heiress to arrogant magician to manipulative actress.

You poke and prod at bafflingly intricate boxes, sliding puzzles and tricky machines – your host is a toymaker, remember? – with each one eventually giving up a key or a component of a follow-on riddle. Some prove relatively straightforward, others require deep thought, still others are visually majestic, such as the library sequence involving moving furniture that whirls the room around you. A few are hampered by the lack of a reset button or the clumsiness of controlling small pieces in a confined VR space.

Once you complete a room, a small cut-scene – campily acted but believable – plays out that gives further insight into the plot and you move on to the next space. As you work towards the denouement of the inevitable confrontation with the demented host, the puzzles become more fiddly and less enjoyable. But a generous hint system – up to and including automatic solving – ensures progress is always assured.

The 7th Guest VR doesn’t stray too far from its origins and feels a little bit of its time, thanks to the artificiality of its set-up and the caricatured anachronisms of its characters. But it makes chillingly good use of VR and engages the brain as well as testing your nerves.