11th Hour
Sold Out		(Win95/98/XP) (Jewel Case) (11THHOURPJ)

Trilobyte / Virgin

Game

Mature 17+

Suggestive Themes, Realistic Blood and Gore

Ratings:

4 stars from PC Entertainment

3 stars (out of 4) from Home PC

Awesome from New Media

Classic Horror

In the 70 desolate years since the horrifying murders chronicled in The 7th Guest, the town of Harley has been ominously silent. Only when journalist Robin Morales vanishes while investigating the rotting, abandoned mansion of legendary to maker Henry Stauf, do events resurrect the malignant past.

As Robin's colleague and lover, Carl Denning, you come to the ravaged estate to find her. What you uncover in its decaying chambers embroils the entire town in a deadly legacy of madness.

Weaving a feature-length, powerfully graphic video through The 11th Hour: The sequel to The 7th Guest, the renowned developers at Trilobyte have created the most cinematic challenge to date. A wide array of games, puzzles and quests cleverly underscores the time-bending, contemporary adult mystery. Only the deepest horrors of the mind could spread such terror in the night.

Three mysterious women are your only guides. Will you find Robin and unearth Stauf's fate at last? Or seal your own forever? It all must come together at The 11th Hour.

Features:

Fully explore over 22 beautifully-rendered rooms with faster, smoother 3-D graphics than ever before.

Participate in a suspenseful interactive drama directed by David Wheeler, written by The 7th Guest author, Matthew Costello, featuring first-rate actors and a new musical score by The Fat Man.

Solve 3 CD's worth of diverse and perilous challenges.

Get on-screen hints instantly with the Game-Book. No backtracking necessary.

Watch high quality, full motion video without any additional hardware required.

Requirements:

IBM and 100% compatibles, Win 95/98/ME/XP, 486DX2/66 minimum (Pentium recommended), 2x speed CD-ROM drive performing at a sustained rate of 300k/sec, 8 MB RAM, 4 MB hard disk space, Sound Blaster family, Roland family, Media Vision family, Gravis Ultrasound and 100% compatibles, Local Bus Video capable of displaying thousands of colors, Microsoft 100% compatible mouse; powered speakers.

Works on Windows XP after 11hWin.zip patch available at:
http://dlh.net/cgi-bin/dlp.cgi?lang=eng&sys=pc&file=11hwin.zip&ref=ps (select server in Greece); use Windows NT Compatibility Mode. Install from System/Instpro.exe on CD-ROM #1.

Reviews:

Home PC, March 1996

"Like The 7th Guest, The 11th Hour combines a spooky setting with a host of diabolical logic puzzles and a story that unfolds through slick video clips. And even if this sequel isn't quite the groundbreaker its predecessor was, the new game's got an hour-plus of full-screen video segments - a vast improvement over the tiny clips in the original - and other considerable merits."

"The 11th Hour is a worthy heir to The 7th Guest's lofty mantle; pacing aside, all aspects of the game have been enhanced, from the story and graphics to the funky new theme music."

PC Entertainment, February 1996

"It's tough to top a million-seller, but Trilobyte has done its best to up the ante the second time around. For starters, The 11th Hour comes on four discs instead of two. Trilobyte has honed its 'Groovie' video compression technology to produce nearly full-screen, 30-frames-per-second TV-quality video. Not only that, the rich music, sound effects, and voices now resonate with distinct stereo separation."

"Of course, game play is the thing, isn't it? So this time Mr. Stauf has filled his hell house with 13 logic puzzles and 6 artificial intelligence games even more diabolically clever than those in the 7th Guest."

Quandary Computer Review by Rosemary Young

"Well, I'm bedraggled and my head is spinning, but I've finally made it through to the end of this game. It's wonderful, almost perfect for those who like to ponder for hours over mind-bending puzzles. In a nutshell, it's a 'thinking' persons game so if you favour exploring creepy old houses with lots of puzzles and games to keep you occupied then you simply can't miss this one."

"If you have already played The 7th Guest then you will know what to expect in the puzzle department, but if you haven't then here are a few examples. Some require you to manipulate objects on a partial chess board or around points on the circumference of a circle, whilst others require books to be sorted in a particular order in a specific number of moves, or panels to be slid around to make a complete picture. There are also a number of board games where you are pitted against the devious Stauf and he doesn't make many concessions."

"There are 20 or so of these puzzles/games. Some are relatively easy, others I would rate as agonising, although which ones are which very likely depends on how you personally 'think'. A couple of the puzzles that I know have caused other players lots of torment, I worked our relatively quickly, and I am certain that many players had no bother with the ones that stumped me..."

Computer Shopper, April 1996

"Incredible as it may seem, Virgin Interactive's The 11th Hour actually lives up to its hype. Perhaps the most eagerly awaited adventure game ever, this sequel to the classic The 7th Guest matches or surpasses its formidable predecessor in every way."

"The 11th Hour's puzzles are much like the chess challenges, word problems, and geometry games that populated The 7th Guest. They're sometimes painfully slow, but they all look great and have more-consistent difficulty levels than those in The 7th Guest."

New Media, January 29, 1996

"After nearly three years in production, The 11th Hour is better than its predecessor in virtually every respect. Its murder-mystery, haunted-mansion story is compelling and frightening, and it stands on its own."

"The gaming side offers much more variety. No longer simply a series of unrelated board games resurrected from public-domain puzzle books, 11th Hour adds a 42-item treasure hunt and six artificial intelligence games that pit you head-to-head against that devil Stauf."

"I do have complaints: The navigation and puzzle animations are too slow, the acting is hard (maybe too hard) and the hints typically state the obvious. However, the 'personal digital assistant' makes accessing the map and hints much less tedious."

Copyright © 1993-2000 CDAccess.com, Inc.
Questions: info@cdaccess.com