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The 7th Guest VR review: fine use of volumetric video

The 7th Guest VR review: fine use of volumetric video

What can a remake of a 30-year-old video game tell us about the future of motion picture performances? Quite a lot, actually. “Volumetric video” isn’t exactly a sexy term but hot damn it’s a great effect, on fine display in The 7th Guest VR. This virtual reality experience is based on the hugely influential The 7th Guest, which, originally released in 1993, was one of the first video games available on CD-ROM—a format it helped turn mainstream. Featuring live action performances integrated with virtual environments, it immersed players in a haunted house narrative heralded by Bill Gates as “the new standard in interactive entertainment.”

Like the original, the (substantially reworked) new version takes place almost entirely in a single setting: a creaky old mansion, like something from a James Whale or Hammer Films production. The place was once owned by Henry Stauf (Carl Wharton), a highly successful toy manufacturer with a terrible secret. We begin in a canoe and paddle our way to land, en route to the house picking up a lantern with a nifty feature: shine it at anything and it’ll show you what it once looked like, when the property was in its heyday. This allows the developers to integrate the equivalent of flashbacks without cutting away, maintaining spatial unity—which is important in VR.

Developer: Vertigo Games
Release date: October 19, 2023
Available on: Steam, PSVR2, Quest headsets
Experienced on: Meta Quest 3

Shortly after arriving at Stauf’s large and dusty abode, the cast burst upon the scene, entering the house as semi-transparent ghost-like creations, cheating the temporal continuum and beaming in from a violent night long ago. We’re introduced to six adult characters who haven’t met Stauf but have heard rumours about him: married couple Edward (Gregory Shapiro) and Elinor Knox (Marnie Baumer), businessman Brian Dutton (Alex Baggett), Broadway star Martine Burden (Daniella Down), magician Hamilton Temple (Robert Paul Taylor) and a miserable alcoholic, Julia Heine (Claire King). There’s also one very rattled looking child, Tad (Walter Sheean), taunted by a ghostly voice as soon as he enters (“Tad, Taaaddd, Taaaaaaaddddddd!”).

This early moment, introducing the characters, is striking—not because of the writing and performances, which have a campy tone, but because it’s the first time we encounter The 7th Guest VR’s volumetric video elements, meaning the cast appear as fully spatialised and dimensional entities you can literally walk around (or through). The performances are prerecorded, meaning they’re the same every time—but the way we view them changes, bringing a kind of spontaneity unachievable in film and television.

During the present, intensely experimental period of technological innovation, from rapid developments in AI to machine learning, robotics and virtual and augmented realities, nobody can say precisely what will stick around going forward, or what form these things will take. But you can bet the house that volumetric video is here to stay.

Seeing actors right in front of you, ushered into shimmering virtual existence, appearing like magical apparitions, is too striking an effect—with too much potential—to be relegated to the dustbins of history. The 7th Guest VR’s volumetric video sequences reminded me of a Disney promo video for the Apple Vision Pro, during which a football player exits the screen and enters the lounge room of the viewer. Not long ago a virtual person, entering your own space, would’ve felt like a sci-fi pipe dream. Ditto for the opposite: when we exit our own plane of existence and arrive at somebody else’s.

There’s a scene, well into the The 7th Guest, depicting a violent altercation between two characters, one hissing at the other “I’d rather be an old hag than a dead whore.” This confrontation takes place on a staircase, which is where the viewer/player will be too (unless they chose to move away). To be present in the heat of the moment, sharing the same dramatic space as the performers, their intense interplay happening around you, is a real kick. Scenes fleshing out the characters and their fateful evening at the house are sprinkled across the game’s five-ish hour runtime, appearing after the player completes a series of puzzles in each of the rooms. 

These puzzles are generally well designed, varying in difficulty. People familiar with puzzle games, which are over-represented in the present era of VR, know the feeling of hitting the proverbial brick wall and wanting the puzzle to be over toot suite. Here, there’s an accommodating hint system, which works well, and, I hope, inspires other productions to follow its lead: the first hint is vague, the second specific. The player can also purchase the resolution, using coins collected from around the house. Each purchase must be at least five minutes apart, forcing us to give it one more crack. 

The 7th Guest is far from the first VR production to use volumetric video. For instance in the immersive documentary On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World) human actors also appear in volumetric form, however visions of them are brief, fleeting and blurry: more like drizzles, or splashes of visuality, than actual sequences. And in the short form 2018 experience Vestige, participants can explore environments depicting recreated memories of the subject, Lisa, and her late partner Erik. It’s dreamlike and surreal, and, again more a collection of visions than dramatic scenes per se.

The 7th Guest presents a bolder use of the technology, complimenting the achievements of its predecessor. The original helped usher in a new format…could the remake help push volumetric video? Time will tell. This won’t be the “killer app” the original game was for CD-ROMs. But if its impact is small, the technology itself is big.

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