The Guest Demo

Attention to detail is a very desirable trait in video games, yet most of them are designed to look nice as a whole, which means that they fall apart once you look closer. Whether it’s a horrible texture or low-poly models that stick out like a sore thumb, these things are noticeable most of the time. Obviously, it’s perfectly fine for this to happen as long as the game itself has a great concept powering it.

The Guest is an adventure game with horror elements in which your task is to investigate the environment and look for useful objects, in order to use or combine them and achieve your goals. Although the formula is far from groundbreaking, it’s the attention to detail that makes it feel different than most other puzzle games out there. There’s also the creepy atmosphere that makes things even better, at least if you enjoy being terrified.

The story revolves around a man by the name of Evgueni Leonov, a doctor suffering from some kind of disease that causes him to hallucinate unspeakable things. You find out more about him and his condition over the course of the story, but there are many other mysteries and riddles you come across. Thankfully, the whole thing is very immersive and well-written, or at least the prologue is.

The gameplay is about as straightforward as you would expect, which means that your main preoccupation is to investigate every drawer and every dark corner for useful objects. However, you can pretty much pick everything up and store it in your inventory, at least if you think it can be useful in the future. Hence, you might end up carrying a whole lot of junk, but at least you are not constrained like in most adventure games, which is great.

As mentioned before, the attention to detail is what sets the game apart, because every room is quite obviously designed to be as immersive as possible. Every little object is nicely textured and accurately modeled, so you don’t feel like you are collecting differently-colored blobs. Somehow, the game runs very smoothly as well, which is pretty incredible when you consider everything the engine has to render.

In the end, The Guest looks and plays exceptionally in the demo, but it can only be properly judged once the whole thing is released. However, if the rest is just as refined and polished as we’re shown here, the game should have no trouble jumping to the top of everyone’s all-time best list.