9: The Last Resort Download (1996 Adventure Game)

Thurston Last is dead. His lawyers, in accordance with his last will and testament, have identified you the player as his next-of-kin, and have awarded you control of his mysterious and failing mansion, The Last Resort. As you take possession of your inheritance, you discover strange and destructive forces hard at work, slowly but inexorably destroying the once-stately mansion. Perhaps becoming the sole proprietor of this aged mausoleum isn't such a fortunate turn of events after all.

In 9, which gets its name from the nine muses that call The Last Resort home, it's up to you to restore the mansion and revive its fading magnificence. To accomplish this task, you'll need to discover Thurston Last's many secrets, and battle the evil forces that are well on their way to twisting and capturing the resort's mysterious powers for nefarious purposes.

The game is a showcase for marquee talent, with voice-acting by Christopher Reeve as Thurston Last, Cher as Isadora, the resort's quasi-historian, and James Belushi as Salty, the late Thurston's man-servant and caretaker of the mysterious machine found on the premises. In addition, the hated (by Last, at least) Twins are played by Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and Joe Perry in a production that counts Robert De Niro as one of its executive producers.

The game's movement interface is entirely mouse-driven, with supportive keyboard shortcuts available for many of the administrative tasks and details. 9 also features options for "zip mode" movement (similar to Myst) and adjustable (screen) transitional speeds.

9: The Last Resort is a surreal point-and-click adventure game in which you have just inherited a large mansion and have to get rid of the 9 evil muses that have taken it over. The gameplay is first person view and similar to Myst which means you spend most of your time searching for clues and solving logic puzzles, often mechanical or musical ones. Later in the game you also have to solve a shooting gallery sequence.

It is most notable for involving some of the most famous people ever in a computer game including Robert De Niro, Cher, James Belushi, Christopher Reeve and a couple of guys out of the rock band Aerosmith.

Three intriguingly disparate celebrities - Cher, Christopher Reeve, and Jim Belushi - make their multimedia debuts on the best CD-ROM game I've played this year, the delightfully twisted 9. Despite the star power, however, this one didn't initially strike me as unique. It's a puzzle-pondering, mansion-exploring mystery in a sea of 7th Guest rip-offs and - quel retro! - it consists of a solitary disc, when similar titles bulge with at least three or four.

That 9 is such an unqualified success can be credited to the admirable restraint of its creators. Produced by Robert De Niro's Tribeca Interactive and partly inspired by Steve Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith (who provide the voices of the crustacean-like twins), 9 could easily have been cluttered with the sludgy live-action sequences that have doomed more ambitious big-budget CD-ROMs. Wisely, though, these high-powered folks stepped back and deferred to 9's real star: album illustrator Mark Ryden (Michael Jackson's Dangerous, Aerosmith's Pump), whose creepy-yet-mesmerizing set designs conjure up an animated cross between the disturbing styles of David Lynch and David Cronenberg.

Here's the scenario that greets you as you enter an abandoned hotel called the Last Resort: You are pestered by a gnome in a toy airplane, voiced by Belushi like a New York cabdriver on speed; solicit puzzle-solving advice from a New Age fortune-teller named Isadora, spoken by Cher in a ghostly monotone; and, occasionally, tune in to a ghostly narrative by departed proprietor Thurston Last, delivered by Reeve, whose halting, post-accident delivery is, sadly, all too well suited to the macabre material.

Load up this disc, though, and you'll spend most of the time gaping at the otherworldly props, which range from nightmarish (a puke green pillar with blinking eyes) to nostalgic (a creaky, old-fashioned steam boiler) to laugh-out-loud ridiculous (a pair of wisecracking tiki statues). Ryden's vision is so consistently original, in fact, that the so-called Dali Room is a letdown - once you've seen a pulsing embryo on a stick, it's hard to get jazzed by a simulacrum, however well rendered, of that old-timey surrealism.

Fortunately, 9's brains equal its strange beauty. Many of the puzzles have musical themes (playing the correct sequence on a pipe organ, arranging a row of chanting African masks) and are challenging without being impossibly difficult; you can often find the crucial clue simply by exploring. And the on-screen controls go way beyond the usual point and click: You can push and pull levers and fold back the canvases of paintings on the walls. All this amounts to a highly absorbing interactive experience. I'd like to give 9 a 10.

How to run this game on modern Windows PC?

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