Chzo Mythos

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5 Days a Stranger, 7 Days a Skeptic, Trilby's Notes, 6 Days a Sacrifice

Developer(s)	Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw
Designer(s)	Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw
Engine	Adventure Game Studio (AGS)
Release date(s)	2003 (5 Days), 2004 (7 Days), June 26, 2006 (Notes), January 25, 2007 (6 Days)
Genre(s)	Adventure
Mode(s)	Single player
Rating(s)	N/A (Graphic violence)
Platform(s)	Windows
Media	N/A (Download)
Input	Mouse (5 Days, 6 Days and 7 Days), Keyboard (Notes)

5 Days a Stranger, 7 Days a Skeptic, Trilby's Notes and 6 Days a Sacrifice are the four parts of an amateur adventure game series created by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw using the Adventure Game Studio development tool and distributed as freeware.

In 5 Days a Stranger, the player controls the shady cat burglar Trilby, who stumbles across a demonic force that manifests itself as a masked killer in the tradition of Jason Voorhees or Michael Meyers, while finding himself one of a group of strangers thrown together in an abandoned mansion and being picked off one by one. 7 Days a Skeptic emulates the claustrophobic horror of Alien, following a spaceship crew that finds artifacts from the first game floating in space, four hundred years after the events of 5 Days a Stranger. Trilby's Notes, set in a hotel which exists in both the real world and a horrific alternate dimension in the style of Silent Hill, goes back to flesh out the origin of the cursed African idol from the other games. While the first two games use the point and click interface typical of recent adventure games, Trilby's Notes requires the player to move with the keyboard and type commands with a text parser, similarly to early Sierra On-Line games like King's Quest I-IV. 6 Days a Sacrifice completes the set, sitting in the timeline exactly halfway between 5 Days and 7 Days.

The games have features on various PC magazine cover disks, and were mentioned as an "excellent series" and given a brief review in an article on Adventure Game Studio in the February 2006 edition of PC Gamer. 5 Days a Stranger is mentioned as a good example of a game created with Adventure Game Studio in the book Gaming Hacks published by O'Reilly Media^[1]

The author has also made available special editions of all his games. The $5 (US) deluxe editions have DVD-style author's commentary, easter eggs, outtakes and other extras.

1 5 Days a Stranger
2 7 Days a Skeptic
3 Trilby's Notes
4 6 Days a Sacrifice
5 References
6 External links

[edit] 5 Days a Stranger

5 Days a Stranger is an adventure game created by Ben Croshaw. It chronicles the story of a gentleman thief known as Trilby and four others fighting an unknown terror in DeFoe Manor. The story progresses over 5 days, with more story being revealed each day. Dream sequences typically space out the transitions between the events of different days, it has an intuitive version of the AGS interface that ties in with the unique feel of the game. The game has been translated into German, Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish^[2].

The game was created in 2003 with the Adventure Game Studio (AGS) engine and won awards for best game created with the AGS engine in 2003, best gameplay, best dialogue scripting, best puzzles, and best scripting^[3]. The game has also had many good reviews on adventure game sites^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7].

Recently it has been announced by a group of fans, and confirmed by Croshaw himself, that there is a Half-Life 2 engine adaptation of 5 Days A Stranger. Croshaw has said that he is closely involved with it: supervising design, okaying changes and possibly writing new dialogue and puzzles.^[8] Despite the use of an FPS engine, the game is intended to be a first person adventure game.

[edit] 7 Days a Skeptic

A screenshot of 7 Days a Skeptic

7 Days a Skeptic is a freeware adventure game created by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw. It is the sequel to the adventure game 5 Days a Stranger. The game takes place nearly four hundred years in the future, on the spaceship Mephistopheles, by which time mankind has begun to further explore the universe. The game chronicles the story of a veteran psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Somerset, and five others on board as they face the same mysterious entity that haunted the protagonists of the first game. By this time the events of the original game have become an urban myth and no-one knows what really happened back at DeFoe Manor^[9]. 7 Days a Skeptic draws several parallels with its predecessor, using elements such as dream sequences between each day as well as using similar plot revelations.

The game was created in 2004 with the Adventure Game Studio (AGS) engine. 7 Days has received numerous awards^[10] and good reviews^[11]^[12]^[13]^[14]^[15] as a whole.

[edit] Trilby's Notes

A screenshot of Trilby's Notes

Trilby's Notes is the third game released, but second in order of game chronology, in Ben Croshaw's popular free amateur adventure game tetralogy. It stands as a true sequel to the events of his first game, 5 Days a Stranger, and a prequel to the events of the second game, 7 Days a Skeptic.

The story follows the gentleman thief Trilby to an isolated Welsh hotel, seeking the idol which wreaked supernatural havoc in the first game. Believing that there is more to the story of Defoe Manor than he had previously thought, Trilby wishes to destroy the idol once and for all, but is suddenly caught up in a series of strange and gruesome events at the hotel that cause him to start shifting randomly between two parallel worlds.

Trilby's Notes was nominated for 9 AGS Awards and won 4 (Best Game, Best Story, Best Animation and Best Non-player character).^[16] This brings the total number of AGS Awards for the series to 11 and nominations to 29.

Trilby's Notes is superficially similar to Croshaw's previous efforts, but instead of the previous games' point-and-click interfaces it instead relies on a text parser and keyboard directional control, in the style of early Sierra Entertainment games such as Police Quest and Quest for Glory.

Like the two previous entries in the series, Trilby's Notes is available for free download from Croshaw's website, while an extended special edition with bonus features and extras such as author commentary has been made available for a small fee.^[17]

Croshaw has stated that the game was intended as both a form of continued high-level experimentation with the AGS engine and a complete product within itself. Trilby's Notes is the most graphically violent of the four games, an effect achieved with an extremely modest pixel-palette. Croshaw said of his main character's rather basic graphical representation: "[He] is not shaded at all because he was drawn after the GFW period when I realised that most people didn't give a toss and just wanted a fun game." ^[18]

[edit] 6 Days a Sacrifice

A screenshot of 6 Days a Sacrifice

6 Days a Sacrifice is the fourth and final game in order of release, and 3rd in order of the game series's timeline, placed 196 years after 5 Days and Notes and 196 years before 7 Days. You play Theo DaCabe, a council surveyor who is trying to run a health and safety assessment on the headquarters of a (false) fad religion called Optimology and gets embroiled in the machinations of the overarching series plot.

The game also has a series of accompanying interactive fiction games which were used as teaser trailers for the release of the point-and-click graphical adventure itself. They used the Zmachine language for implementation and need an interpreter such as WinFrotz to run. These games were developed using the Inform7 development system.