5 Days A Stranger - Overview

Overview

The series is also sometimes called the DeFoe series, after one of the main characters; the Trilby series, after another main character; or the "X Days a Sauerkraut," based on Croshaw's own references. The author commentary for 6 Days a Sacrifice confirms Chzo Mythos as Yahtzee's intended title, despite referring to it several times on the official sites as the "John Defoe Quadrilogy".

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 Myers, while finding himself one of a group of strangers thrown together in an abandoned mansion, inspired by Nocturnal Illusion, 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. Yahtzee's later game, Trilby: The Art of Theft, features the character's exploits before the series, but is not connected to it thematically, plot-wise or gameplay-wise.

The games have featured 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

"Special editions" of each game were sold for $5 (US), but are now available for free. They contain small extra scenes, supplemental material such as music, and the option to play with a DVD-style author's commentary track. Yahtzee's text elaborates on his aims and design choices, lists sources of inspiration, clarifies the more mystical parts of the plotline and provides other background information, such as the history of mental illness in his family and being dropped on his head as a child.

Although only officially released for Microsoft Windows, the games can be run on Linux and Mac OS systems using the respective ports of the Adventure Game Studio runtime engine. In addition icculus.org hosts Linux native binaries of all the games, as well Trilby: The Art of Theft, utilizing the Linux runtime.