A great game, good writing, interesting puzzles and an absorbing storyline, but very short.
5 Days a Stranger is the multi-award winning adventure game created by Ben "Yahtzee"Croshaw, praised for its scripting, puzzles, dialogue and overall gameplay. With all this praise, and the knowledge that adventure games are one of my favourite genres, and of course because it was free, I decided it was worth downloading and playing, despite being worried that I would take a single step into the game and get hacked apart by some crazy murderer while I cowered behind my computer chair.
The graphics are only describable pixelated, a style whichtakes me back to the glory days of playing Monkey Island 1&2 although granted, even DeFoe Manor is brighter than some of the rather dark and dingy (for anyone who's played Monkey Island 2, that reference was not intentional) islands you end up going to in the first halves of those games.
Since I have compared 5 Days to Monkey Island 1&2 it only seems right to do the same here with the music. The music in 5 Days, while not created for the game, or even original, is well suited and adds atmosphere to the times when it's played, and compared to the music in the first two Monkey Island games, it's a lot smoother, although I'd (and hopefully anyone else with knowledge of the games would) guess that most of this is due to being made 12 to 13 years after the MI games came out. Unlike the early Monkey Island games (as I remember anyway) you'll often hear some ambient sound effects, usually a creaking board which despite adding some nice immersion is defiantly not good if you have a headache, although neither is the rest of the game's music, such as Psycho shower scene style music, so it's really not the kind of game you'd want to play with a headache, which is something I didn't really have to say anyway.
The gameplay was your standard walk/use/talk adventure game, but since I'd never played a horror adventure game it was a fresh experience for me, making this all the sweeter, it's advisable just to pick up anything you can, even if you don't need it at the time, because it's all going to become relevant later, and since I'm mentioning things that will become relevant, since some people who've played this game have commented on a bug – Right click on the Matthew detector after you've used it on the bed, this will sound less like gibberish later on in the game. The puzzles are well thought out and will usually keep you thinking for at least a short time before you figure out the solution, although most of them just involve common sense and maybe some initiative. One of my few problems with the game is that while you'll probably be kept on your toes for the first few days, dreading every moment you may open the door and find the masked man known as the Welder behind it, the horror loses its edge after a few days, I'm not going to tell you why but it's easy to figure out why as you progress through the game. By only problem with the game is how short it is, I downloaded it, started playing, and about an hour later I closed the window, not because I had finished, I had just decided it wasn't really advisable to play the game at night, of course I'm just dilly-dallying by mentioning that when I say it's too short but it really is, when I plucked up the courage to play again I spent maybe two hours more playing and then I had finished, although my argument seems almost undermined when I think that if the game was longer, it would rather worryingly feel artificially lengthened, and 5 Days just doesn't deserve that fate.
Since this is an adventure game there's obviously going to be a lot of emphasis on the story, so here's what I feel comfortable giving away without spoilers. You play as Trilby, an eccentric cat burglar who finds himself stuck in the middle of this whole fiasco when the window he climbs through slams shut after him, leaving him trapped in the house with four others. Almost immediately you find your first housemate for the next couple of days, a skinny man in a tattered business suit who goes by the name of AJ, upon seeing you he screams and runs away, seemingly because of the black velvet mask you haven't taken off yet. Upon further investigation you find another man named Philip Harty, who welcomes you to the manor and asks you to find the other prisoners there. The other prisoners are James 'Jim' Fowler, a 16-year-old public school boy, and an up and coming TV Presenter named Simone Taylor, who seems amazed by Trilby's appearance in the mansion, stating that she did a "Crimewatch special" on him. When you tell Philip that you can't find AJ a meeting begins to welcome Trilby, seemingly a good opportunity to question everyone on why they're in the manor.As you progress through you begin to solve the mysteries behind the supposed Murder-Suicide of the latest resident, Clarence DeFoe and his new wife, and the disappearance of every member of the DeFoe family who's lived in the supposedly haunted estate since it was built. Something I liked and I've decided is worth mentioning is that I found myself pitying the antagonist, hopefully anyone else playing through the game will pity him as well.
This game is a must play if you're a fan of the adventure game genre, or to a lesser extent the horror genre, or if you're just looking to try something new. Obviously (and quite ironically) the biggest 'selling' point of the game is that it's free, although there is a special edition available for 5USD, and it's worth checking out if you don't mind paying for a bit extra.