Never On Sunday

Drat! I discovered 5 Days a Stranger just two days ago by a roundabout path, and yesterday PC Gamer includes it in a list of freeware games to try, possibly as a favor to a former editorial contributor. Yes, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, author of the wildly successful “Zero Punctuation” review, is the man responsible, making 5 Days more interesting for its author than for its content. But I swear I’m not just jumping on the bandwagon.

As an old-school point-and-click adventure—well, let’s be honest here: the game isn’t old-school; it’s just old. The only thing new about 5 Days is the price tag, now available as freeware instead of $5 shareware. By the modest standards generally appropriate to freeware, it’s a pleasant enough way to spend a couple hours.

But are the modest standards generally appropriate to freeware appropriate here? Yahtzee, after all, is a professional game critic, a self-appointed arbiter of what makes a game worthy or unworthy, a guru on how games should be made. How does his own work fare when measured against his own exacting standards? Not well, I fear.

You play the role of Trilby, oxymoronic (and sometimes simply moronic) “gentleman thief”—the argument apparently being that stealing things from helpless victims is acceptable as long as you wear a tie and use proper grammar. Sort of like Goldman-Sachs. Climbing through a second-story window, you find the good loot missing and—horrors!—all exits locked by a malevolent spirit, and the true objective is escape.

For someone who complains first and foremost about a lack of originality in game design, he manages to travel a great many foot-worn paths. Locked doors? Check. One-use tools? Check. I mean, why can’t Trilby simply bash out one of the windows with the pickaxe and flee, instead of using it only to chop his way into a bricked-over basment? It’s like Croshaw wanted his name on an adventure, too, but couldn’t be bothered to come up with one of his own, so he simply assembled it from pieces taken from every other title in the genre. Plot elements, too. I mean, come on: treasure hunting in a mansion only to discover the real challenge is getting out? The designers of Maniac Mansion, 7^th Guest, and others all the way back to Haunted Mansion, when graphic adventures still used text and “graphic” simply meant you got sitck-figure picture to accompany your text adventure, might have a bone to pick with Mr. Croshaw, were not five years or more in the computer game industry a fancy way of saying “dead and forgotten.” And then there’s the crux of the story itself: a mad slasher chained in the basement as a child but now given to machete killings while wearing leather apron and welder’s mask? Where does the man get such clever ideas?

Nor does 5 Days exhibit any sense of good and bad interface choices, the kind of design choices so integral to enjoying point-and-clicks. The action point on the hand-eye-footprint cursor isn’t clearly marked. Not such a big deal when you want to click on a nice, big door or the car that mysteriously appears inside the compound on Day 3, but rather a nuisance when you have to click on a six-pixel spot on a monochromatic floor. And it turns out you need to click off-screen to take the stairs down from the upstairs hall; simply clicking on the stairs themselves causes Trilby to pace back and forth alongside them like a six-year-old desperate to pee but unable to find the loo. And really, is the talk-walk-see-use set of verbs really necessary? Isn’t a single click sufficient for both enjoyable (Neverhood) and commercially successful (Myst) games? Why yes. Yes, I believe it is.

A suspense/horror game needs to parcel out its information to maintain suspense. Croshaw sets his pace by activating one and only one game event at a time. This forces you to wander back and forth through the malevolent mansion solving puzzles by a kind of Brownian motion, repeatedly pushing every object at random, hoping to trigger the next bit of exposition, because pushing it the first twenty times doesn’t count if you haven’t done absolutely everything else first in the proper order. You couldn’t pick up an occult book before, but maybe you can now. No? What about now? And how about now? Now? To illustrate: you can interact with a tree in the back yard all day long, earning nothing but a snide comment for your troubles, until you decide the tree is inert and forget about it. But when asked to collect your fellow victims for a meeting, you’re expected to start your search by talking to the tree, because someone has been lurking silently up there the whole time. A hint to potty-mouthed misanthropes everywhere: conversing with trees is not the natural first step to meeting people. Similarly, although Trilby concludes early on the second day that he’s dealing with a supernatural horror (the same Trilby the author describes as “fiercely logical”), he can’t be made to read the books in the fucking occult library until day three, after the bodies begin stacking up. Even then, he’ll touch only one specific book on goody-goody white magic; he won’t touch the necromancy section until day five, after cheerfully letting another of his companions get hacked into kebab-ready chunks. I guess gentlemen thieves don’t go looking for helpful information before it’s too late; they have servants for that kind of thing. But Trilby will pick up a teddy bear for no reason beyond, “And why the hell not.” God help you if you restore the game from a saved position, and have to try to reconstruct just how much of the story the fiercely logical but apparently dimwitted Trilby has reconstructed in his mind from redundant exposition. It’s hard to remember just what Trilby knows when you’ve worked out the whole story days ahead of him and must patiently wait for him to catch up.

And there’s a sequel. In space. No doubt taking a cursed tiki idol into space will make complete sense, and by putting it on a spaceship, 7 Days a Skeptic becomes a completely different game, and not at all a cheap retread. As an aside, apparently Yahtzee’s repeated criticism about unhelpful female NPCs in his reviews—“worthless bitch” is the preferred label, I believe—is some kind of passive-aggressive attempt to expunge a nagging guilt, rather than a profound reflection on effective AI design.

I mentioned the author’s commentary; there is one, and quite revealing it is, too, especially in its drumbeat of “…but I couldn’t be bothered to do it right.” Yes, Jim seems to teleport through doors, but I couldn’t be bothered to work out some decent animation. Yes, the refrigerator should have food in it, but I couldn’t be bothered to add the graphic. Yes, the car appearing from nowhere makes no sense, but I couldn’t be bothered to work out a non-retarded way of introducing some lockpicks to the story. Additionally, Croshaw openly admits to “padding out” the adventure with the same kind of useless busywork he castigates in other games: adding extra steps to a magic ritual, for example, and placing connected events at opposite ends of the house just to force you take extra time wandering back and forth, admiring the 8-bit scenery (brown). Smirking about how lazy and lame and uncreative you are doesn’t somehow magically make it okay to be lazy and lame and uncreative. No, not even if you do it a second time, speaking through a pixilated border collie. Granted, making good games is hard, tedious, and generally unrewarding work. But let that be a reason not to make a game at all, not an excuse to make a bad game and trying to deflect criticism with a jovial “Har-har, I know it’s crap, but I”m too post-modern ironical to worry about it.” Agreeing you’re being a dickhead doesn’t make you not-a-dickhead; it just makes you a smug dickhead.

Which, judging by “Zero Punctuation,” seems to amount to “life’s mission fucking accomplished” for Mr. Croshaw.