davidn

SPTHWAP!

A few months ago,

dr_dos happened to mention a series of horror games by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw on his journal, and shortly afterwards a post of my own appeared detailing how absurdly traumatic they were. For some reason this account convinced a number of other people to download them too - which was pleasing, because horror games have this immense viral appeal to them in that you want to convince people to play them too to prove that you're not a colossal wimp and that they do indeed cause normal people to sleep with the light on for a week. In a continuation of this saga, today I sent off for the special editions of the series and I've been playing through them again.

The second time through, they're not too bad - the "director's commentary" is interesting, describing his influences and thoughts on his own game, and the extras like this are very welcome. But the biggest thing is that, even without Yahtzee's constant comments about how rubbish the game is or how rubbish the players were at said game, I can't believe I didn't realize how hilarious the possessed captain's death (where you have to whack him into the suspiciously exposed reactor) in 7 Days was before. Just listen to it - it's a lonely futuristic engine sound and tense piano, cut short by a loud noise best described as "spthwap", like Eddie Izzard's 'sword' sound effect.

I'm still not looking forward to Sunday, even though there's apparently a warning given in the special edition before you're suddenly killed. And I'm also a bit apprehensive about 6 Days because apparently there's an illusion scene in it that I didn't get but

pami_zee did.

You should still play them, you know.