davidn | I'll get you, Ben Croshaw

NOTE: The cutscenes in this game are VERY gory and bloody, so this game is not for the squeamish. Alternatively, you could read the walkthrough before you play the game, so you won't be surprised.

I can't begin to describe how little of the mood of the game this shows.

All things considered, I should probably have heeded that warning. I had known about the 5 days a stranger series (or, as it actually seems to be called, the Chzo Mythos) for a while, but when

dr_dos mentioned that they had been created by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Punctuation (who is very funny in a Marcus Brigstocke kind of way) it got my interest up enough to play it. And I have now been severely traumatized by an innocent-looking point and click adventure game.

The first in the series isn't too bad on the nerves. It's a bit tense at the same "ooh, this is a bit strange" level of most episodes of Doctor Who (i.e. those not written by Steven Moffat) but isn't likely to generate nightmares. You start off as a cat-burglar planning to loot an old mansion. Little does he know, however, that it's actually a DOOM HOUSE that is possessed by the ghost of what will later become known as John DeFoe - who takes the form of people when they touch an idol kept in the living room and gets them to kill others while wearing a welding mask and apron. And the warning on the download is slightly misplaced, as there are a couple of deaths, a body at the bottom of a swimming pool and a small amount of blood, but nothing like the wanton carnage that you're asked to prepare for.

This is a bit more like it.

Then I moved on to 7 Days A Skeptic. Unusually for a direct sequel, this game is set four hundred years after the original and on a spacecraft, which led me to believe that it would be entirely different from the first game. I was wrong. Shortly after the game begins, the crew recover John DeFoe's remains, which were shot into space shortly after the events of 5 Days A Stranger, and roughly the same thing starts happening to them. One of Yahtzee's favourite tactics, it seems, is to show your characters having nightmares. He's done this four times so far in the series, and the annoying thing is that I have not seen a single one of them coming.

The first part that really got me was just after the obligatory section where the hero is accused of the murders and locked up. In the middle of your protests, the possessed body of the captain wanders in behind your captor, breaks her neck and sets you free. Through some frantic clicking, you eventually force the monster into the cell where you were trapped and close it up. And then you wander off to warn the others. Except I went the wrong way, into the maintenance decks by mistake. Realizing my error, I turned around, opened the door and he appeared right in front of me. A scream and a shock cut to my character being strangled, and it was Game Over.

Once Whitney had peeled me off the ceiling, I somewhat foolishly decided that I would be able to continue, after looking up a guide to tell me exactly how to avoid things like that happening. But Yahtzee hits you with three things in a row. After the encounter with the possessed captain, the others decide that it's probably a good idea to escape, and go to sleep while the only available pod is refuelled. (Quite why an emergency escape pod needs a few hours to warm up is never really explained adequately.) In the morning, unsurprisingly, only two of the three remaining crew members turn up. Your character goes down to investigate the doctor's room, and finds what can only be described as a slaughterhouse, with a stitched-together torso abomination on the floor and spare limbs neatly arranged on the bunk bed. You would think that the similar scenes in Silent Hill would have been worse than this, but there's something about the clear pixelled artwork here that disturbs me immensely.

So after seeing that, you grab the key, run out of there as fast as possible, get back to the escape pod, open it up to discover that it is no longer there and are sucked out into space. I died here, and as my last save was before I went into the doctor's room, I decided I'd better stop. Then checked around the flat before going to bed in case anything was just around the corner with a machete.

However, I decided to face my fear and play it again on the way to work today. Passing all those scenes quickly, I got very near to the end, knew exactly what I had to do, approached the door to the captain's room, and the Welder burst out of it and stabbed me to death in much the same way as the captain had earlier. I'm not playing it again.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

kjorteo

You certainly weren't joking about Trilby's Notes - I thought I could cope with it as Silent Hill is much the same idea, but after it warped me to the cargo bay from 7 Days out of nowhere and started responding to everything I typed with "it hurts", I was forced to put it down.

Explain. This sounds eerily similar to the concept of ghosts and supernatural things along those lines themselves being tortured or frightened, which is my major weakness. As I've said in a couple videogame_tales posts before, if a ghost appears and says something like "Who dares disturb my sleep, all intruders shall perish," then I just go "Meh, it's an enemy," but something like "Please help me" or "I'm so cold" is so scary that I'm actually a little more nervous now just from having typed that.

That's why the warning ghost in the White Tower in Lands of Lore traumatized me as much it did, and Lands of Lore isn't even a scary game! It's a Dungeon Master clone, for God's sake.

From:

davidn

Well, first of all, I have to admit to being scared by Dungeon Master-type games - Eye of the Beholder 2 is the only one that I've played to any real degree, and there's something about the weirdness of it that gets to me. Particularly the way that your enemies only update their animation and movement every so often, so that they jump from place to place after you - and the feeling is even worse if said enemies happen to be giant spiders like in the fourth dungeon of that game. (I had to stop playing it after that.) And the section in Dungeon Master that you mentioned on videogame_tales - the one with the "YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE DONE THAT!" sign out of nowhere... that would have got to me.

But to the explanation... the "it hurts" words start appearing in the third game, Trilby's Notes. They're never actually said by anything, though you first see the words in a discarded diary near the beginning of the game. Instead, there are points where you experience hallucinations and dream sequences, where you can't interact with anything and any attempt to do so will produce a response of "it hurts" from the game. Usually the 'nightmares' happen when walking from location to location, where you won't appear in the room you expected to go but somewhere else, and like I experienced the first time I got one, sometimes in the wrong game entirely.

The message can also pop up once in the main game without a random location change. And it's petrifying - we know that game bugs and glitches are frightening things, and this thing has deliberate ones to unnerve you. No ghost or character on-screen ever says it - if anything, it seems like the game itself is frightened and doing things that don't make sense.

Anyway, I still think you should play them. ;) 5 Days is a bit unnerving in a couple of places but there's nothing in it that's nightmare-inducing - there's just the feeling that something is going to happen at every point (but the only time you're actually facing an enemy directly is in the screenshot in the main post). It's even quite humorous in places, Ben Croshaw obviously not quite getting the mood that he wanted out of the next games.

It's 7 Days that actually had a couple of points where I screamed out loud. Even though the general consensus is that it's the worst of the series, I found it the most frightening - it seems that like me, a lot of people can't even play the final scene. Trilby's Notes is where the "it hurts" messages and odd deliberate glitches start to appear, and it's certainly the cleverest of the series.

6 Days, the final one, goes back to being generally unsettling without any massive scares, though largely because you've learned at this point to expect what happens. Apparently, it's possible to get a couple of hallucinations in this game as well, but thankfully that's never happened to me.

(As for the frightened ghosts, I remember The Granstream Saga got to me a bit when you're in an underground graveyard, and looking at graves makes their occupants talk to you with roughly the exact lines you mentioned. Then they dispelled it instantly by making the last two ghosts say "Remember to look both ways before crossing the road" and "I knew I shouldn't have eaten my mother-in-law's salisbury steak!")

From:

kjorteo

Oh, the "YOU WILL REGRET THAT." plaque. I can't believe I had forgotten that. You're right--that was pretty traumatic, especially with how my memory seemed to exaggerate the consequences. I swear to you that I remember there being no less than fifty giant worms summoned as a result of that, and since only two could fit per tile and this was a narrow hallway, there was literally a line going back as far as the eye could see of those things. I was stuck because clearly you weren't supposed to actually deal with that many enemies, so there must have been some trick to open the door without killing the mummy and thus REGRETTING THAT. Then I find a walkthrough now because I never could figure it out and I was curious, and it turns out that there were only about ten of them and the answer was to just fight your way through.

Like I said in another post, I did talk

slither into playing 5 Days, and I'm there to simultaneously satisfy both his "I'll play a scary game as long as I'm not alone" quirk and my "I'll watch someone play a scary game but I don't want to actually play it myself" one. We got as far as day three, and the second nightmare ("FATHER!!") got to me a little, but it's not The Dagger of Amon Ra, or at least not yet.. If what you say is true, I may have to see if I can talk him into the next games in the series once he's done with this one.

Also, for the reason of themselves being distressed like that, the scariest ghost (and scariest moment, really) in any game I've ever played--and once again it's not even an overtly scary game otherwise!--is Lady Tsepish from King's Quest VII. If you haven't played it, there's a part of the game where Rosella pays a visit to an overtly and cartoonishly over-the-top Halloween-ish area--think Halloween Town from The Nightmare Before Christmas, only with more 2D Disney-like animation. It's normally much much too cartoony to actually be scary, but there is one screen in a graveyard with a woman dressed in black mourning at a particular tomb. She's normally-proportioned, so she's no more Disney-esque cartoony than the heroine herself (that's Valenice, not Rosella, but you alternate between the two and they don't have any Rosella screenshots for some reason.) She's crouching and hunched forward, facing the tomb, so all you can see is the black cloak. And the mourning--she really gets into it. She is wailing. And of course everywhere else gets a goofy "isn't Halloween fun?" kind of song and they saved the one genuinely sad and eerie dirge for this particular screen.

Anyway, if you're stupid enough to try interrupting the sobbing and talking to her, you get a brief exchange depending on which character is doing this, where you ask her a question and she responds in a horribly distorted echoing voice. (Rosella's dialogue is by far the scariest--"Are you all right? Can I help you?"/"Noooo one can help meeeeeeee!!" Valenice's is comparatively lame--"Madame, are you ill?"/"I'm deeaaaaaad!!"--but Rosella's comes first, so by then the damage is done.) Either way, she then stands up, faces you, and slightly raises her hood. Her arm is in the way when she does this so the player can't see anything, but the character instantly screams like they're seeing the most horrific sight they've ever seen, then instant Game Over.

And near the end of the game, you find out who she was in life and get an item of sentimental value to her, and have to dispel the ghost by giving it to her. The "Screw that, I'm not going anywhere near her!!" reaction is very strong, but you absolutely have to get into that tomb she's mourning over, so....

From:

kjorteo

I should add that when you do give the item to her, she obligingly turns and walks the other way for a few steps and then disappears, sobbing all the while, so it works, but...well, there is no adequate way to describe the level of wailing she does when she disappears. Either you've played the game and you've gotten that far and you've heard it, in which case that sound will probably stick with you forever, or you haven't and you'll just have to take my word for it.

From:

davidn

I actually have King's Quest 7, but I haven't played much more than the first chapter/section/whatever it calls them - I think I got it from the charity shop down the road from my parents' a couple of weeks before moving to America, and never got the time to actually play it. It looked like it was the point at which the King's Quest design was starting to become rather more fair, with the instant "start from not quite the same place" and lack of completely unwinnable states. I must give it a try some time, particularly as I've got quite into point and click adventures as my train-entertainment at the moment. I'm sure I've actually seen the scene you described, possibly when one of my brothers was playing it - I'll have to see if it's as I remember.

I'm rather disappointed that the answer to the Dungeon Master situation was just to fight through! I had followed the comments on that thread and the continuing quest for a decent walkthrough for ages, thinking that there would be some arcane solution, possibly involving the weightless plasma balls that you accidentally discovered you could create. (It seems that the EOB walkthroughs share the Dungeon Master ones' spirit of total uselessness, with one I looked up on GameFAQs describing the entire two-hour catacombs section of the game as something along the lines of "Look for the four horns".)