Adventure

5 Days a Stranger is the first in a series of freeware, horror adventure games created by Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw. If that name sounds familiar to you, it probably is; he recently achieved internet-stardom via his wildly popular series of Zero Punctuation video reviews. He had been creating adventure games for years before this, however.

5DaS, while not his first game, was certainly a turning point. Before this, most of his games weren’t bad, per se, they were just...unpolished. That’s not to say that 5DaS itself is polished, however. The graphics aren’t the greatest, the interface is clunky, and the music is ripped straight out of RPG Maker.

So then, how does the game manage to be so fantastic?

Inherent Evil was the first graphic adventure developed by Bryan Wiegele and the crew at Big Time Games, and was originally developed in an unusual way: It was supposed to be released episodically, one chapter per week, with a $10,000 cash prize to the first person to 'solve' the game. This structure led to some interesting design decisions; originally, each chapter dropped you to the desk-top on conclusion, and there was no way to save games during a level.

An old school text adventure dressed up with hundreds of period photographs and other images, 1893: A World's Fair Mystery takes place at the Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in that year, the last and greatest of the 19th century's World Fairs. Coupling a well-researched and evocative depiction of the Exposition with interesting puzzles and a mystery to solve, 1893 proves there's life in the text adventure yet. Both fans of the genre and those interested in Chicago's history will enjoy it greatly.