Promotional title image [1]
5 Days A Stranger is the first game in the Chzo Mythos series, developed by Ben Croshaw using Adventure Game Studio and released on September 22, 2003 on the Fully Ramblomatic homepage. It centres on the supernatural events surrounding the gentleman thief Trilby and four others who struggle for their lives against an unknown force as they try to escape from their imprisonment in DeFoe Manor.
5 Days A Stranger was originally planned as a standalone title, with 7 Days a Skeptic later being developed as an indirect-sequel following the scrapping of its original plot, which was penned as a direct sequel to 5 Days. It was later retconned into the first installment of the 4-part Chzo Mythos, and later received a prequel game in the form of Trilby: The Art of Theft.
Gameplay[]
The player takes control of the famous cat burglar known only as Trilby, using a point-and-click interface to interact with the environment and other characters. The story is told over the course of five separate days spent within Defoe Manor. Each day is separated from the next by a dream sequence which require no player interaction.
Plot[]
Trilby, a self-described gentleman cat burglar, comes to DeFoe Manor at the request of an associate after the last heirs have died off and the valuables are up for grabs. Upon entering the manor, Trilby finds himself stuck in the house by some supernatural force along with four other people: Phillip Harty, a self-proclaimed "treasure hunter", Simone Taylor, a correspondent for the BBC who came to the manor to film a documentary, Jim Fowler, a high school student who entered the manor on a dare, and a mysterious man known only as AJ. After all but AJ gather together, the four decide to try to find a way to escape the manor the next morning.
That night, Trilby has a dream where he awakes to find everyone dead, killed by a masked, hulking figure carrying a machete. The killer lifts his mask to reveal that he is Trilby.
Into Day 2, Trilby awakes to find Phil hunting in the backyard for a secret tomb, and Simone in the newly found library. AJ is still nowhere to be found. Upon inspecting a map to convince Phil that the secret tomb is not within reach, Trilby gets a vague suspicion that there's something on the map he hasn't seen, despite his full search of the house the day before. After convincing Phil to stop looking for the tomb, Trilby finds AJ dead, tied to the bottom of the swimming pool in the back yard. After discussing this with his three remaining companions, Phil blames Trilby in a fit of rage.
Into Day 3, Trilby breaks into more rooms to find the diaries of Sir Roderick and Matthew DeFoe, the original owner and his son, respectively. Matthew's diary refers to a boy "behind the door in the kitchen" that his father seems to ignore. On Matthew's fifteenth birthday, the last entry, it reads: "My father has done a terrible thing. All this time he pretended there was no boy behind the door, and now this. There is blood all over the kitchen floor. I will do what I can. Then we can be a family together and be happy." In Roderick's diary, it tells of his wife's death in childbirth, and the last entry (also Matthew's fifteenth birthday), reads: "It is the anniversary of the night I unleashed a horror. A horror which I tonight shall remove from this world. May God forgive me." Having previously found an article explaining that Roderick and Matthew had mysteriously disappeared on Matthew's fifteenth birthday, Trilby becomes suspicious.
Using a white magic spell to find Matthew's body, Trilby locates a secret dungeon behind a wall in the kitchen. Manacles hang from one wall, and after digging under some of the dirt, Trilby finds Matthew's and Roderick's bodies. At this moment, a loud crashing noise sounds from the opposite side of the house. When Trilby goes to investigate, he finds a broken glass jar that had previously encased a wooden idol, and the idol lying on the floor. When Trilby touches it, he is immediately knocked unconscious. Trilby then wakes up wearing a welding mask and holding a machete, lying next to Phil's corpse. When he sits up, he looks around briefly before being knocked unconscious again, this time by Simone.
When Trilby awakens, he is locked inside a shed without his tie that holds the emergency lock pick or any other items. The shed is being guarded by Simone, who tells him that he killed Phil. She says the tie was removed after Jim said Trilby might hang himself with it. After failing to convince Simone to help in all other ways, he manages to convince her that suicide might not be so bad for him. She then slips him his tie, which he then uses to pick the lock on the shed with. Once he exits the shed, he finds Simone gone. After searching the house, he finds Simone upstairs, who has now caught up with the fact that Trilby was possessed when he killed Phil. The masked figure from Trilby's dream then enters and tries to kill Trilby and Simone. Trilby quickly knocks the figure out by tripping it with the rug it stands on. After the mask is lifted, the figure now turns out to be Jim.
After putting Jim to bed, Trilby and Simone deduce the story behind their predicament: though Matthew was reported as Roderick's only child, Roderick actually had twins, the first being Matthew and the second being the cause of his wife's death. Overcome with grief and believing the second son to be a demon, Roderick chained that son up in the basement, causing mental retardation and insanity. After Roderick beat that son half to death on his fifteenth birthday using the African Idol, the son adorned a welding mask and leather apron, and killed Roderick and Matthew with a machete before dying of his own wounds. His soul was sealed in the wooden idol he was killed with. Since then, he possessed anyone who touched the idol and killed anyone they found, thinking it was his father coming to torture him again. Trilby would later name the second son John out of convenience.
Trilby locates John DeFoe's skeletal remains in the upstairs bathroom, which are shown to be deformed, heavily suggesting that John DeFoe was born physically deformed and that was partially why his father so strongly hated him. With a black magic spell, Trilby summons John's soul into John's corpse. Simone and Jim, positioned around the body, are then possessed by the spirits of Roderick and Matthew respectively, and unwittingly re-enact their last conversation prior to their deaths. Simone shoots the body with a rifle. It then falls into the fireplace that spreads fire everywhere. The entire manor burns, and the group finally escapes. Trilby lets Simone and Jim think he died in the fire to avoid the police, who had surrounded the front of the building prior to it burning down. Now free, Trilby remarks that his first order of business is to give the associate who originally sent him to DeFoe Manor a punch to the face.
Trivia[]
- 5 Days a Stranger contains a number of errors and plotholes, both natively and retroactively as a result of being adapted into the Chzo Mythos.
- AJ is killed under unknown circumstances. Due to the fact that John Defoe's ghost (at the time unnamed) could only possess those who touched the Wooden Idol, which had not happened prior to his death, AJ's death seems implausible. When questioned about this, Yahtzee made no effort to explain it, claiming he had no idea.
- Halfway through the game, Trilby's car appears within the mansion grounds under unknown circumstances, allowing Trilby to recover his lockpicks and access locked rooms of the DeFoe mansion. No explaination is given for how Trilby's car relocated into the mansion grounds.
- The birthdate of the DeFoe twins, and the recurring arcdate in the series is given as June 28th in 5 Days a Stranger. Later games changed the date to July 28th, due to Yahtzee misremembering the original date during their development.
- The television show Big Brother is mentioned during 5 Days a Stranger, a show that aired in the 2000s. Although the present date goes unmentioned in 5 Days a Stranger, later games retcon the game as having taken place in 1993 in order to fit with future events, thus making the reference impossible.
- In the game's ending, Trilby appears untroubled by the events that had taken place, despite discovering the truth of the supernatural and having involuntarily committed murder. The third game in the series, Trilby's Notes, retcons this into him being deeply and openly traumatized by the events of 5 Days a Stranger, an attitude that continues on through the rest of the series.
- Due to the then-primitive nature of the program used to create 5 Days a Stranger, Adventure Game Studio, the vertical walkspeed of the game is the same speed as the horizontal walkspeed, causing characters to walk up and down at comically fast speeds compared to walking left or right. Although 5 Days a Stranger was completed with this in effect, Yahtzee personally requested the developer of AGS, Chris Jones, modify the engine to properly differentiate the two walking speeds. Jones complied with Yahtzee's request in time for the development of 7 Days a Skeptic.