Mr. Trilby, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love CHZO

Taking a break from the Russian sophistication of yesterday, I'm gonna tell you to download a computer game. Well, four, actually.

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw is best known over the internet for his bilious, hate-filled, cartoonish Zero Punctuation video game reviews over at The Escapist. If you haven't seen them, do so now, as they're absolutely freakin' hilarious. (Although anyone that references the infamous "baleesteecs" gag in Resident Evil 4 is okay by me.)

But his real accomplishment lies in making the best damn adventure games since Curse of Monkey Island. They're called the CHZO Mythos (or, sometimes, the John DeFoe Quadrilogy), they're over at his website, Fully Ramblomatic, and they rule.

Chronologically, there's 5 Days A Stranger, Trilby's Notes, 6 Days A Sacrifice, and 7 Days A Skeptic. But you don't want to play them chronologically, oh no. That wouldn't make a lick of sense, since Mr. Yahtzee is cool enough to mess with nonlinear storytelling. You wanna start with 5DAS, then 7DAS, then Trilby's Notes, then 6DAS.




The gameplay's a little rough for the first two, although by Trilby's Notes most of the puzzles seem intuitive enough that you'll rarely be frustrated. The graphics, as you can see above, aren't so hot, but we can forgive that. Where the games really shine are in the fact that they have better story and atmosphere than most major big-budget games, and they're free.

I don't wanna ruin much of the story, so let me give you a bulleted list.

• The Tall Man is one of the scariest malevolent bastards in videogame history, right up there with Pyramid Head from Silent Hill and The Bella Sisters in Resident Evil 4.
• Trilby is a fantastic protagonist and if you don't fall head over heels for him and cringe at various moments involving him and horrible things in 6DAS you have no soul.
• Yahtzee does an amazing job of bringing everything together and making the final game an incredible finale.
• The main villain of the first two games manages to both utterly horrifying and pitifully sympathetic. I'd pity him more if he wasn't stalking me about with a machete.
• The middle two games should be looked at as a lesson for anyone that wants to make a horror game- they're brilliantly scary and atmospheric, and keep you on your toes at all times. And the second one has some great little homages in it.
• Seriously, look at that. That is creepy. Yahtzee does a lot with simple graphics.

So anyway, that concludes my recommendation. If you've got any respect for independent gamemaking, go pick up the full series. Get through the kinda slow, not-as-scary first one, and then sit back and enjoy the rest.