IFReviewed by
lembeezee on 2007-04-10 07:11
Yahtzee wrote a few well-received little games in Inform in the late 1990s before deciding to "go graphical" instead, writing a series of very popular freeware graphical adventure games using Adventure Game Studio. These included the very creepy haunted-house mystery "5 Days A Stranger", its futuristic sequel "7 Days A Skeptic", and its terrifying "mid-quel" "Trilby's Notes", all winners of multiple AGS Awards (the XYZZYs of freeware graphical adventures). Interestingly, "Trilby's Notes" used a text parser - a signal that Yahtzee was finally ready to return to the text adventures fold. The Countdown trilogy is Yahtzee's way experimenting with Inform 7, while simultaneously providing a backstory for his upcoming graphical adventure, "6 Days A Survivor", the conclusion of the "5 Days A Stranger" series.
The Body takes as back to meet a historical character encountered in "Trilby's Notes", and gives us one rudimentary puzzle to solve. Implementation is sparse, but the writing is very, very effective. One clever trick has the NPC defined as a "thing", which gives a nice insight into the mind of the PC. Yahtzee has a gift with words, and it shows. Unfortunately, the final command to complete the game is very much "guess-the-verb". A little more time spent testing would certainly have corrected this, and marks the only blemish to a fine "trailer" for "6 Days A Survivor".
