Game Profile

Author Yahtzee Idiom English Authoring System Inform7 Release Year 2007 IFR Overall Rating

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 Soul gives a taste of the setting for "6 Days A Survivor" - an underground hi-tech facility - and a cameo appearance by one of its characters. A stunning attention-catching opening is followed up by a pretty straightforward little fetch-quest. It works well as a prequel to "6 Days", and certainly helped "sell" it to me, despite having the same level of extremely sparse implementation as The Body.