Hands-on: Korsakovia

Genre: Survival horror
Developer: The Chinese Room
Out: May 2009

http://thechineseroom.co.uk/korsakovia.htm

Anyone whom I subject to my regular raving will be aware of my feelings for a Half-Life 2 mod called Dear Esther.  It’s a strange, beautiful thing, crafted as part of a series of fascinating research projects examining how players respond to particular game mechanics – or, indeed, the absence of them.

In Esther’s case, it was the absence of, well, pretty much anything you’d consider game-like.  The mod took place on a desolate Hebridean island, and you explored, prompted onwards by a series of narrated memoirs that rarely made much sense until you sat back with a glass of whiskey and got all deep.  No challenge, no goals, no concrete answers.  It was, and still is, a remarkably interesting and astoundingly affecting piece of work, and you really should go and play it.  Go on.

Korsakovia, The Chinese Room’s new endeavour, is a little bit different.  It’s still a Half-Life 2 mod, though you’ll need the Episode 2 engine to run this one.  And it’s still about abstract storytelling methods and challenging the conventions of gaming.  But it’s also, quite clearly, much more of a “game”.  Specifically, it’s an oddball survival horror title that asks: how do you react when you’re placed in a situation of threat, but nothing makes sense because you’re suffering from severe psychosis and reality is slipping increasingly further away?

I’ve been playing through a few levels from an early build of Korsakovia.  Aspects of it are shaping up to be staggeringly brilliant.  From it’s humbly atmospheric opening, through the delectably weird sound design and up to the panic-induced flailing at an obscure enemy, it’s impressively frightening.  Strange sounds pierce the near-silence.  Objects hover unnervingly above the ground.  Your only foe – a terrifying black fog monster, somewhat akin to that in the TV show Lost – floats aimlessly in the distance, before turning towards you and charging with all its might.

It’s dark.  Like, really dark.  Your flashlight is often your only friend, and while it’s a bit tiresome to keep waiting while it recharges, it ramps up the atmosphere tenfold.  And when you finally come across an area where the lights are turned on, there’s still no respite.  On heading for one brighter room, in the hope of some relative safety, a chill slid down my spine as I discovered the source of the glow.  A bolt of electricity shot from one side of the room to the other, between the eyes of two hovering, mangled corpses.  Quite.

It’s currently a bit rough and ready.  Texture misalignments adorning bland environments, along with occasional hideous difficulty spikes, could go some way to spoiling the experience if not corrected before release.  And, as yet, there’s very little of the story implemented – though we’re told much of it will be up to the player’s interpretation anyway.  All we know is that it concerns the plight of one deeply disturbed man, struggling to establish whether the nightmare surrounding him is real or in his head.  It’ll be interesting to see how this is portrayed to the player – there’s already an abundance of visual symbolism, but very little exposition, and at present it’s rather difficult to establish what’s going on.  Perhaps that’s the point – but there’s a sense of being dropped into a world without context, one that grates a little.

Reminiscent of Penumbra’s sense of dread, Pathologic’s eerily shifting environment and Silent Hill’s twisted aesthetic, Korsakovia is nevertheless shaping up to be an extremely interesting project.  On its website, lead designer Dan Pinchbeck asks what motives players will assign to such an intangible enemy, and what stories they will begin to infer.  The answers to these questions remain to be seen – but it’s something of a given that most will react with visceral, primal fear.  So far, so pant-wetting…