By Fraser McMillan and Lewis Denby

Last summer, The Chinese Room made a small name for themselves through the success of experimental Half-Life 2 mod, Dear Esther.

Set on a deserted island off the coast of Scotland, it told the rather unnerving tale of a man succumbing to madness, explained via a series of narrations as you explored the increasingly surreal world.  It was only peripherally interactive: you walked around, you looked and listened, but that was about it.

Korsakovia is The Chinese Room’s attempt to merge Esther’s surreal storytelling with something more resembling a traditional game.  Each of their mods is part of lead designer Dan Pinchbeck’s ongoing research project at the University of Portsmouth, examining the new ways in which the first-person engine can be used to communicate ideas with the player.  You can read a lot more about it here, and there’ll be some more specifics below.  Lewis Denby and Fraser McMillan have been playing Korsakovia, which releases on Saturday.  Both found it so interesting that they stayed up late talking about it.  Here’s what they said.

Fraser: Okay. So I just finished a videogame, apart from where I skipped a couple of bits.  What did I just play?
Lewis: You played a mod called Korsakovia.  It’s by The Chinese Room, who previously did Dear Esther, which I’m not sure if you’ve played, but is excellent.
Fraser: I haven’t.  I heard it’s excellent.
Lewis: Korsakovia, then. Overall impressions?
Fraser: Good.  Never played a game that fucked with me so much.  A problem I had with this was that I often wasn’t sure if this was by design or accidental.
Lewis: Yes.  It’s occasionally hugely impressive in its mind-fuckery.  It’s also occasionally filled with odd design quirks, but ones that manage to be accidentally brilliant.  Shall we do basics?  It’s a first-person, horror-centric FPS with a focus on running away from things whom you’re not quite sure what they’re supposed to be.
Fraser: “The Collectors.”
Lewis: You play a psychotic patient in a psychiatric hospital, as a doctor – who narrates – tries to work out what’s wrong with you.
Fraser: There are a lot of televisions involved.
Lewis: Televisions, electricity, fire and furniture.
Fraser: They like their chairs, that’s for sure.
Lewis: Oh, relevant point: it’s part of an ongoing research project looking into how people respond to inventive uses of the first-person perspective, as well as fragmented narrative.
Right.  Where shall we start?
Fraser: Okay, I have some things. Number one: It treats the atmosphere as an end in itself. It creates an incredible sense of unease, assaulting the visual and auditory faculties spontaneously.
Lewis: It’s hugely stifling, in that respect. It’s rare for a game to instil such panic.  It’s up there with ‘Shock 2 and Silent Hill in that respect.
Fraser: I’ve never played that series, but I think I’d like it. Korsakovia certainly did instil panic in me. My palms were sweaty and I frequently found myself lashing out when I could and grabbing at nearby doors. You’re constantly on the run, sometimes from nothing, but sometimes from a sinister entity or maybe your own fear. I’d like to point to the sountrack here – it did a great job of building slowly with dissonant and sickening noises.
Lewis: Jessica Curry did the sound design.  She’s an absolute star.  Some of the noises are tremendously horrible.  It’s all about odd volumes.  Some things are unnervingly quiet.  Other bits – like the static disturbing the voice overs – is uncomfortably, piercingly loud.
Fraser: Those were horrible. I felt myself cowering at times, literally curling up in my chair. It’s not necessarily “scary” in the same sense as a horror film; it’s more unnerving. This is where interactivity and perspective come into their own.
Lewis: On a more obviously gameplay-orientated note… it’s an odd one.  There’s a lot of running away.  But the level design breaks the atmosphere at times, I’d say.  The signposting isn’t great.
Fraser: Definitely not. There’s an uncomfortable amount of backtracking for such a short game. It’s easy to lose your bearings. I found some objects to be inconsistent as well, which is never a good idea. There are some wooden barricades that can be smashed, but others that can’t and are often on the critical path. It could have done with being a bit more linear.
Lewis: I didn’t mind any of that. It was a more direct thing, for me.  In the second level – the warehouse – there were bits where the obvious route to progress wasn’t in your line of sight.  Example: you climb down a ladder into a huge room. Your eye is immediately drawn to a couple of destinations ahead, but where you actually need to go is behind you. That stumped me for ages.
Fraser: That doesn’t often bother me, but there’s not a lot of fruit borne from exploration in this case. That said, maybe the fact it uses the Source engine means the signposting will be compared to Valve’s, never a good place to be really.
Lewis: Perhaps.  But I think it’s an important thing to get right. Dear Esther suffered from that as well, but at least that simulated an open environment.  Korsakovia’s clear thatit follows a strictly defined path, and I think it’s occasionally guilty of assuming the player will know where to go.  Perhaps the level designer was too close to his own work.
Fraser: It must be a problem for designers, though. Players all have different styles, some will absorb their surroundings and others will just forge ahead. It became more of an issue for me later in the game when enemies are stronger, faster and more persistent.
Lewis: I didn’t notice a dramatic shift in the strength of enemies.  Just the number.  Oh: the enemies are well worth talking about.
Fraser: They’re very etheral and creepy. Exactly the kind of thing that scares the living piss out of me. Think ICO, but more malicious.
Lewis: Immediately, they’re most reminiscent of the Smoke Monster in LOST.  But they’re more alarming.  They’re eerily fast.  These big plumes of black mist that just charge towards you, emitting this ear-piercing shriek.  One of the main research questions in Korsakovia was how players would respond to enemies that didn’t resemble anything usually used in videogames; foes to which it’s difficult to assign motive or humanity.  The result, for me, is that it becomes instantly terrifying.

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