A Look at The Chinese Room's Body of Work

The Chinese Room is a British independent game developer that gets a lot of flack thrown their way over the nature of their games. Their games are commonly criticized as being glorified "walking simulators" and that the narratives of their games are nothing but pretentious drivel masquerading as something deep and meaningful. To be frank, those are not unreasonable allegations based on my own experiences with their games. However, I do feel that the Chinese Room deserve more credit then they are usually given by their critics and that the issues with their games originate from misguided mindset about player agency rather then mere laziness and incompetence.

The Chinese Room's current company logo.

Their first game was Korsakovia, a Half Life 2 mod that put the players in the role of a man named Christopher who suffers from Korsakoff's Syndrome. It was the start of The Chinese Room's style of walking around a strange environment and listen to some narration that builds the story. However, unlike most of their future projects Korsakovia still had "gamey elements" like combat and a health bar. I feel that Korsakovia still holds up as an interesting experiment today and it can be found for free on most modding sites if your interested. Just be warned that it isn't the most stable technically and will likely crash a lot.

Title Screen for Korsakovia The Chinese Room's first real project.

Their next game was another Half Life 2 mod and probably their most well known project. Dear Esther was released in 2008 and was an evolution of Korsakovia in the sense that it focused on what made Korsakovia unique. It put players in the role of an unnamed protagonist traveling to a radio tower on an abandoned island while a narrator reads letters addressed to a person named Esther. As you progress through the island the narration pieces together a story involving a car crash, a miscarriage, and someone dying of syphilis. Honestly, I have no idea what is going on in this game and the fact the narration changes every time you play results in a narrative that has no substance because there is no core idea it seems to focus on. Dan Pinchbeck, one of the founders of the Chinese Room, has stated in interviews that his goal with Dear Esther was to experiment with creating a void that players filled with their personal own interpretations. But based on my own experiences and those of my close friends it's safe to say that this experiment failed.

Title Screen for the original 2008 version of Dear Esther.

If Dear Esther has stayed an experiment I doubt that The Chinese Room would have become the controversial developer it is today. But then The Chinese Room remade Dear Esther in early 2012 and sold it on Steam for fifteen dollars. They took what many considered a failed experiment, myself included, and were now charging money for it. Now I understand why they did this. The Chinese Room obviously wanted a project out there making money that they could use to fund new projects. They also didn't do a slap dash job either. The remake of Dear Esther meticulously rebuilt the entire island from scratch and if I talked to someone that was interested in playing Dear Esther I would point them to the retail version over the original mod. But even though they built the entire game from scratch they did not change the overall narrative structure and lack of player agency that was the issue in the first place. In spite of its gorgeous visuals, hauntingly beautiful music by Jessica Curry, and its incredible voice work by Nigel Carrington, it was still the same failed experiment.

This is the same area as the above screen in the 2012 remake of Dear Esther.

After Dear Esther, The Chinese Room teamed up with Frictional Games, the studio behind the Penumbra series and Amnesia The Dark Descent, for a pseudo-sequel to Amnesia called Amnesia A Machine For Pigs. I personally consider this to be their best game thus far. It is very dark and disturbing survival horror game that dives into the deepest and darkest parts of the human mind. Its story is one of the single best narratives I have experience in any horror property I can think of. I would be more than willing to call this game a masterpiece if it wasn't for the rest of the elements that make up the game.

Concept Art for Amnesia A Machine for Pigs.

Sadly, Amnesia A Machine for Pigs suffers for the same reasons that afflicted Dear Esther though thankfully to a much lessor extent. The players interaction with the would is highly limited and progression is entirely linear with no real opportunity to go off the beaten path. This is in sharp contrast with the previous Amnesia game developed by Frictional Games which was highly interactive and had a Super Mario 64 style level design that lead you through a linear story, but broke it up by funneling you through non linear hubs that let you piece together your own way through the game. It was with Amnesia A Machine for Pigs that I realized what The Chinese Room's major issue with their design methods are. They do not value the power of player interaction.

More Concept Art of Amnesia A Machine for Pigs.

I remember playing Dear Esther and listening to the narration and I kept thinking "Wow, This would be so much more interesting if I was exploring this island finding these letters that the narrator keeps reading to me." If they would have designed the game like that they would have engaged the player more. The player would have had to pay more attention to the environment and maybe notice a lot more of the subtle details The Chinese Room put into the world they have crafted. But I think they are afraid that they if they give players too much freedom they will not respect the dark, depressing themes their games explore. Based on some of Let's Play's I've seen of their games I can't necessary blame them for feeling that way. Video games are a very young medium, interactive narratives are a very new genre that we have only just started exploring, and gamers in general are not fast to embrace new ideas.

A screenshot of The Chinese Room's latest game Everybody's Gone to the Rapture.

The Chinese Room's new game Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is now out and I've seen a lot of the same criticisms I've level at their previous works being directed at it. In fact, that is why I decided to write this in the first place. I think The Chinese Room is a very talented studio with lots of great ideas, but they are seem unable to trust their players to respect their work without heavily directing their actions. I do plan on checking out Everybody's Gone to the Rapture at some point which leads me to my final point. In spite of all my criticism towards their works I still feel like there games have value, The Chinese Room are a very creative group of people and their deserves to be supported. If you see them on Steam during a sale I recommend at least giving them a try and if you don't like it just don't abuse the refund system. The Chinese Room aren't hacks they are just artists doing what artists do. Experimenting whether it works or not and I think that is something simply worth supporting.

Here is a link to Jessica Curry's Bandcamp Page: https://jessicacurry.bandcamp.com/album/dear-esther