the white chamber

The White Chamber is the name of two distinct games. One is a rather lackluster Flash-based one-room puzzle game by FASCO-CS; the other, and the subject of this review, is a psychological horror/adventure game by Studio Trophis.

I'm going to spoil this game, in a way: I won't reveal any plot points, imagery, or even the solutions to any puzzles, but I will discuss one of the tricks it uses to set up the atmosphere of horror, and it may ruin much of the feel of the game. The following text has therefore been ROT13'd for the casual reader's safety.

Irel rneyl ba va gur tnzr, jura lbh fbyir gur svefg chmmyr, lbh cresbez na veeribpnoyr npgvba naq ybfr npprff gb gur svefg ebbz bs gur tnzr. Gurer'f abguvat vzcbegnag yrsg va gung ebbz — ol gur gvzr lbh jnyx bhg, lbh'ir frra rirelguvat lbh cbffvoyl pna frr gurer. Ohg vg'f fhqqra, naq wneevat, naq lbh'er tvira gur vzcerffvba gung gur tnzr vf, ba gur Zarfian scale, anfgl.

Guvf vf nyzbfg ragveryl n snyfr vzcerffvba: nyzbfg rirel bgure chmmyr va gur tnzr vf npghnyyl zrepvshy. Ab 'zbir' be 'hfr' pbzznaq pna pnhfr gur tnzr gb raq be orpbzr hajvaanoyr. (Gurer vf n tbbq raqvat naq n onq raqvat, naq gur jnl gur pubvpr bs raqvat vf qrpvqrq vf Mnesvna-pehry, ohg guvf qbrfa'g nssrpg lbhe novyvgl gb trg gb gur raqvat.) Gur bayl jnl gb qvr vf gb sbbyvfuyl nafjre "Ab" gb n dhrfgvba jubfr cebcre nafjre nf "Lrf" fubhyq or boivbhf. (Naq lbh trg gb fnir orsber lbh nafjre, naljnl.)

Oh, but make sure you take the axe. Some puzzles and events seem to assume you have it; I haven't tested to see if this is actually a problem, though. [sic]

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I approve of the main character's appearance for several reasons, mostly because it subtly plays with viewers' expectations. The climax and denouement make it clear that she's not what she looks like — but not in the tomato-in-the-mirror sort of way you'd expect from reading that sentence; it's just that her appearance and outfit is styled to give an impression which, in the context provided by the epilogue, is plainly false simply because said epilogue quietly and nonchalantly rebukes several assumptions most people will not even be aware of making. Unlike the above, this is not a spoiler because I am almost entirely certain you will not realize what I mean by that until you see it at the end.

The voice acting did not make me want to jab my ears out with a rusty knife, which is always a plus; I did usually interrupt her, but I am impatient and can read faster than anyone speaks. (I did find it curiously jarring that our protagonist spoke with an American accent, but was subtitled in British English.)

As for the horror aspects, I can only compare this game to Silent Hill 3 — that being the only other graphical psychological-horror game I've played (though of course it's also rather similar to many an amnesiac-protagonist IF game: Babel comes to mind). The FPS-ish elements present in SH3 (or other games referred to as "survival horror") are obviously absent. As a whole, it's not quite as creepy as SH3, but this is largely due to its much shorter length. (There's probably slightly less gore per minute, but not by very much.)

The game is actually very short — five or six hours' play, perhaps. Ten if you go slowly. There's no hunt-the-magic-pixel difficulty here — all the interactible-with objects are fairly obvious, and if you're still having trouble there's a configuration option which allows you to use Ctrl-Tab to cycle through the mouse-sensitive areas of the screen, the way you can in some Flash games. Its use takes nothing away from the game. (By contrast, FASCO-CS's rather annoying puzzle game relies almost entirely on this sort of fake difficulty, being one of the sorts that disables Flash's built-in use of Tab to cycle through sensitive areas of the screen.)

The artwork is quite good; the animation is, at worst, occasionally a little stiff, but not unforgivably so.

Altogether I can rate the game 1/1, and express some sorrow that Studio Trophis hasn't released anything else. They've supposedly been working on a game entitled For the Game — "Rest assured we are still working on this project and would like to stake our reputations that you'll finally get to try For The Game yourself before the end of 2008." ... yyyyeah. Ah well; c'est la vie.