17/11/08 - White Chamber

Pulled some free stuff off the net recently. Got the World of Goo demo. Sticky-structure-styling is fun, though watching things collapse can be a bit disheartening. Pretty nice.

Also a free game called The White Chamber. It's a point-and-click adventure, with a sci-fi, horror theme. When I say horror, it's more disturbing imagery than anything else. There is a slight tenseness, but the 'scares' were too obvious to actually be frightening.

The puzzles are simple and logical, so there's little reason to be stuck. The game is also very short, 20-30 minutes if you know what you're doing, so the main reason to play is the 'horror' and story.

The story uses the amnesiac start, but it's interesting. The thing that bugs me is that they don't really explain why we're seeing all this gory imagery. I mean is it a hallucination, or projection or what? I could make some guesses, but an explanation would have been nice. There are a few endings. A couple are dying ones, but they don't just appear out of nowhere, so it's fine. I got the 'good' ending on the first try, it wasn't really that hard. The 'bad' ending is probably more interesting, actually. It sounds like there are a couple more endings I missed, because I used a walkthrough from an earlier version (after first completion, of course).

The graphics were pretty good, the backgrounds had some nice detail, and things were appropriately disturbing when they were supposed to be. Some people might dislike the anime main character, but apart from a couple of cutscenes, there's not much else specifically anime, so it shouldn't be a problem.

There was voice acting, and it was decent for a free game. Could have done a little more with context, like make her sound scared when she examines an object that only appears straight after a disturbing scene, or just putting a bit more emotion to things in general, but that's probably nitpicking. Just to be clear, she does sound scared/surprised for some things. There were some nicely appropriate ambient noises, though.

Additional - Okay, so after checking out the site a bit more, I found some audio files, that gave a bit of a prequel story to the game. The voice actor was pretty good, and the story was decent. It did explain a few things about the game that had bugged me, but not everything.