If you haven't played Dear Esther or Conscientious Objector, stop reading this and do so immediately. Not just because these two games by thechineseroom are tremendously interesting experiments in their own right, but because they're honestly quite a bit better than thechineseroom's latest attempt, Korsakovia.
Where DE and CO bent the rules of what first-person gaming can be and what emotions it can evoke -- Dear Esther is utterly without challenge or conflict, and Conscientious Objector is entirely about making the player feel like dirt -- Korsakovia feels weirdly familiar. You run away from bad dudes in a linear, darkly-lit environment while navigating some fairly difficult platforming sections and a few jumping puzzles. Whether that sounds good or bad is up to you.
Personally, Korsakovia's basic gameplay makes my least favorite game from thechineseroom yet, but its dedication to merging its creepy atmosphere with a wildly interesting story keeps me coming back. How interesting, you ask? Consider your role: you play a mental patient who has gouged his own eyes out.
Granted, I haven't actually finished it yet. It's way, way too frigging hard to figure out where you need to go at any given time -- after my second time getting completely lost, I got so irritated I shut the game off. Still, though, the story and atmosphere alone are worth the price of entry (which is free, assuming you own Half-Life 2: Episode Two). Get it here.
Contest:
9:30 PM on 09.25.2009
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After playing for an hour I'd only gotten to Chapter 2. Honestly I would have preferred it with no player death, like Esther.
So I just listened to all the voice clips and felt like I got a better experience out of that then the game proper.
Once you find the numbers, you are supposed to go back to the room with the jumping puzzle where you got the crowbar. On the far end of the room, up the ladder, is a door with a keypad. When you get there the door will unlock for you automatically.
@KIHP
It's not like a room escape. There is only one item to find.
this is certainly a difficult game, but i'd recommend giving it a full run if you're able to - i was, without needing to ask for info, you just need to be thorough and sometimes realize that the game's going to throw some very confusing, jarring things at you (here's a vague hint: your sense of sight isnt always reliable, trust your other senses to be accurate if something seems simply screwed up).
in finished the game tonight, but played the majority of it last night... after hours of playing (and having to stop because it was around 7am), i was absolutely jittery, wired, aggravated, terse - and not *just* due to the difficulty. and the creepier parts (note the pictures of the dead, in pitch-black rooms later in the game) in my view, if a game manages to hit you like that, it's doing something right.
"and the creepier parts (etc etc) had gotten under my skin" is what i had intended to say in the last paragraph.
from everything i've read, this game is about the psychotic experience, about being INSANE and HAVING NO EYES. If the level design doesn't make any sense then there's probably a very, very good reason for it!