Tag: The Chinese Room

News

Dear Esther: Landmark Edition is a delicate, embalmed object

Heterotopias is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by artist and writer Gareth Damian Martin. /// Videogames have always had something of a preference for islands. These closed spaces, limited by a shoreline, are the perfect conceit for creating an enclosed simulation—an isolated section of “reality” split off from the world. Despite this, thematically, games rarely have anything to say about their own predisposition towards landscapes of isolation, separation, and abandonment. For Dear Esther, these are central themes. It’s easy to imagine that Dan Pinchbeck’s choice of an island setting for the original 2008 Half-Life 2 mod, built…
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Everything we know about The Chinese Room’s next game so far

There’s a terrible pun here about The Chinese Room leaving us totally in the dark about their new game, Total Dark, but I’m trying to be better than that. Maybe. Anyway… It’s been a few months now since Everybody’s Gone to Rapture (2015) emerged, triumphant, on the PlayStation 4, and so it’s fair to ask what’s next for the Brighton-based studio. The answer three months ago was the self-funded RPG Total Dark, an isometric adventure game that “took inspiration from those old paper-based RPG systems of the late 80s and early 90s.” However, in a blog post on the studio’s site yesterday, The…
Everybody's Gone to the Capture
Feature

The English melancholia of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

This article is part of our lead-up to Kill Screen Festival where Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture artist Alex Grahame will be speaking. /// “These are the dark November days when the English hang themselves!” – Voltaire /// The English are known for a number of bred-in-the-bone traits but chief among them is a certain melancholia. There is nothing uniquely English about being a bit sad but history has latched it to us as part of our national character. Perhaps it is our artists who are to blame for this. John Dowland, the Elizabethan bard, is remembered for his motto: “Semper…
Feature

Two5six is now The Kill Screen Festival

Join us June 4th, 2016 for our fourth annual festival. The Kill Screen Festival, formerly Two5six, is a weekend dedicated to celebrating creative collaboration between games and other great art. We bring together two speakers, one from within games and one from without, to discuss a topic pertinent to both of their work. The conversations that result are often unexpected but always interesting and inspiring. This festival has a lot to offer everyone from those who play games religiously to those who don’t know Link from Zelda. Our lineup this year features some of the most promising creators in independent gaming…
Dear Esther
News

More people will soon be able to play The Chinese Room’s poetic videogames

Very soon, thousands more will have the opportunity to get lonely with a videogame in the most beautiful way. Yes, The Chinese Room is bringing both its poetic narrative games, Dear Esther (2012) and last year’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, to new platforms—the former is coming to Xbox One and PlayStation 4, while the latter makes its way to PC. Other than a few pleasant additional touches, like a developer’s commentary for Dear Esther and a few bug fixes, the games will remain essentially unchanged. That means each of these games will, once again, invite you into their virtual…
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What’s going on over at The Chinese Room?

A lot is going on at The Chinese Room at the moment. Perhaps not as much as before Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture was released, or necessarily more than any other studio out there, but what is going on is being documented in surprisingly personal and honest blogs. This is going to start off grim and then slowly get less grim, so stick with it. We begin with the studio’s co-founder Jessica Curry who had a “horribly hard post to write.” In short, she’s leaving (sort of), but will continue to compose music for the studio’s games.  “I was so…
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Breaking: Walking simulator features a "run" button

We were keen on Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the Chinese Room’s spiritual successor to Dear Esther and a furious, beautiful audio-visual experience. The game is literate, subtle, and adult, all qualities missing from a lot of the games we come across, even those that aspire to such descriptors. We (by which I mean I) also called it “the Gran Turismo of walking simulators,” in that it obstinately keeps the player moving at a fixed clip through a fairly sprawling world. While I enjoyed this restraint, many other critics thought it sullied the entire experience.  In a blog post, Chinese Room creative director…