| The White ChamberStudio Trophis | The White Chamber is an anime style point and click adventure game featuring fabulous graphics, a compelling story, multiple endings, and original voice acting. However, I must warn that The White Chamber features bad language, gore, and other highly disturbing imagery. That being said, if you like anime and/or point and click adventures, stop reading this review and download the thing.
Ok, for those of you that are still here, I will go on, though I must admit there is little about the plot I can reveal in good conscience, which is perhaps a testament to it's superb storytelling style. You take the role of a girl who wakes up in a coffin aboard a space station and can't remember who she is, what she's doing there, or what is going on.
What shines more than anything else to me is the sheer quantity and quality of content in this game. This, of course, is reflected by its file size: well over 300 megabytes. Each scene in the game is amazingly detailed and colored in an original anime inspired style. There are even a few cut scenes produced in the traditional hand drawn anime style, which is mind boggling for a no budget studio to include in a freeware game.
Adding to the impressive nature of this title is the fact that the game offers voice overs in two languages, English and German(I only tried the English; they're not bad), and subtitles in a dozen others making this an excellent title for those wishing to sharpen their acquisition of a foreign language. The creators also went to quite a length to create music that amplifies the game's creepy Lovecraftian horror theme.
It will occur to players as either bad or good that The White Chamber is a difficult game. Then again, considering it's explicit content, perhaps it is simply aimed at a higher age group. You can die in multiple situations in this game, so the player is made to think about what to do next rather than simply trying everything with everything.
There are also multiple endings. There's a good ending, a bad ending, a crappy ending, and a couple deaths too insignificant to be called an ending. I also think I may have missed an alternate ending in my play through. The good thing about this game is that you'll be involved enough in the story to play through all the endings and upon finally reaching the good ending (I'm pretty sure the developers intended for all players to end up at the same place eventually; you'll understand what I mean when you play the game) you actually feel quite satisfied with how the plot resolves for the main character.
Now's the point where I usually indicate what I don't like about a game, but in this case, there isn't a whole lot. The game seemed somewhat short, but perhaps that's only because there are relatively few rooms to explore (not that that's a bad thing). I often find the most annoying part of a point and click adventure is being able to take a shower while my guy walks across the game environments to get from one objective to another, but it wasn't too bad in this case. Even with the few number of scenes in the game, there are plenty of puzzles to solve. I also liked the minimal interface. There's no menu screen; just press escape to save, load, or quit. And there are only two things you can do to objects in the game: look at them and use them, which I think removes much of the frustration of the genre from this title.
All in all, The White Chamber is a must play for the sake of it's incredible polish. |
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