Escape the White Chamber

I'd first like to say that the opening date of At World's End is a clear sign from the powers that be that I should buy tickets to watch it, as opposed to waiting for it to come to Star Movies.

My classmates introduced me to the brilliant White Chamber, a point-and-click puzzle game in which you must escape an isolated chamber McGyver-style, using whatever items that may have been carelessly left in the room. Whoever set up the White Chamber must have been particularly careless, because among other things the player can find a crowbar, a mysterious remote control, a manual (with pictures!) and a Yamaha motorcycle.

Part of the challenge with the game is learning the rules. In a real situation if someone were locked in such a room, their first action would be to pick up the table and pitch it through the garage window. Naturally, that is not an option here, and certain items can only interact with each other in certain ways and under certain conditions. The game also contains an element of the supernatural (or perhaps really advanced technology), so there really isn't any way to define what is possible or impossible.

That is not to say that there is no help for the player. Other than the opening scene, the game is marked by almost complete silence, broken only by sounds triggered by certain actions and snatches of an eerie tune which plays only when an important item is present in the scene. Once an item is in the inventory, it can be examined for a short sentence describing it; examining certain areas in the room will also trigger the display of messages, supposedly from the player talking to themselves, which serve as useful hints.

The creator of White Chamber, Toshimitsu Takagi, also created a number of other rooms, including the original Crimson Room, the creepy, grostly Viridian Room, and the simplistic - but no less challenging - Blue Chamber. However, in spite of being the most recent, White Chamber is possibly the easiest - the items which can be picked up interact in the most predictable ways, and there are no items hidden in obscure, hard-to-reach locations as in the Crimson Room. The greatest challenge is in learning how to perform certain actions, but once this is achieved it is merely a matter of putting things together. Perhaps this is what makes this game more successful as a logic puzzle - there is less emphasis on blind luck, and more on thinking things through.

As a whole it's a great game, especially for the puzzle-minded. I'd recommend it to anyone with a few free days to burn - and you'll need those few days, because once you're immersed in the White Chamber, its mysteries will haunt you until you figure the way out.

White Chamber requires the latest version of Adobe Flash Player to run. Get it here.