A Chinese Room by Milo van Mesdag
Note: While stricken with a nasty flu, I played this game for a total of about four hours & then immediately reviewed it. If I say anything foolish here, imagine it’s the virus speaking.
Spoilers here are for early in the game, but I’ve nevertheless blurred them for folks who want to play the game with totally fresh eyes.
A Chinese Room feels old, but covers contemporary events in politics, law, and moral philosophy. I think the vintage flavor is a result of European spellings & grammar conventions, default Twine visuals, and the writing style, which is very precise. This style meshes well with the internalities of the two protagonists, who are each being forced (or asked emphatically) to perform certain tasks. In my playthrough, neither showed much emotion, although there were options to do so. These choices didn’t feel as ‘in character’ to me, so I avoided them.
What we have here is a sort of political morality tale, dry and long but very rarely boring (I played both sections as a single player & found Caroline’s story especially engrossing). In fact, I found the dryness refreshing after spending the last few days reading a weird experimental novel. A Chinese Room is stylistically and mechanically as simple as can be, but its choices are logically demanding; a trait I associate more with parser games than Twine.
Caroline and Leon are two perspectives on the aftermath of a conflict: Caroline is the wife of a hopeful politician, and Leon is an interrogator at a government black site. As Caroline, you interact with your preoccupied husband and two children, and eventually you take a job “guiding” a European economist who has been sent by the IMF to understand and negotiate with the country’s new government. As Leon, you interview political prisoners and decide their fate, although what you think best may not always happen.
To me, Caroline felt fully realized in a way Leon was not. The ambiguity of Caroline’s decisions made her story something I could fully invest myself in, while it seemed clear what the “right” option was for Leon the majority of the time.
Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but the conflict seems to be a thinly-veiled depiction of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A Chinese Room occurs as the dust settles on a nation that has been absorbed into another.
van Mesdag describes the game as a “non-supernatural, non-technological horror” that is “based on the types of power structures, societal positions and psychological states that exist within the real world.” It felt closer to the drama or thriller genres than horror to me, but both descriptors are deeply inadequate and feel almost offensive given the gravity of the topics discussed. The game is horrifying but not scary, and van Mesdag doesn’t actually seem interested in terrifying his players - rather forcing them to confront legal and moral questions (secondarily; these don’t seem particularly debatable to me) and political questions (primarily; these do, and both protagonists are conflicted: a quality that makes it easier for the player to move in whatever direction they choose).
The game is polished, engaging, and thoughtful. It’s impossible for a two-hour text-based game to conjure wartime politics, sociology, morality, and ideology in full complexity, but A Chinese Room skillfully states its case and leaves a meaningful impact.
As much as One Last Pitbull Song (at the End of the World), A Chinese Room will be to the taste of some and not others. van Mesdag’s game will delight players with an interest in this unique intersection of politics & morality and repel those who enjoy only more impressionistic & poetic stories. However, based on its current number of reviews, it’s safe to say a fair number of people who have avoided A Chinese Room so far because of its length and subject matter will find that it’s a deceptively captivating tale. Enough so to keep a drowsy flu-inflicted ADHD-sufferer from wandering away for several hours.
edit: I neglected to mention the two-player option, which I didn’t try but I suppose based on my knowledge of the 1-player version would greatly enhance the game from all angles (except mechanics; it will be difficult to arrange). If you do get the chance, I think this is likely how the game is meant to be played.
