The White Chamber

Last updated

The White Chamber
The White Chamber Cover.png
Developer(s) Studio Trophis
Designer(s) Richard Perrin
Programmer(s) Richard Perrin
Artist(s) Paul Johnson
Composer(s) Zakir Rahman
Engine Wintermute Engine
Platform(s) Microsoft Windows
ReleaseMarch 2005
Genre(s) Adventure
Mode(s) Single-player

The White Chamber, stylized as the white chamber, is a science fiction adventure game created by Studio Trophis using the Wintermute Engine. Originally designed as a university project, it was expanded to a full game and released for Microsoft Windows as free download in 2005. [1] [2]

Contents

Gameplay

The player controls a girl who awakens in a coffin in a darkened room. She has no memory of how she got there, and opens the windows to reveal that she is in fact in space. The player must solve the puzzles and move from room to room, piecing together what happened to the crew of the station. [3] Along the way, she discovers logs from a technician named Arthur Anderson documenting the mystery of the main laboratory, the titular "white chamber".

Release history

The first release of the game was released for free in 2005, and featured four endings depending on the player's choices during the game. It originally had no voice acting, but several animated sections, including an opening and ending. The inclusion of anime sequences meant the game was over 300  MB to download.

The size was one of the contributing factors to the fact that it was originally available exclusively through bittorrent. In an article for PC Zone , Richard Perrin stated that using bittorrent allowed them to reduce their bandwidth costs greatly. The game is no longer available for direct download on the Studio Trophis site, due to unexpected increases in traffic. There is however, a download link on the site page.

The game has been updated multiple times and is now at version 1.7. It features eight endings and the text in nine languages, English, Czech, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Russian and voice acting in either English or German. [3]

The game's source code and assets have been released under the CC BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license. [4] [5] That means anyone is free to share and modify the game as long as Studio Trophis is credited, it is not for commercial gain, and that the result is made available under a similar license ("Freeware"). The game's engine ("Wintermute") source code was later released under the MIT license in 2013 on Bitbucket. [6] [7]

Around 2014 a remastered version was announced for commercial re-release, by Richard Perrin's successor company. [8]

Reception

The game has received very positive critical reactions. The New York Times described it as "Grisly and intriguing, with logical puzzles and surprising plot twists, Chamber is a first-rate garage game." [12] The Inventory magazine called it "A genuinely suspenseful horror game in a marvelously drawn anime style. All in all this game is a marvelous first outing by Studio Trophis." and gave 80/100 points. [11] Indie Games Plus included it in their list of top adventure games of 2006. [13]

As of May 2006 the game has been downloaded over 100,000 times and has featured on many magazines across the world (including the UK's best-selling SFX magazine [14] and The New York Times ) and appeared often on cover discs.

Related Research Articles

GameMaker is a series of cross-platform game engines created by Mark Overmars in 1999 and developed by YoYo Games since 2007. The latest iteration of GameMaker was released in 2022.

<i>Gobliiins</i> Puzzle adventure video game series

Gobliiins is a puzzle adventure video game series, consisting of five entries, released by Coktel Vision for the Amiga, Atari ST, DOS, and Macintosh platforms. The first three titles were released in the early 1990s, the fourth in 2009. The visual look of the series and its characters were created by French artist Pierre Gilhodes, whose style was used in another game from Coktel Vision: Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth.

Wintermute Engine (WME) is a set of software tools and a runtime interpreter primarily designed for creating and running graphical adventure games.

<i>Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars</i> 1996 video game

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars is a 1996 point-and-click adventure game developed by Revolution Software. It is the first in the Broken Sword series, co-written and directed by Charles Cecil. The player assumes the role of George Stobbart, an American tourist in Paris, as he attempts to unravel a deep conspiracy involving a sinister cult and a hidden treasure, seeing him travel to various locations around Europe and the Middle East. The game's storyline was conceived to feature a serious tone and heavily influenced by research on Knights Templar by Cecil, but was also interlaced with humor and graphics in the style of classic animated films.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Studio Trophis Production Company</span>

The Studio Trophis Production Company, or Studio Trophis for short, was an independent video game developer, based in Sheffield, UK. Their first game, The White Chamber, a point-and-click sci-fi horror adventure, was released for the PC for free download via their website in 2005. They were working on their second game, entitled For The Game. On 26 December 2009, Studio Trophis had closed its doors, as all the other members were busy with their own projects and lives.

qBittorrent Free and open source BitTorrent client

qBittorrent is a cross-platform free and open-source BitTorrent client written in native C++. It relies on Boost, OpenSSL, zlib, Qt 6 toolkit and the libtorrent-rasterbar library, with an optional search engine written in Python.

Bitbucket is a Git-based source code repository hosting service owned by Atlassian. Bitbucket offers both commercial plans and free accounts with an unlimited number of private repositories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloud9 IDE</span> Online integrated development environment

Cloud9 IDE is an Online IDE, published as open source from version 2.0, until version 3.0. It supports multiple programming languages, including C, C++, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, JavaScript with Node.js, and Go.

<i>Anna</i> (video game) 2012 video game

Anna is a 2012 psychological horror adventure video game developed by Dreampainters Software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Masthead Studios</span>

Masthead Studios is a Bulgarian video game developer, founded in 2005, specializing in massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Their latest PC game developed and published was Soul Grabber, released on Steam in 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Itch.io</span> Website for distributing games

Itch.io is a website for users to host, sell and download indie video games, indie role-playing games, game assets, comics, zines and music. Launched in March 2013 by Leaf Corcoran, the service hosts over 700,000 products as of April 2023.

<i>Super Lemonade Factory</i> 2012 video game

Super Lemonade Factory is a puzzle-platform video game developed by Initials Command.

<i>Weaving Tides</i> 2021 video game

Weaving Tides is a puzzle adventure video game developed by the Austrian developer Follow the Feathers. It was released on Windows, MacOS and Nintendo Switch on May 27, 2021.

<i>Chinatown Detective Agency</i> 2022 video game

Chinatown Detective Agency is a 2022 point-and-click adventure game developed by General Interactive Co. that was released on April 7, 2022 for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One. The game launched a Kickstarter campaign in March 2020, with a demo being released in September. The game is set in a cyberpunk version of Singapore in 2037.

<i>Webbed</i> 2021 video game

Webbed is a 2021 2D adventure puzzle platform game developed and published by Australian, Brisbane-based studio Sbug Games. A physics-based game set in a fantasy version of Queensland, players control a peacock spider whose goal is to rescue her boyfriend after he is kidnapped by a bowerbird, with the help of other bugs. The player can use spider webs to swing to different areas, create bridges, or move objects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aseprite</span> Pixel art image and animation editor

Aseprite is a proprietary, source-available image editor designed primarily for pixel art drawing and animation. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and features different tools for image and animation editing such as layers, frames, tilemap support, command-line interface, Lua scripting, among others. It is developed by Igara Studio S.A. and led by the developers David, Gaspar, and Martín Capello. Aseprite can be downloaded as freeware, or purchased on Steam or Itch.io. Aseprite source code and binaries are distributed under EULA, educational, and Steam proprietary licenses.

<i>Toasty: Ashes of Dusk</i> Upcoming video game

Toasty: Ashes of Dusk is an upcoming singleplayer action-adventure role-playing video game developed by Pocket Llama and published by Top Hat Studios. The game is set to release for Microsoft Windows, the PlayStation 5, the Nintendo Switch, and the Xbox Series X/S. A demo version of the game was made available in 2021.

References

  1. ↑ "About Us". Studio Trophis . Archived from the original on January 16, 2020. Retrieved April 13, 2021.
  2. ↑ Perrin, Richard (April 24, 2019). "Now on itch.io!". itch.io . Retrieved April 13, 2021.
  3. 1 2 "the white chamber". Studio Trophis . Archived from the original on January 16, 2020. Retrieved April 13, 2021.
  4. ↑ Perrin, Richard. "the white chamber". itch.io . Archived from the original on February 23, 2021. Retrieved April 14, 2021.
  5. ↑ "Downloads". Studio Trophis . Archived from the original on January 16, 2020. Retrieved April 13, 2021.
  6. ↑ Nedoma, Jan. "license.txt". Bitbucket . Archived from the original on May 10, 2018. Retrieved April 14, 2021.
  7. ↑ Nedoma, Jan (March 23, 2013). "Wintermute Engine source code - the complete guide". Wintermute Engine . Dead:Code Software. Archived from the original on October 24, 2020. Retrieved April 14, 2021.
  8. ↑ "the white chamber". Locked Door Puzzle. Lupus Studios Limited. Archived from the original on November 12, 2020. Retrieved April 14, 2021.
  9. ↑ Washburne, Robert (April 18, 2005). "The White Chamber Review". JustAdventure. Archived from the original on June 10, 2011. Retrieved April 14, 2021.
  10. ↑ "The White Chamber - Free PC Game Review". FreePCGamers. February 2009. Archived from the original on January 22, 2021.
  11. 1 2 "The White Chamber Game Review". PAH Nation. Archived from the original on March 21, 2017. Retrieved April 14, 2021.
  12. ↑ Herold, Charles (May 6, 2005). "Off the Couch, Deeper Into the Psyche". New York Times . Archived from the original on March 8, 2021. Retrieved April 14, 2021.
  13. ↑ W., Tim (February 15, 2007). "Top 20 Adventure Games: Part 1". Indie Games Plus. Retrieved April 14, 2021.
  14. ↑ Holmes, Leah (June 2005). "Press". Studio Trophis . SFX Magazine. Archived from the original on January 20, 2019. Retrieved April 14, 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.