Korsakovia

This single-player mod for Source is currently in closed beta development.

Korsakovia is a survival horror FPS from the makers of Dear Esther, which asks two questions:

1. What happens if you remove the normal visual and audio cues attached to agents, making them more abstract and difficult to project behaviour onto?
2. Can you take the abstract storytelling experiments we made with Dear Esther and marry them to more traditional gameplay?

Warts and all, Korsakovia is the result...

It will be released on 20th September 2009.

Features

• Fuses abstract storytelling of Dear Esther with more traditional gameplay
• Experiments with alternative visualisation of agents
• Lots of playing around with visual effects and environmental build

Media

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thechineseroom

Korsakovia was developed for the earth-shattering sum of approximately £10,500 as an internal grant from the University of Portsmouth, as part of the ongoing chineseroom project into experimental FPS gaming.

The core ideas behind thechineseroom are that:

1. There are important and interesting questions about FPS gaming that cannot be answered simply by studying and analysing commercial titles, and that it's necessary to experiment and build in order to address them and
2. There's no reason why a research project shouldn't be any less playable and 'fun' than a non-research project (i.e. a 'normal' game). On top of that, if you want to really make something that is true to the medium, then it should stand or fall as a game in its own right, and players should be able to engage with in on those terms.

Previous releases as part of the project include Dear Esther (Source), Conscientious Objector (Doom3/idTech4) and Antlion Soccer (Source). All are freely available from ModDB.

If you have any questions about thechineseroom project or any of our mods, please contact me at dan.pinchbeck@port.ac.uk. More information about us can be found at www.thechineseroom.co.uk.

Team

Korsakovia dev team

Korsakovia was written and produced by Dan Pinchbeck

The environment was designed by Dan Pinchbeck and Adam Griffiths

The environment was built by Adam Griffiths, with additional build by Dan Pinchbeck and Ankur Shah

Coding was by Maksim Mitrofanov

Audio and music was by Jessica Curry (www.jessicacurry.co.uk)

Genevieve Adam voiced Doctor Christine Grayson and Ben Crystal voiced Christopher

The voice acting was recorded at Middle Street Studios, UK, by Phil Thompson

Playtesters were

Nick Mower

Donkey81

Eli Just

Maksim Mitrofanov

BiGToM (who also debugged a level for us)

Albert Teng

External links

• Korsakovia page on ModDB including link to download
• thechineseroom project website