E3 2015: The Chinese Room on a Korsakovia remake

The Chinese Room, indie developer known for Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, and now Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, created two Half-Life 2 mods in their early days: Dear Esther and Korsakovia. While the former received a remake treatment back in 2008, the reality-bending horror that is Korsakovia‘s sadly did not. When talking with The Chinese Room’s co-founder and game director, Dan Pinchbeck at this year’s E3, he dropped some hope for fans of Korsakovia.

“I actually tried to get Korsakovia working last week, and it’s so broken,” said Pinchbeck. “Korsakovia has a special place in my heart; it’s completely insane and it’s awful. And half of it is great and half of it is terrible. But there’s something about it that I still have a bit of a soft spot for. Maybe one day.”

He went on to say that if they revisit it, they’ll probably break it down into pieces of its better parts and focus on that, because there’s just too much about it that isn’t up to snuff these days. I touched base with Dan post-interview to get a few more details regarding Korsakovia and he wrote the following: “So what I meant was basically that I think there’s too much bad stuff in Korsakovia to justify a reboot – we’d need to really start again to make it work. But there’s some stuff in there I really like as well, so we’ll probably hack it up into lumps and raid the good stuff at some point.” He then went on to say – which he also touches on in our E3 interview – that some ideas from Korsakovia may find their way into The Chinese Room’s next game. So for fans of Korsakovia, it will live on in some capacity. We’ll just have to wait and see.