"Dear Esther had a 3D environment that looked, sounded, felt and played like a game, but there was actually nothing but a story to be told. We stripped the functional aspects of that story right back until you were left with just an avatar moving through a space and nothing to reward or engage you but the story itself," he explains. With Korsakovia, however, he takes this principle forward to challenge assumptions and expectations of what gameplay should be. The key question, he says, is how to take a story similar to Esther's and work it into a more traditional game structure.
Dear Esther was set on a Hebredian island covered in many strange symbols
Korsakovia, unlike Dear Esther, introduces such elements of traditional gameplay as puzzles, combat and even platforming in order to explore more closely the interchangeable nature of story and play. "I think story is important for most developers, but it also generally is assumed to be secondary to gameplay. For me, story and gameplay are one and the same thing: the division is misleading." Fortified by the enthusiastic reception Dear Esther and Korsakovia have enjoyed, he says that we can have different kinds of stories - less plot-driven, more abstract and less obvious to those with which we've become familiar.
With Korsakovia, therefore, the story remains central to the experience, and it's also even weirder than Dear Esher's dark meditations on isolation and obsession. Korsakovia's environment design and gameplay are intended to destabilise our expectations of how things should work, and this is where the inspiration for the game's title – based on Korsakoff's psychosis, a condition of amnesia, confabulation and apathy caused by vitamin B deficiency, becomes clear. "When I started thinking about the kinds of things I wanted to do in this mod, the fit was really natural - it's a terrifying illness and I couldn't quite believe it hadn't been used in a game before, as it's just almost perfect to wrap that kind of psychological horror experience around. It's surprising more games don't play with madness, especially as the breakdown of reality is an almost ubiquitous device."?
Korsakovia generates a much more disorientating effect than Dear Esther to serve its simulation of the mental disorder which inspires its name
Even though there are many similarities between the two projects – both are unusual, non-commercial SourceMods that aim to question game design – they provide very different experiences. While the melancholy Dear Esther was abstract and poetic, Korsakovia doesn't treat you so kindly. It instead goes for panic, confusion, frustration and fear. As Pinchbeck puts it, "If Esther is a slow, lonely climb up a mountainside, Korsakovia should feel like falling down the stairs in the dark, or that ground-falls-away feeling when you wake up and you're not sure, just for a second, if you are still in the nightmare."
Pinchbeck believes that many modern horror games are sterile and not very frightening. The solution he found was to carefully and deliberately break all the rules and conventions that made those games predictable. Only by making ourselves uncomfortable - the thinking goes - can we discover the edge that makes something truly frightening. The idea was to constantly mess around with our assumptions of what was meant to happen and of how things were supposed to be done. Nothing was taken for granted during the development process, and every aspect of the game was scrutinized and flipped on its head at one point or another. "We then sifted back through the wreckage afterwards to see where you could actually get away with breaking those rules, and where it just wrecked the experience for the player," he recalls.
For the moment, Pinchbeck is done with the experimental side of things and is hard at work raising funds for the team's first commercial project. "I want to consolidate all of this: to take all that experimentation and distil it into something where our key drive is a really high quality game experience, rather than an experiment. We've shown this type of experience can really work, but we've been limited by time, budget, and the need to focus on a kind of proof-of-concept approach. Now I'm hungry to go all out and make a really serious game using these principles, taking everything we've learned, the ground we've broken, then invest really heavily in making the best possible game we can out of that experience and knowledge."