The Chinese Room "Goes Dark", Lays Off Team

If you’ve heard of the aptly named “Walking Simulator” style of game, then you’ve probably heard of The Chinese Room. The enigmatically-named studio was the folks behind the game that founded the first game of that style, Dear Esther, and would go on to rise that huge wave of success with a series of near-misses and flops. Everyone can agree A Machine for Pigs wasn’t what people were really looking for in a follow-up to the critical darling Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and Everybody’s Gone to Rapture, while well-intended, simply lacked the… oomph of their earlier work. Plus, the fact you had to slowly walk everywhere until they patched in sprinting kinda sucked.

Well, it seems they agree, to some extent, as this Sunday they released a new blog post telling their fans that the studio would be “going dark”… for an unknown length of time.

To cut a long story short, the situation – between financial pressures, trying to keep the lights on for the employed team, the stress of end-of-development, health issues – just wasn’t a tenable thing anymore. It was time to take a break, recharge, recover and have a good think about the future.

Going dark doesn’t mean the studio is shutting down: far from it! Co-founder Dan Pinchbeck assures their fans they’ll still be around to answer questions, take care of things, and release their VR game So Let Us Melt, just that things will ‘slow down’. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be big changes: namely, as part of going dark, they’re laying off everyone else in the studio.

Which, you know, sucks. But when you’re the boss you get to make those choices, and they go on to defend the action by saying they were “creatives, not managing directors," and I can sympathize with people who are thrust into a role they don’t want.

Either way, we won’t be hearing much from The Chinese Room for at least a few more months, and when they return they might not even come back with games. But, when they do come back, I’d wager dollars to doughnuts they come back with something super pretentious.

You can quote me on that.