loan me your imagination for a moment

imagine the government has been informed by aliens that a god has crash landed alongside the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs, it has come as close to dying during the whole ordeal and has been slumbering for the past couple of millenniums, the aliens now informed that the god is soon to be awakened in a week and must bury them with their strongest weapon possible to continue his slumber before they come themselves to remove him from earth

so, the government decides to simply send a spec ops team with a nuke to the god's location and go to the deepest part of his resting place, a pyramid located in the Yucatan peninsula

soon, you'll see plenty of odd things, crystals that give unique magic powers, monsters based on the fears of humans thanks to the god's immense power on turning the pyramid into a collective cognition by just dreaming, the fate of those who came before you and how much of death trap the pyramid is turning to be, as you scrap with whatever previous explorers left for you to survive after your equipment broke before reaching the place, all while time is running on real time and reminding you there's not much time before the world ends if you don't fulfilled your mission

all this sounds incredibly interesting and a great setting for a shooter dungeon crawler with RPG mechanics. right?

well too bad
the game doesn't live up to it at all

let me be clear, all the previously mentioned stuff is just small touches of interesting writing that you will get from the manual and talking with corpses around the pyramid (we get to that later), all while putting the puzzles pieces together with a lot of interjection

the actual game itself is a game that is not shy to hide the fact it was inspired by doom and ultima underworld with its shooting combined with very, very small RPG mechanics with open exploration, but the mistake this game makes is trying to do too much despite not having the people nor the tech to achieve what they aimed for

if SMT hired some halloween decorator to design every piece of art, this would be the result, monsters look extremely cartoonish to be taken seriously despite being told how the others died horribly by them, the actual game scenery looks like screensavers from Windows 98 and there is not a single piece of music at all, all you have is SFXs

at the beginning, you would believe its a game about managing your resources and saving up ammo or crystal spells when things are dire, it goes like this for almost half the game until they introduce a box than let you create an infinite amount of ammo, it does introduce a interesting debate whenever letting time pass to get a surplus of ammo or push forward while slowly letting the box run its course, but in practice, you pretty much always stock up since all you need to do is avoid being trigger-happy to always have ammo

its one unique mechanic involves talking with corpses thanks to a spell inside a yellow crystal, this is where you gather up most of the background plot and clues on how to advance inside the pyramid, alongside trying to help you solve cryptic stuff like a wall not having collision and hiding a crystal that can damage an enemy type who can't be harmed by bullets, it still won't save you from the more cryptic puzzles that comes into the late game, like having to wear a cloak to avoid suffocating in a trap you cannot avoid (which no one solved unless they bought a manual that outright tells you) or figuring out that the meditating guys blocking your way can only be killed with an earthquake made by your spells

in general, the game feels like for every 4 levels, the devs figure out a new gimmick they wanna try and expect the player to just try everything by brute force and gotta keep tally on everything they do, right down on how you have to search for the bomb, arm it and get an escape beacon, but its also surprising the game also gives you the leeway of skip getting any of them in exchange for a worse ending

yet, looking back, the game didn't piss me off that much and those small touches of writing kept me engage all the way until the end, it really carry the whole thing

i would recommend playing it at least once in your life, just to see how Bungie started and slowly develop into the powerhouse than they are now

The White Chamber is one of many exemplary cases of how free games/freeware had been before digital storefronts became widely accepted. 2-10 British and German dudes (+ the one or two women they knew to do a the VO work) working a year or a few for a proud tribute between Event Horizon and Silent Hill, with the sheen and style of Anime. In the limited budget cost of "no profit", a Point-and-Click becomes and easy path forward to develop with. Many of the people involved went on other and maybe greater things down the road (not alone, but with Kairo being a notable example).

Because of how short this game is (1 to 5 hours, depending on how knowledgeable you are of it), a walkthrough will spoil the setups and paths quickly. In whole, a short, well put together creepy experience.