OUT OF CHARACTER

While you’ll meet a large number of characters along the way, none of them are rendered in a traditional way. The Chinese Room instead sticks to shimmering silhouettes made of fizzling energy, picking out key gestures (an arm pointing, for example, or a head despairingly dropped into hands) and movement in the world, but no more detail than that. It’s a wholly successfully aesthetic that manages to strengthen the sense of disconnection you feel from normality as you move through a community in which life has been mysteriously extinguished, while at the same time circumventing the drama-neutering effects of the uncanny valley, which even the most advanced models and animation can’t entirely avoid.