To The Green – The Corridor: On Behalf of the Dead

To The Green is a weekly look at one game on Steam Greenlight trying to get onto Steam. Many games get mired in the process trying to get there, caught up with abandoned projects, shovelware, and other things. With To The Green we hope to highlight one worthy game each week that is attempting and let you decide if it is something you’d be interested in trying out.

This week, we take a look at an adventure sci-fi horror game that is called The Corridor: On Behalf Of The Dead made by Desktop Daydreams.

In the distant future, the world is recovering from a cataclysmic event. Society is no longer what it had been; made instead of struggling survivors in a world where people grow more and more desperate. Violence has become a normal part of life – murder, assault, battery, driving them to create a new experimental method of justice.

The program is known simply as ‘The Corridor’. In this they train handpicked individuals and prepare them for experiences that might destroy others. These people, known as Custodians, enter the minds of suspected murderers to find out what really happened in the most horrific of cases. They seek out proof that cannot be denied – that of the memories in the killers own mind of what he/she has done.

In The Corridor, you take on the role of one of the Custodians, Ri Anderson, who has  been trained since childhood as a Custodian. You are investigating the mind of a suspected killer, like Custodians typically do, for the memories of a suspected murder.

Desktop Daydreams uses the unpredictability of the human mind in The Corridor to tell a non-linear story. Memories come back erratically, in different ways and orders allowing for a different experience to the story each time. How you experience the memories and what you choose will impact which of the multiple endings you get.

A large part of the game is exploration through the presumptive killer’s mind. The Corridor program creates a way for you to explore the killer’s subconscious mind, but it isn’t a simple thing. Corridors connect together and act as the primary travel conduits for exploration to the subconscious mind. Throughout the different ones, you will find clues and things that will keep you on edge.

To connect to the memories one has to use Hatches. These are the gates to the memories and transport you to different areas of the killers mind. The different areas hold other memories which you can then experience and add to those you have already seen so you can try to figure out what is going on.

The Corridor, like many other Adventure games, also features puzzles as a core element of its gameplay. Here it makes sense as you are deciphering the mind of a person and thus no matter how weird the puzzles can seem – the mind is an odd thing. The puzzles will be of various kinds – ranging from physics based ones to riddles. Some of them will be needed to get items necessary to progress, others might just let you see another story segment, which may be optional.

It would be remiss to talk about The Corridor though without talking about the Oculus Rift. The Corridor has been developed the whole time with Oculus Rift support to help it feel like you are in the mind of the killer. Ideally, it will help place you in Ri Anderson’s spot – exploring firsthand the mind of an odd, and possibly psychotic person. This may help lead to a more unique and immersive experience.

The Corridor: On Behalf of the Dead is currently on Steam Greenlight. It is tentatively expected to be released in the fourth quarter of 2015. Their Greenlight campaign also has some interesting Dev Updates. In their last one, they detailed Hatches system with screenshots how the visual scripting tool shows the different states and actions a Hatch might take.

Of course, I have a trailer for you here to look at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vtd3NAkn5tc

Have a game on Greenlight you think we should take a look at? Post about it in the comments below or email don@techraptor.net !