I put 16 hours into this game and I greatly enjoyed it. I'm going to give it a thumbs up because I think it's good, but I actually DON'T recommend it to new players...

First of all, what exactly is Cloud Chamber? Well it's really more of story than a game. The story is told over 10 chapters, each of which contain a series of story nodes. Each node could be a video clip (uses real actors - Renley Baratheon from Game of Thrones is one of the lead characters!), photographs, transcripts etc.

One of the things that is quite unique is in the way these nodes are delivered. In each chapter you traverse this odd sci-fi landscape going from node to node and it isn't linear. Two players are unlikely to take the same course through the game. Thus what gets delivered is little snippets of the story out of order and you find yourself trying to piece together the timeline and that's what makes it interesting and makes you want to keep going to find out what happened.

Also, another thing I have to mention is the soundtrack - it's superb. It's different in each chapter and it just merges in with the game so well really giving it a great atmosphere.

But here's the problem... in each chapter only around 2/3 of the story nodes are actually available at the start. In order to unlock the rest and thus get the full story you need to interact with other players. This works rather like a social network such as Facebook. Each story node has an attached discussion area where you comment on the node, rate up others comments, reply and so on. But in order to unlock the hidden nodes you need to get a certain number of likes / comments from other players per chapter.

This wouldn't be a problem if it was an active game but it isn't any longer. I got Cloud Chamber in a bundle around a month ago and at that time there were quite a few players and plenty of discussion. But I took my time and now, some weeks later, by the time I got to the final chapter there were just 2 active players on that chapter. We were messaging each other, replying to each others comments just so we could get through it and this felt somewhat artificial.

Having said that, yu can still get a large part of the story from the unlocked nodes. You could play through from chapter 1 -10 completely ignoring the social stuff in probably an hour or two and you wouldn't be missing that much. In a few of the later chapters the locked nodes were actually very disappointing; they used a lot of clips from science programs and it started to feel like I was back in school. This felt like low value filler content.

Finally, the ending. I won't spoil it of course but I finished the game feeling unsatisfied. As I went through the final nodes I was thinking "is this it?", and it didn't feel finished. Many questions were left unanswered which was quite frustrating.

I put 16 hours into this game and I greatly enjoyed it. I'm going to give it a thumbs up because I think it's good, but I actually DON'T recommend it to new players... First of all, what exactly is Cloud Chamber? Well it's really more of story than a game. The story is told over 10 chapters, each of which contain a series of story nodes. Each node could be a video clip (uses real actors - Renley Baratheon from Game of Thrones is one of the lead characters!), photographs, transcripts etc. One of the things that is quite unique is in the way these nodes are delivered. In each chapter you traverse this odd sci-fi landscape going from node to node and it isn't linear. Two players are unlikely to take the same course through the game. Thus what gets delivered is little snippets of the story out of order and you find yourself trying to piece together the timeline and that's what makes it interesting and makes you want to keep going to find out what happened. Also, another thing I have to mention is the soundtrack - it's superb. It's different in each chapter and it just merges in with the game so well really giving it a great atmosphere. But here's the problem... in each chapter only around 2/3 of the story nodes are actually available at the start. In order to unlock the rest and thus get the full story you need to interact with other players. This works rather like a social network such as Facebook. Each story node has an attached discussion area where you comment on the node, rate up others comments, reply and so on. But in order to unlock the hidden nodes you need to get a certain number of likes / comments from other players per chapter. This wouldn't be a problem if it was an active game but it isn't any longer. I got Cloud Chamber in a bundle around a month ago and at that time there were quite a few players and plenty of discussion. But I took my time and now, some weeks later, by the time I got to the final chapter there were just 2 active players on that chapter. We were messaging each other, replying to each others comments just so we could get through it and this felt somewhat artificial. Having said that, yu can still get a large part of the story from the unlocked nodes. You could play through from chapter 1 -10 completely ignoring the social stuff in probably an hour or two and you wouldn't be missing that much. In a few of the later chapters the locked nodes were actually very disappointing; they used a lot of clips from science programs and it started to feel like I was back in school. This felt like low value filler content. Finally, the ending. I won't spoil it of course but I finished the game feeling unsatisfied. As I went through the final nodes I was thinking "is this it?", and it didn't feel finished. Many questions were left unanswered which was quite frustrating.