Blue Chairs

Baf's Guide

My favourite game in IF-Competition 2004, Blue Chairs almost immediately won me over by a wonderfully surreal (or, more precise, dream-like) atmosphere and setting. As it turned out later, they were combined with one of the strongest stories I'd ever encountered in interactive fiction. On the other hand, it has been (deservedly, it seems) criticized for somewhat obscure puzzles, so that someone could find enough reasons to take away a star off its rating; someone - but not me.

-- Valentine Kopteltsev

>VERBOSE -- Paul O'Brian's Interactive Fiction Page

Klimas has a hold of something very powerful -- interactive fiction steeped in surrealism and symbolism. This sort of thing has been tried before, but Blue Chairs is the best realization of it that I've seen.
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5 star: (19) 4 star: (9) 3 star: (10) 2 star: (5) 1 star: (3)

Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 7 Write a review

Most Helpful Member Reviews

Technically great, full of symbolistic smugness, December 28, 2008
I played Blue Chairs because I looked specifically for games with a surreal setting and surreal is what I got. The opening scene is really great, both technically and as a plot device, and it seems like the start of some psychedelic fun. But it isn't really psychedelic, it felt more like the stoned ramblings of a preachy zen-buddhist who read too much wikipedia on Freudian pychoanalysis. Then again, I don't know what kind of drug I, the player that is, is on.

I have no problem with games with a message, but either I didn't really get it or I'm not interested in it.

But mine is a very subjective point of view: The game is flawles technically, has various endings and if you are into psychology of the sub-consiciousness, symbolism and new-age-isms or just more tolerant than me, you will love it.

Even though I didn't like it I advise you to play it, it deserves it!

One of my favorites, November 22, 2007
One of my favorite games, Blue Chairs is surreal at its best. It's not surreal for its own sake, but to underpin the emotional state of the protagonist. You are Dante Hicks (no, not the one from Clerks), and you begin the game by drinking a bottle of unknown liquid from a strange man. From there you drift from reality to dream to nightmare to who-knows-what state you're in and back again, but it is all amazingly cohesive.

Dancing in the Dance
You can go anywhere you want. You can see anything you want. Where are you? There are five hundred people crammed into this room -- it's a miracle of genetic instinct and secular humanism that no one's bumping into anyone else, except when they want to, which is always... Why don't you touch people more? You never hug people except when they hug you first. Your grandmother leaving for a trip to New Orleans, to see where her body will reside once she's gone up to wherever it is that grandmothers belong after they die...

Like an interactive fiction version of a David Lynch movie, Blue Chairs manages to be confusing, provocative, beautiful, and in the end packs a surprising emotional punch.

Needs an Author's Cut, June 11, 2008
The game deserves 4 stars. A good edit would get it 5 stars.

The implementation is utterly sound and the prose is consistent and error-free. And that alone is enough to set this apart from 80% of that year's offerings.

It's a beautiful game, and I got really immersed. However, there's a dream section that goes beyond the nightime otherworldly and into pure surrealism for the sake of getting some exposition done. It's not needed, and shakes the mood.

What I'm saying (non-spoilery) is that the conversation with the reporter could as easily have been done by a conversation with Chris, while flying through the dark in the car.

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