THE CORRIDOR

THE CORRIDOR is a short-form adventure from solo developer Thomas Mackinnon, and it clocks in at somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes. That is not a warning. That is the whole design intention, and once you understand that, everything about it clicks into place. This is a game that knows exactly how long it wants to be, and it uses every one of those minutes with purpose. It belongs to that rare category of tiny PC releases that ask very little of your time and leave a disproportionately large footprint in your head. What the game is actually about is difficult to describe without spoiling it, and spoiling it would be a small crime. The Steam page calls it an experience about the relationship between player and game, and that is accurate in a way that only makes full sense after you finish. Expect walking. Expect reading. Expect the kind of quiet atmosphere that solo developers often do better than studios with thirty people, because there is no committee rounding the edges off the mood. Mackinnon built something singular here, and the handcraft shows in the texture of every screen. The pacing is deliberate, close to meditative. If you come in expecting puzzles or branching choices or systems to master, you will be in the wrong headspace entirely. THE CORRIDOR is closer to a short story you inhabit than a game you play in the traditional sense. Its closest relatives might be the quieter end of interactive fiction or those short experimental pieces that surface on itch.io and get passed around in Discord servers by people who care about this stuff. The audience for it is people who already have some affection for games as a medium and who are curious about what a single developer can say about that relationship when they strip everything back. With 94 percent positive reviews across over three thousand ratings, the community response is unusually strong for something this small and this strange. That number carries weight. Players who expect a conventional adventure and bounce off will leave negative reviews. The fact that almost all of them did not suggests the game is doing exactly what it intends to do, and doing it well. Short experiences live or die on whether their ending earns the journey, and based on the response, this one does. My honest suggestion: go in knowing as little as possible. Give it the half hour it asks for. Play it somewhere quiet, with headphones if you have them, because the soundscape is doing real work throughout. This is the kind of release I champion because it would be easy to miss entirely, and that would be a shame. Thomas Mackinnon made something genuinely considered here.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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