Blumhouse is a name that’s perhaps familiar to you as a production company specialised in horror movies like Paranormal activity, Insidious, and The purge. But they also have a division that publishes horror novels and they recently added another one that does video games. Horror games, of course. And in that genre there’s a pretty high incidence of chessboards. So also in today’s subject, a rather surreal first person adventure game with the unsettling premise that people vanish during their sleep and the few remaining struggle to stay awake. 1
You’d think mathematics, chess, and perhaps coffee would be the go-to solutions for staying awake, but in this universe they developed some kind of drug for it.2 Chess only turns up roughly halfway through the game and just a single time. While rifling through the somnological institute, the player can find a black knight in a safe. A bit later on, she comes across a chessboard.
The position is as follows:3
At first, I thought that the players didn’t know how to castle queen’s side, but that doesn’t explain the white rook still being on a1. Then I thought it must have been a Fischer random game with the two rooks right next to the king, but this doesn’t explain the black rook on h8. It would hardly have escaped from a8 just to bury itself in another dark, deserted corner.
The player is supposed to add the black he has found on d2, thereby checkmating the white king. But I have reservations about that. I think I could win a considerable amount of games if I could, at a moment of my choosing, drop an extra knight on the board instead of playing a move. Perhaps that’s why black has so many more marks to his name on the chalkboard.
Realism: 2/5 This position is by no means impossible, but it requires a lot of pointless shuffling that’s hard to explain.
Probable winner: Black, if we allow the clandestine conjuring up of a knight. Otherwise, white‘s enormous material superiority should allow him to sleepwalk to victory.
1. [My personal theory is that the world the player walks through is actually the sleep world. When people fall asleep there, they wake up in the real world and vanish from the sleep world.] ↩
2. [It doesn’t work very well, though. I think the scientist were sleeping on the job.] ↩
3. [With this diagram editor, you can sleep safely!] ↩