Eye on iOS: Volume 9
The Room
Randall Rigdon
The Room is not the interactive adaptation of Tommy Wiseau’s unintentionally hilarious cinematic cult classic. Rather, it’s an addictive little puzzler by Fireproof Games that’s making waves amongst the mobile community for its incredibly immersive puzzling and engaging touch and slide mechanics. And indeed, while you play you’ll feel like a genius treasure hunter and code-decipherer as you slowly unravel some of the most intriguing puzzles ever realized on a touch interface. Unfortunately for hardcore adventure gamers, that’s about as far as The Room’s appeal reaches.
The game spends no time establishing its premise, but nor does it need to with its jump-in-and-see-what-happens ambiguity. It opens by presenting you with a strange box-like contraption set atop a desk within a room too poorly lit to identify. The swipe of a finger allows you to rotate your view a full 360 degrees around the table, as you observe the device’s endless switches, knobs, secret compartments, and countless other hidden intricacies. Simply double-tapping any of these components swings your viewpoint forward for closer inspection, where the always-dynamic and unpredictable interactive modules of the mysterious contraption lie within.
This description alone has basically detailed the entire story core of The Room. As you solve and decode each individual challenge, you come closer and closer to eventually opening and unveiling the device’s ultimate secret. Thankfully, the puzzles are engrossing and always diverse as you constantly find yourself tilting the device to rotate colored spheres into exact positions, sliding your finger across the supporting legs to unscrew secret compartments, or dragging metal balls across rotary maze surfaces to unlock hidden doors, to name just a few of the tasks that await you.
The intensive hands-on interactivity of these puzzles will make you feel happy to own a touch device. As you slide pieces together, find hidden codes scribbled on the corners, and pull open hidden drawers all at the touch of a finger, you’ll feel incredibly immersed in the experience of unlocking this elaborate treasure chest. Once you finally open the contraption – which will likely take about thirty minutes – you’ll be provided with yet another one to unlock on another table in another unidentifiable room, and then another two after that, which comprises the entire adventure.
As a straightforward series of complex puzzles, the game plays out almost like an aggregation of random fetch quests; you’ll frequently find yourself uncovering a missing tile, an arcane crystal or an ancient figurine that will stash into your inventory on the left, which then can be observed from every angle with the single swipe of a finger. All of these objects, however, in essence function as keys or passcodes and always behave as the missing link to the next available puzzle – which when dragged into place will occasionally provide an impressive animation involving unfolding and moving mechanisms.
Although its linear nature allows The Room to flow at a fairly smooth and leisurely pace, figuring out what goes where and how everything’s supposed to operate connectively can take quite a while. A flashing – and subsequently tempting – question mark inhabits the corner of the screen for any player looking for a few sly hints to quickly speed along the puzzle-solving process. Too much reliance on hints is counterproductive, however, as the game’s entire allure is based on the satisfaction that comes from solving puzzle after puzzle.
Any experienced adventure gamer is by now wondering how the story links together these elaborate puzzle-solving entanglements. The Room employs the popular first-person puzzler strategy of unfolding the story loosely and vaguely through the player’s own interpretation of its small, obscure subtleties. In this case, the thin narrative is mostly revealed through stashed letters and random scribblings found throughout the devices as you slowly unveil more and more of their hidden compartments.
Because The Room is strongly rooted in mystification, the underlying story turns out to be equally enigmatic. The letters recount a tale of a Galileo-esque inventor researching some larger-than-life questions. Unfortunately, by the time your personal venture is finally over, none of these questions are actually answered and the backdrop never fully develops into anything more than elusive intrigue gently driving the gameplay. Although this certainly adds to the mysterious atmosphere, solving complex mechanisms and intricate head-scratchers one after another without any real sense of what’s going on leaves The Room’s story feeling entirely incidental. The game would have been much more aptly titled “The Table” or “A Series of Elaborate Boxes”, seeing as the room in which each contraption is based is entirely impervious and inaccessible. Even a glance around you would have made for a more captivating experience.
Apart from the puzzles themselves, atmosphere is The Room’s strongest quality, from the crisp, realistic antiquity of its aesthetic design to the eerie and ominous nature of its soundscape. Filled with distant creakiness and droning musical ambience, everything oozes with cryptic moodiness. Not knowing what’s going on actually connects well with the periodic whispering of unintelligible voices and the seemingly metaphysical eyeglass you equip early on. This is used heavily throughout the game as a method for unveiling intangible and esoteric images the human eye couldn’t otherwise perceive.
Introducing some clever and highly engaging touch mechanics through a constant stream of intricate puzzles, The Room is clearly made for puzzle enthusiasts. Through its heavy-handed puzzle-after-puzzle execution, the game sacrifices virtually all storytelling in the service of its puzzles. With no gameplay shifts or plot developments to break up the monotony, the average adventure gamer is likely to find The Room too far removed from the genre’s other elements to provide a complete experience. It’s an attractive exhibition of the interactive gameplay mechanics a touch device can provide, but it has little to offer beyond that when its singular appeal begins to waver.
The Room is available for iPad at the App Store and at Google Play for Android devices.
The Room Two
Randall Rigdon
A definite improvement over its predecessor, The Room Two expands the player’s perspective well beyond the surface of the table. The previously silhouetted backdrops have finally opened up, allowing for a more fully realized experience. Unfortunately, without full navigational control, the actual freedom to explore this space is still excessively limited. The controls remain exactly the same as before, as you can still only shift your perspective around at the tap of a finger, and while the environment has seemingly opened up, you’re really only able to tap across the sparsely illuminated segments of the larger shadowed-out environment.
While this limitation continues to prevent The Room Two from transforming into a fuller-fledged adventure game, as a puzzle game this sequel makes for a hugely engaging experience and a large step above the original. While the expectations are largely the same – solve a puzzle to unveil a piece to another puzzle and so forth – the expanded scope of the environment allows for more immersive payoffs. Instead of simply moving around dials to slide open hidden compartments on a box, you’ll find yourself reflecting lasers across corners of a room to unveil hidden areas or manipulating lever mechanisms to move a boat forward across a pitch-black cavern.
Unfortunately, while broader and more expansive than the original, these more “adventurous” moments are few and far between. For the most part you are still solving a succession of elaborate puzzle contraptions within dusty, antique-filled studies. The core gameplay remains the same and the story’s presentation retains its cryptic and somewhat interpretative nature, never moving the narrative forward enough to truly satisfy by the time this installment ends. Available as a universal app for iPad and iPhone, “more of the same but better” is the bottom line for The Room Two, so anyone who enjoyed The Room will certainly be satisfied by the improved expansion of its streamlined simplicities.
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