The Room Series
Although you can buy and play the first three games on Steam for around $5 each, I feel like the controls were ultimately designed for a touch screen. I couldn't imagine playing Majora's Mask with a keyboard and mouse. Spinning and twirling objects was much more difficult than I anticipated. I also did not like the fact that the games were more expensive than their mobile counterparts (around $1 to $3 each). This might be because they "enhanced" the graphics on the computer? I'm not sure. Without the gear, I will be skipping The Room VR: A Dark Matter. I guess that is sort of good seeing that it costs around $30. Each game can take you at minimum the number of hours equivalent to which one in the series they come. It would normally take you probably twice as long to finish.
The story is pretty consistent between the games. There was a strange occurrence that happened when a bunch of secret engineers and scientists discovered an alien substance called The Null that seemed to bypass time and space. After trying to harness this power for their own benefit, they find out the dark past of the strange material. Most of the history is hinted at through strange (and I mean like very cryptic) letters. The majority of the setting is sacrificed when nearly everything in the rooms has something to do with the puzzle placed in front of you. Other times the rooms don't make any lick of sense when you run into impossible Rube Goldberg Devices. You have a special lens that sees things that are invisible to the naked eye and items you can manipulate in your inventory to better fit the holes within the machines.
The Room is the first one in the series and the walkthrough is literally less than an hour. I felt like they were trying to let you use the lens as a sub-hint system to show you where a person placed his hand or manipulated some knobs to activate the next piece in the puzzle. I believe the game is divided up into two very simple rooms that pretty much only have a window or lamp that shine upon the tables, maybe some gears rotating in the background. You'll be opening quite a bit of Chinese puzzle boxes by sliding curved levers and matching symbols. Make sure to use that lens! The first game doesn't really tell you when to use it. I thoroughly enjoyed the puzzle with the game's theme on the piano at the end.
The Room Two can take you about two hours if you are really good. The notes become more sensible as they guide you through some interesting settings. I actually enjoyed how they expanded the puzzles to include other objects like a model of a pirate ship and a crossbow. However, instead of focusing on the puzzles, they seemed to try and squeeze "neat" obstacles in various themes. This is kind of hit-and-miss depending on how you view them. Although the first game was more ominous with the lack of physical features, the second game can really creep you out as The Null substance and various artifacts interact with you. They do a little better in making certain areas have a sort of rainbow-color translucent film to let you know when to use the lens. You can also get a bit dizzy when you are being teleported around inside and out of areas. The size of the game runs around 1GB (twice as big as the first one). I felt completely ripped off when "Chapter 5" had one total puzzle. The only time I gave up on the game was when they hid a secret below a drawer after pressing the number two button in "Chapter 6". Apparently the first drawer has no secret underneath.
The Room Three probably took me around 6 hours to complete, even though you can potentially beat it in 3 hours. As much as I applaud the developers in making a massive "island" to explore, I found it a complete mess trying to traverse between the different rooms. There are no real identifying features to remind you which door leads you to the library, the study room, the garden house, the observatory, or the prison cell. The markings on the ground don't help you much either. Try doing areas in short spurts and you will have a tough time remembering where that star pattern hole was and which identical oscillator (I hope you know what that is because they seriously used that word in the hint system) had a broken chassis. At the end, there is no real clear indicator whether you are really escaping the labyrinth or accidentally releasing a kraken onto the world. You pretty much just have to do all four endings to find out.
I found myself shaking my head most of the time while playing the third game. I do love the fact that they made the lens a sort of "miniature" ray where you enter inside the machine to twist and turn the gears within. But other times, I couldn't quite figure out why one exclusive thing only unlocked another exclusive thing. There is an area in the bell tower where you have to break the crystals by ringing the bells. Yet, for some reason each bell could only break one crystal. I figured if the thing could be heard throughout the whole place, it would break all three crystals. There was a time the game wouldn't let me pull down on a little knob, but for some reason when I attach a metal piece on top it magically makes it easier to pull down? Can't I zoom in on the notes on the wall? I'd like to know where the story is going, please.
Review: The Room series takes The Myst series and narrows it down to point, slide, and click. The puzzles can range from ridiculously easy interacting with one thing after another in the same vicinity to crazy difficult if you can't find that one item hiding behind the landscape. I would have preferred a less daunting hint system than the thirty second intervals one pops up on the screen, but they definitely do help point you in the right direction when you need it. The games are ludicrously short and work better on a mobile system. I say give it a shot if you are struggling to find another video game to scratch that "escape room" itch.
3-20-2020