The Room is a fantastic looking puzzle game developed by Fireproof Games originally for iOS. And the game mechanics and puzzles are just as impressive as the visuals. The Room keeps shelving out puzzles left and right at the player relentlessly, with no mercy for the weak or impatient. I consider myself to be a very patient person, but at times the only thing I could do with The Room was close the game and cool off before trying at it again.
There is somewhat of a story going on in here, in fact it’s the whole incentive to wanting to open up this safe that a friend has left behind for you. But in all honesty, the puzzles themselves overshadow any sort of story going on in The Room. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, in fact, I consider it to be a good thing. The gameplay is so engaging that it was all I could think about while playing the game.
As the title of the game suggests, The Room takes place inside of a room with the centerpiece being a series of large safes that the player must crack in order to move the story along. The puzzles themselves are of course solved with touch controls. The Room uses tapping, swiping, pinching, and some circular touch motions on the screen to solve puzzles and move around the level. There is also an eye piece that the player has at their disposal the reveals things that cannot be seen with the naked eye in order to crack the safe. The images seen through the eye piece are shown in a haze and some images grow a bright neon blue color.
There is a small amount of repetition in every safe with the larger goal of creating or figuring out how to make the symbol that keeps reappearing throughout The Room. Each sequence with the same figure takes on a fresh enough change from the predecessors that it keeps it from getting boring. And in all honesty, even if they were repetitive, the rest of the puzzles in The Room are so engaging that I probably wouldn’t even have minded.
The Room features a hint system that is very non-intrusive. It very much lets the player decide when they feel they’ve exhausted every resource at their disposal to solve the current puzzle and are in need of some guidance. If you’re the type of player that loves to figure things out on their own, even if you decide to tap the hint icon for some help, the hints are still vague enough that it leaves enough room for the player to discover the puzzle on their own, even with that added guidance and they’re still super satisfying to solve.
The pacing is very well done, and The Room is filled with hours of gameplay which is especially impressive given the price of $1.99. Until recently, The Room was only available on iPad, but is now available on Android, this is definitely a game you do not want to miss if you’ve got a tablet.
Recently, The Room was extended in an update to include an Epilogue chapter. The Epilogue includes a bit more gameplay with puzzles that are just as difficult and satisfying to solve as they are in the original game. Depending on how quickly you can solve the puzzles, the Epilogue includes about an hour of gameplay, or possibly more.
The Room is available for both iPad on iOS and Android on the Google Play store, and is priced at $1.99. It’s a great puzzle game that will provide you with hours of satisfying gameplay and it really should not be missed if you’ve got a tablet. The Room 2 is also in development and will be releasing soon.
