The Room made me think of a puzzle that’s been rattling around in my head for years. You try and get through a door but it won’t open. Your character takes a look at the lock and there’s a key in there. They found a convenient key-poking device earlier but if they aren’t careful, the key will just fall onto the ground and they’ll be stuck. But never fear, the newspaper is here! Slide it under the door and you’ve got yourself you a key there, mister. Every time I play a puzzle game, I secretly hope that puzzle comes into play.
Sadly, no such luck with The Room. Probably for the best going by the TVTropes page. Instead, The Room is on a more thoughtful wavelength. There aren’t any doors in it, for one. Well, unless you count the nightmare door at the end. Instead, it’s more about poking the inner workings of a giant box until another bit of it opens. If that sounds familiar, then you probably played The Room on its original 2012 release. Today we’re talking about the remake for Switch that came out in 2018, which has made it much prettier but hasn’t come through the transition entirely unscathed.
Oh Hi Box
Fortunately, I never played the original The Room so all of this is new to me. It’s an intruiging set up. We open by being trapped in a room with nothing but an overly elaborate box, which contains something extremely important. In order to get to it, you have to solve the puzzles that line the edge of the box. Solve enough and the box opens to reveal… another box. It starts to feel like a matryoshka doll after a while. The Room works hard to create an unsettling atmosphere too, with its odd background sound effects. Add in the notes from a maniac, raving about a new element called ‘Null’, and you begin to wonder if you really want to find the core of this box after all.
But find it we must, which brings me to the puzzles. On the whole, it’s good stuff. It gives me something of an Escape Room vibe, as most of the puzzles are staring you in the face – you’re just missing the final piece. When you find a starting point, you start getting clues and things slot into place. It’s a nice feeling. There’s a range of different puzzles here too, from finding code words, to setting up gears, to using the special eyepiece that makes things go red and spooky. I found the puzzles a touch on the easy side, but it was enjoyable slotting things in place and watching the box unfold its next challenge. It’s as much an adventure game as puzzle game.
What’s In The Box?
One thing that helped give The Room its classic status back in the day was the attention to detail. It already looked pretty good and the HD upgrade has done wonders. There’s a moment where you activate a solar system model and it projects constellations across the ceiling. It’s quite beautiful. There are extra touches too, like the videos giving you the codes and little cutscene transitions, that show some real love has gone into it. These little puzzle/adventure games used to be dime a dozen back in the day. It’s easy to see how The Room stood out when it came out on mobile.
I do have nitpicks though. If you play in handheld mode, the Switch version forces you to use the touchscreen. I love my Switch, but it doesn’t fit comfortably into one hand and a lot of elements are quite close together, so my clumsy tapping would often zoom me in on the wrong thing. You can only use the controller in docked mode, which is an odd choice. Puzzle quality varies too. A high point is spinning a series of blocks so that they line up into a combination from a specific angle. A low point is searching the entire box for a single, obscure dial that you twiddle once. It adds something to the ‘adventure game’ aspect, but these bits start to feel a little formulaic towards the end.
Room For More
Chances are, you don’t need me to tell you that The Room is good. It got a lot of praise upon its release, rightly so, and spawned three sequels. When seperated from its children though, the original The Room does feel a touch short. It can be completed in a single evening and, oddly enough, costs more on the Switch than it does on PC. Given the slightly awkward controls, the Steam version might be the better bet. That, and The Room Three and The Room 4: Old Sins are missing from the eShop, so you’ll be stuck with an unsatisfying cliffhanger ending. Hell, The Room‘s ending is little more than a note that says ‘Buy the sequel’.
A hangover from the mobile days, I expect, when you were never sure if a single game was going to sell enough to buy you lunch. But The Room exploded back in those days and, playing through it for the first time, it’s easy to see why. It’s not just the puzzles, it’s the atmosphere and the compression of the ‘escape the room’ format down into something as mysterious as a random box. Every puzzle feels like part of a single whole, and I always wondered what the clicking and whirring was going to lead to next. I’d simply suggest plonking the box into your Steam library, rather than the Switch.
