The Room 1,2 & 3
The puzzling star of the mobile world on trial as a shared game. How does it stack up?
Player 1 has Joined
The name of this game is a lie. Well, mostly. While you are in a room, it’s hardly the focus. The game presents you with a series of intricate puzzle boxes and tasks you with unlocking their secrets. The game should be called The Boxes that Eventually Open when You Poke Them.
You will slide and twist, push and pull, screw and stretch various mechanical components of the boxes. Unscrewing the box’s metal foot may reveal a key. The key may open a compartment in the side with a sliding blocks puzzle. Solving the puzzle may reveal a golden shrew carrying a ham sandwich. You get the idea.
The Room focuses on single boxes; solving each leads to a completely new room/box establishment. The Room 2 & 3 expand this concept and present several boxes to solve at once. You will find yourself piloting the camera between them frequently. Personally I find the later games suffer for this dilution of focus, I prefer the purer experience of the first game.
Player 2 has Joined
We played the game on Android, on various tablets and phones. Initially I was controlling the game with Tong (my partner) watching. It did not take long for her to steal the phone from me and start poking at the boxes herself. Soon we settled into her controlling the game and me suggesting solutions.
The game is quite easy, with most puzzles requiring little thought to solve. This creates a satisfying forward momentum which holds your interest. I personally would have preferred a higher difficulty level but I can’t deny that seeing something new every 60 seconds is compelling.
The controls are extremely intuitive, to open a hatch you simply swipe it open. Some frustration comes from identifying which parts are supposed to actually move, but the game generally telegraphs this well. Tong did not have any difficulty controlling the game, Fireproof have done an excellent job here.
Camera control is partially manual, but heavily constrained and curated by the game itself. While she had experienced motion sickness in other games with 3D camera movement, this game did not cause any at all. Good work, Fireproof.
From my perspective, I did experience some neck pain looking at the phone over her shoulder, but this was soon fixed once we realised we could cast the phone screen to the TV (either via Chromecast or Airplay). With this setup we could comfortably play for hours without discomfort.
We completed the first game in a couple of evenings, and quickly moved onto the 2nd and 3rd. Tong got totally addicted immediately and was very annoyed when it turned out that nobody else had made any games quite like The Room. Fireproof are really the only developers producing such high quality 3D games on mobile and that’s a shame.
Can you share it?
Absolutely, we had a great time with The Room and it’s brethren. It is an excellent choice for a game to share with a non-gamer.
The Room 1, 2 and 3 are developed by Fireproof Games and are available on iOS, Android and Windows platforms.
