Easily one of the strangest puzzle game series that shows off its underlying story throughout has to be The Room by Fireproof Games. Originally released on mobile, these developers have completely remade these games and brought them to other platforms; mainly the PC via Steam. Their latest chapter in the series to be brought over to Steam was The Room 4: Old Sins and after playing through this strange puzzle game, I have to say that I can’t wait for more from this series.
Story
After being hired to uncover what happened to an ambitious engineer and his high society wife. Your search brings you to their home, the Waldegrave Manor, and leads you to the attic where you find a strange dollhouse. It doesn’t take long for you to realize the secrets you need are hidden within this tightly secured dollhouse and thus your true work of uncovering its secrets can begin.
Gameplay
You will only need your mouse to actually play the game since everything you need to do will require either clicking on your inventory, double-clicking on what you are trying to examine, right-click to back out, or holding down the left click and dragging the mouse to move around. Even though this seems limiting, it is all you actually need in order to move around the house smoothly.
A lot of this game will require you to remember what you are looking at and what parts are missing or look like, examine clues that might help you figure out what it is that will help you progress, and tinkering with objects to make them fit properly. It starts off just having you work with one room, but the puzzles will soon broaden to multiple rooms being worked between simultaneously. The progression on how difficult it is to spot what you need to find and how many rooms you work with is pretty gradual, so adapting to the spread-out puzzles is natural.
If you do find yourself stuck, they do provide hints for you to use. You will need to try and figure it out yourself first as the hints unlock based on time passing, but these clues are very handy. I liked how they were always able to guide me in the direction I needed to go in order to figure out the part of the puzzle I was stuck on without flat out telling me what to do.
Mixing together the different puzzle elements definitely made it intriguing and challenging to solve each puzzle segment as well. If you aren’t familiar with this series, you are given an oculus piece that shows otherwise hidden viewpoints and interactable objects that you couldn’t see without this piece. Using the oculus piece, interacting with the environment, and messing with items in your inventory are the different elements they utilize in their puzzle games and it was well mixed together in this one.
Visuals
The overall graphic level of the game was very well done to the point that it was clear what each piece was. All rooms that you enter are filled with more than enough scenery pieces to look like real rooms and the overall feel that the game’s scenery provides was comforting although dark when showing off lore moments. I liked how it didn’t look like a dollhouse and it took seeing the attic scenery behind the house itself to sometimes make me remember that this isn’t the actual house itself.
Sounds
There is soft music that plays throughout the game and does a great job at not leaving you in silence without bringing any attention to it either. The only time you really hear the music is when you complete a puzzle piece that has a significant moment to the overall progress of the game. Otherwise, you mostly just hear sound effects that you would expect to hear around a house and in each room, accordingly.
Replayability
As is the curse of any puzzle game, there is no replayability to the game. All the puzzles are the same and so going through the game again wouldn’t provide anything new to the experience.
Conclusion
The Room 4: Old Sins is a worthy remake and an entertainingly challenging puzzle game! I enjoyed getting through the difficult puzzles and love how this series always has such a twisted final chapter. The final cutscene that plays actually caught me off guard too and make me look forward to what the developers have in store next. My hopes lie on there being a full game of the craziness we get from the twisted final chapters in these games. As for now, I definitely recommend this game to all puzzle fans out there.
