The Room born in 2012 as an iPad-exclusive 3D puzzle game, completely reworked to offer a HD experience to PC gamers. Environmental lights and almost every asset have been redesigned to fit the more modern graphics potential.

You’re called to solve the puzzles contained in mysterious strongboxes full of weird devices, strange carvings and complex mechanisms, in order to discover alchemical teachings and dangerous truths.

I can't express how much I love this game's graphics.
I can't, really.
Such a high quality in realism and details is an incredibly big boost in the atmosphere that, together with the soundtrack,

The Room is a wonderful puzzle game, in the form of 3D structures where all the puzzles, hints and solutions are contained. In The Room, these “structures” are big and complex strongboxes, full of crevices, holes, words, carvings, hidden notes and many mechanisms and devices to activate.

Probably it’s redundant to say but I LOVE puzzle games and their challenges. For me, they’re one of the most attractive genres.

So, when during a sale event on Steam I was searching for a bunch of “little” games to buy and I stumbled upon The Room, it was enough for me to see a few moments of the trailer to be immediately catched.

I had to buy it.

I can't express how much I love this game's graphics.
I can't, really.

Graphics was what bought me immediately. I understood immediately that it was a stunning 3D -in my opinion at least-, with an infinite amount of little fine details and a gorgeous environment. The lights and the atmosphere they create in each level are so dramatic and evocative that it was almost automatic to be swallowed up by them.

All the strongboxes are made of wood and metal, so the striking work on lights creates a show on its own and it’s unavoidable to waste time to analyze how the game manages the sources of light when you turn the box and to lose yourself playing with the decorative elements and the way they reflect through their textures!

If I were to give a flash opinion on this game, I would say that it has two immensely strong points and one of these is the graphics.

In The Room, each “level” has the shape of a strongbox. Each strongbox is completely different and independent from all the others, so every time you complete one you have to start the following from scratch again. You won’t have any element, object, key or similar from the previous box, exception for the "eyepiece" given to you at the beginning.
The game features 4 different strongboxes, included the one presented in the tutorial (the tutorial is simply the first strongbox with some instructions about what you can or should do, to give you an idea on how to play).

The puzzles are complex but not too much. Every box has knobs, levers, gears, panels, paintings, drawings, decorations.
Each element you see can or cannot be something useful, so my best advice is “touch, pull, push, open, spin, close everything you see”. In this way you’ll discover and find several objects and hints that will help you understand which part of the box you must search for or choose what part of the box you want to start solving first.

The main mechanic here is to find hints and pieces and discover which puzzle they belong to, solve it and access to more hints and pieces to rinse and repeat until every puzzle is solved and you finish the box, for all the boxes of the game.

In addition to this, there is also a “curious eyepiece” that will open to you a further level of mystery (and enigmas).

One of the wonders of this game is the impressive range of different puzzles and the attention they’re designed with, the connetion between different puzzles where to solve one you must solve others before. Together with the graphics, they create a majestic and very immersive environment, where you can lose yourself.

Anyway..there is a lot to figure out in order to solve the puzzles. Each part of the strongbox is complex and made from many other parts both physically and in the sense of puzzles.

I don’t consider them excruciately hard but they surely ask for a pretty high level of attention and a moderate one of logic.

Anyway, if you think you might like this game but are worried about the need of a help or an explanation, don't despair: the game not only has a whole series of little “considerations” when clicking on something. An example would be “A circular indentation. It seems to connect to the mechanism inside “, suggesting you that something must be inserted there or “there is something strange about this key. I should take a closer look”, hinting that you should go to your inventory and check what you’ve just found.

But , if you were not to have a real clue about what to do, there is a big “?” in the upper left corner for you. It’s not always active, but there is a little sound when it does and if you want you can click on it and you’ll have 3 hints to use, increasingly helping: the first one is pretty generic, the second one will be a little more specific, the third one will be very helpful.

Or, at least, this is what I understood from trying it in the starting tutorial just to test it. I never used hints to go through the game and I’ve clicked, I think, just one time during the initial tutorial.

Talking about this game, music is a pretty odd theme.

Why, you’d ask.

Well..because there is no real music!

I must say that this is an interesting concept, for a puzzle game like this.

Initially I didn’t realize it but I felt a strange feeling, like if something was off. Then, when I noticed that the weirdness came from the absence of a real soundtrack, I really appreciated the choice.

Since the game story is a mysterious one, involving alchemy, magic and other preternatural concepts, the idea of being closed in a dark room, with few -often artificial- light spots, trying to solve the riddles of these massive strongboxes was perfectly aligned with having just the noises coming from its mechanisms and my movement on them.

And not only this is beautiful for immersion reasons but also and foremost to give to the player the chance to hear other mechanisms activating in other parts of the box. In fact, it does happen to interact with a part of the box and hear something move somewhere else, as a consequence.

However, there is a little soundtrack in the far background and the tracks are elementary and “monotonous” in a very positive sense. This makes them not distracting at all and, at the same time, they’re able to give some “dangerous” vibe to the scenes, highlighting that we are there to discover unspeakable mysteries and not to open strange boxes for fun during a sunny Sunday trip.

On the other hand I’ve found an excellent sound library. With the “almost silence” in the background, the sound quality is high (at least in my ears) and every click, tic, cling, ding, swish and so on, is very clear, very audible and it’s hard at all to hear everything you need to follow the evolution of the puzzles!

The Room is a fantastic game with very complex puzzles and mysteries: some can be solved right away, some others are instead linked to other puzzles’ solutions. Thus, the gameplay is stratified and when you get stuck in a puzzle you need to ask if it’s linked to another one and which one.

The solving process is fully enjoyable, fun and asks you to stay focused and keep in mind everything you discovered to that point. It's knowledge that will speed you up in understanding what you’re supposed to do or where you must search.

The story is intriguing, you want to buy every other game offered by the franchise just to know more!

If you like to spend several hours racking your brain, this is made exactly for you!