For this week’s critical play, I experienced the Room by Fireproof Games. The game was released originally on iOS platforms and then released to more platforms. I played it on my iPhone. The audience of the fame should be people who have a mobile smartphone and have leisure time. The premise of the game is for you to interact with the safe or mystery box in the room and solve intricate puzzles that lead to a solution.
I think one interesting formal element of this game is the boundary. I think most puzzles/escape rooms intimidate the players for having way too many possibilities and steps. The players end up getting overwhelmed not end up solving the puzzle because they don’t feel motivated enough. I think the boundary of this game is great because they offer a limited scope so that the users don’t feel as overwhelmed.
The fun of this game comes from overcoming challenges and using the right clues to solve the puzzles. I think of this game as an obstacle course and the players have to use their inference to solve the puzzle. Otherwise, this game is pretty simple because it only has one player and the player can only interact with the game through some simple gestures like zooming and dragging. But The joy of unlocking a mystery box by trying different things is very satisfying.
As shown above, the game does a good job by having a narration at the bottom of the screen and the player would feel that they are receiving some guide or inner dialogue to guide them throughout the game. The game also fully utilizes the touch screen to magnify the puzzle-solving experiences. There are a lot of spinning and pushing motions of mechanisms and I think there is an advantage to having those features on a touch screen rather than a PC screen. It feels more real.
However, at the same time, some mechanisms of the puzzle do not seem as intuitive. For example, the player has to constantly drag the screen since there might be clues in all directions of the box. In this process, the player also has to constantly double-click to zoom in or pinch to zoom out. I think the interface could be better so that the mechanisms do not involve as many duplicated behaviors as possible. One potential solution to that is to have 2 quick turning buttons so that the players can click on them to change sides quicker. It would also be interesting to see if it would be possible to add some storylines into the game so that there could be more urgency or significance in solving the puzzles.
