I played the game Tiny Rooms Story: Town Mystery. The target audience is any person but most likely children and young adults. On Google, the publishers are listed as Kiary Games and Vasily Povalyaev. It is a game for mobile phones and tablets.
The premise of the game is that you are a private detective who has received a time-sensitive letter from your dad to go to a town that is specified in the letter. The game starts with you and your car being stopped by a traffic barrier next to a house, where you need to complete tasks in order to move forward. The mechanics of the game include the user swiping left in order to rotate through their environment, as well as tapping to zoom in to an object as well as using the object. These mechanics are intrinsically tied to the forward motion of the game’s narrative, as the game can not move forward without the user experiencing and interacting with the game’s mechanics. For example, once the user finds the toolbox in the room, they are able to use the tool to turn on the lights by fixing the breaker box. This allows them to advance through the story; if they had not used the tools, they would not advance through the story and thus advance through the mystery itself.
The story is deeply centered around architecture; even in the premise of the game are woven several architectural components such as the mystery town and the houses within it, one of which is presumably connected with the detective’s father. The architecture of the setting controls the story in several ways. First, there is a significant element of concealment, especially in the house, in line with the concepts in Designer’s Notebook: The Role of Architecture in Videogames. The very architecture of the strange house conceals the clues within, and the player is made to physically interact with the interior architecture by opening doors and climbing a ladder in order to move the narrative forward. Similarly, the concept of exploration also applies because the player must explore the environment in order to move the narrative forward. Another concept from Designer’s Notebook: The Role of Architecture in Videogames that is applicable is the concept of familiarity. Because the idea of a “town”, a “house”, a “traffic barrier”, “tools”, et cetera are all ostensibly familiar with the player, this in itself moves the narrative forward because the game does not have to take up time explaining what these concepts are.
One accessibility barrier that exists in the game I played is that the font is quite small, which could pose a barrier to players with low vision. There are no accessibility features that try to mitigate this barrier, even when I check the game’s settings page. To improve the game’s accessibility, one thing the developers could do is add a feature where text size could be increased using a mechanism such as a slider, similar to the text size slider in Apple’s settings app.
