Tiny Room Stories Critical Play — Tommy

Tiny Room Stories: Town Mystery is exactly what it sounds like: a game in which you explore various tiny rooms across a mysterious town searching for clues. It is interesting that the game’s name describes the gameplay completely but entirely neglects the narrative — you play a detective trying to piece together his father’s disappearance —  because the game’s storytelling is integrated across its design and mechanics. Tiny Room Stories, which was created by Kiary Games for mobile devices, elicits a very similar kind of fun to those “spot the difference” games from childhood but has some mature content, so I think its target audience is adults who like slow-paced, detail-oriented fun. Considering its core loop, Tiny Room Stories is just a cycle of exploring areas and finding objects that allow you to explore more areas and find more objects; however, it manages to tell the story of a father’s disappearance because the objects themselves embed the narrative and the architecture of the areas evokes familiar spaces and facilitates the player’s discovery of the narrative.

In order to progress through the game, you must find certain objects; since these objects are integral to the story of the detective’s father’s disappearance, this mechanic ensures that the player experiences the narrative first hand. Tiny Room Stories’ gameplay would not change even a little if the user searched for unthemed, random objects which allow them to progress; in fact, the player would probably still have fun, in the form of a puzzle or challenge. However, the creators chose to make these objects elements of the narrative so that by finding them the player almost plays back the father’s disappearance. For example, the following screenshot shows scattered “financial documents” which are interactable; these clue us into looking for something money-related as our next clue and tell us that there might have been financial fishiness in the father’s disappearance. This embedded narrative raises the stakes and adds fun, in the form of discovery and fantasy, to the puzzle’s existing fun.

Rather than providing an open world full of these clues for the player to piece together freely, Tiny Room Stories uses architecture to facilitate and direct the player’s discovery of the narrative. Architecture acts simultaneously as a medium for exploration and a mechanism of constraint in Tiny Room Stories. Through finding objects like keys, the player’s access to and experience of their environment changes without the actual structures changing at all. For example, the game is full of locked doors and keys, as seen in the following picture where the door labeled 303 is locked. The effects of these are dual: they suggest a future explorable space and also constrain the player’s search — objectively, as they may be prompted to search for a key, and spatially, as they must try the other door — guiding the player through the narrative.

Tiny Room Stories’ architecture also contributes to the narrative in its own right by setting the scene and the mood. Each room that you explore appears as a single room floating in a void; this creates a sort of surreal effect that suggests intrigue and reinforces the feeling of being solitary or even left behind, which aligns with the narrative fact that the town is empty. Individual rooms also create more specific feelings for the player. The room in the above screenshot, for example, instills pure fear — it feels almost out of a horror movie with the window’s moonlight spilling into the shadowy room. The first of the below screenshots, on the other hand, with its awkward emptiness has a more uncertain (yet surely uncomfortable) mood. Tiny Rooms Stories even further creates spaces that, although they are not identifiably scary, evoke the cliches of mysteries and crime scenes to help immerse us in the narrative — like the second of the below screenshots with its strewn files and scattered chairs.

Tiny Room Stories is proof you can tell an engaging story with a few simple mechanics. With just objects and spaces, its creators have managed to embed a narrative and evoke spaces that had me excitedly on edge the whole time.

 

Ethics:

The gameplay and the narrative of Tiny Room Stories are 100% visual, which poses a problem for seeing-impaired players. Progressing through and enjoying the game requires being able to see a visual scene and, further, identify intentionally small, unassuming details, and the game’s story is told entirely through text. While the latter issue could be resolved through a braille translation, the game’s central exploring mechanic may be harder to adapt for a blind player. Regardless, accessibility features don’t exist for either of these issues, rendering the game basically unplayable for a blind player.

Another ethical concern is that the game rests on piecing together disparate clues — finding a code here, reading an explanation of the code there, and using it on a padlock still elsewhere. This can be challenging for users who struggle with information processing and recall. To ease this burden, the game keeps track of these sorts of clues in a notes tab as seen in the upper right of the above screenshots. Tiny Room Stories has too small an audience (when you search the game, other Mechanics of Magic blog posts come up almost first) to really research disabled users’ experiences of this accessibility feature; however, I think that it would be helpful since it alleviates the need to store too much information at once since you can pull that information up from anywhere in the world.

 

 

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