In Tiny Room Story: Town Mystery, a mobile puzzle game distributed through the App Store, the player embodies a detective investigating an abandoned town. In the game, narrative is used as an extension of the puzzle, in that the narrative provides hints and context that help the player solve the puzzles. This mechanic furthers the depth of the puzzles but muddles the narrative story, as there lacks a cohesive dedicated narrative flow, creating the effect of an emergent narrative despite the effort of an embedded narrative.
The game begins with narrative backstory. However, it is limited, and text-heavy. Counter to the advice from the Plants vs Zombies Ted Talk, in which the designer suggested players receive only one or two sentences of dialog and backstory at a time, the player is given several lines of text without a progression.
Initial screen with narrative background
Despite the narrative style, the ensuing scene is focused primarily on the puzzle. Specifically, the player is accompanied by a person who provides helpful dialogue. However, the dialogue serves the purpose of supporting navigation of the puzzles, rather than supporting the underlying narrative.
NPC gives hints to help solve the puzzle
By failing to use the NPCs to provide narrative support, the game encourages the player to be engaged primarily on the puzzle. While this benefits the puzzle dynamic, it limits the ability of the game to be an embodied narrative. Instead, the puzzle is front and center, and narrative emerges as a consequence of interacting with the environment and making inferences.
The player is confronted with a landscape and building. They need to navigate inside the building to find hidden keys and password clues in order to fix the power and move the traffic control barrier.
Padlock puzzle of numbers
Environment to search for documents
Hints for computer password
The game thus focuses on the puzzle mechanics and misses opportunities for immersive narrative. It creates missed opportunities for interest and jagged experiences at times. For instance, the initial level starts from a background story, fitting into a narrative delivery. However, once the power is connected, a large red banner fills the screen to explicitly tell the player that they can advance. This breaks up the narrative feel and instead could have been hinted at through an interjection of narrative or a cutscene to show the gate opening.
Barrier lift message in red
The previous week’s game, Myst by Clay Worlds, offered a different format. The walking sim contained many embedded puzzles. However, it also effectively utilized cutscenes to advance the underlying narrative that motivated the puzzles as an embedded narrative. Instead, Tiny Room only accomplishes an emergent narrative with gaps, producing a less enjoyable game by using narrative only to advance the puzzles despite subjecting the user to significant popups to ingest the narrative itself.
The game has several accessibility potential concerns. The first is color blindness. The map contains many colors which may wash together or not be friendly to people with color blindness. The game offers higher contrast colors but combinations like red and green may cause difficulty for some users. Portions of the game, including clues and backstory, are written in these colors, like the location on the map.
Red and green overlap on city map
Other difficulties may stem from a lack of puzzle game experience. Many puzzle games require financial resources to purchase or watch. Thus, the game may be harder for some players than others, lowering accessibility.
The game offers a hint mechanism that can help counter this scenario, but it comes at a financial in-app purchase cost or can be unlocked by watching an advertisement. Thus, any levels that block the player from continuing successfully without a hint incur a financial burden that makes the game less accessible.
Overall, this game has strong puzzle elements but lacks narrative integration strength that could otherwise make it a much more enjoyable game as an embodied narrative.
