This week, I played Tiny Rooms Story Mystery which is a mystery puzzle game developed by Kiary Games in 2021. This is an online game that you can play on Steam with a PC or on iOS/Android devices. The target audience of the game is aged 8+, and the hints feature of the game allows many users to be able to play the game regardless of age or circumstance, because players can use as many (or as little) hints as they want. This game attracts explorer and achiever types of players who want to solve the mystery or explore a space and its relation to the game’s storyline.
The narrative of the game is an embedded narrative where your discover the secret as to what happened to “your” (the player’s) dad who sent you a letter about a deserted town. By walking through abandoned homes and looking around every corner, this game is designed to push players to explore the game’s environment as much as possible. This embedded narrative is woven into the mystery through tapping through every object in every corner to see if there’s anything behind/suspiciously hidden near the object that can help solve the mystery. You also interact with elements (e.g., turning lights on and off) and swiping left and right to inspect the room at all four possible corner and see the room from every view without missing any pieces. When you interact with objects in the game, you get commentary on whether the object functions as a clue or you’re on the right path:
This clue also gives key insight into how the architecture of the game defines challenges through exploration of rooms and letting the player find important objects on their own. Every hint is important in unlocking the next clue for the mystery of the game. The dynamics of the game are a point-and-click adventure with Escape the Room elements where you must click on objects, as mentioned previously, to progress through the game. This game has narrative and discovery elements as aesthetic choices for players to have fun.
Tiny Rooms Story Mystery is different from other Escape Room games, like Exit the game where you work with other characters to solve the main mystery, because Tiny Rooms Story Mystery is one player, and focuses on multiple rooms in one house in one chapter rather than one-three rooms total as other Escape Room games (of different mediums) usually utilize. In Tiny Rooms Story Mystery, once you solve the mini mysteries which let you move on to the next chapter, the player feels hooked to continue until all chapters, and the mystery itself, is solved once and for all. Other escape room games work with only a few rooms and work with the clues mainly in each room, but the architecture is vital for progressing in the Tiny Rooms Story Mystery narrative. This game lets the player take as long as they want on each room, and there is no timer component rushing the players. However, this also leads to a fault of the game, where because it’s single player and you are entirely by yourself, the lack of a timer made the game too slow-paced for my liking.
Generally, the multiple rooms and navigation through rooms allows players to have a unique experience when it comes to navigating the game’s mystery and never get bored of a single room because the setting is always changing, yet important for the narrative.
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Features that I thought were useful while playing were the narration of the player (e.g., hmm maybe there’s something behind the chair)
and the hint feature where if you watched an ad, you could unlock an actually-useful hint for the game. The hint features are helpful to those with varying cognitive abilities play the game at their own pace and choose whether they think they need a hint or not. The narration (on screen dialogue/clues) is helpful to deaf players, especially since the game doesn’t rely heavily on music/audio for players to solve mysteries. However, some accessibility barriers in the game was for blind/low vision users; this game is not very accessible for blind players, at least, without significant modifications, because you need to explore the rooms in-depth, and the premise of the game is to explore the room’s subtle objects that may not be as straightforward to find for these players. As one escape room company stated, “To cater to visually impaired players, escape rooms can offer Braille or tactile components, adequate lighting, or audio descriptions.” However, this is not a feature Tiny Rooms Story Mystery incorporated into their game design because the online game relies heavily on visual cues that make it inaccessible for visually impaired individuals.
