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Rooms: The Main Building Review for Nintendo Wii

Rooms: The Main Building Review for Nintendo Wii

Casual games, or what we refer to as such today at least, are a somewhat strange river to navigate for people who take their video games seriously. It may be good fun to have a game that’s easy and mundane enough that you can play for a few minutes at a time, but for negotiating the fun factor for easy design is by no means a simple task.

Rooms: The Main Building screenshot

How exactly can a developer go about creating a game that’s easy to play and fun in short spurts, yet hold gamers’ attention for longer? Take, say, puzzle games, which are casual insofar as they offer an addictive experience that’s easy to learn but hard to master (the good ones, anyway). Tower defense, on the other hand, is a design that barely even qualifies as a game, considering very little interaction with any adversaries actually happens with you commanding the action as it happens. While casual games can mean different things for different people, the point is that the simplicity of their design means you’re probably either going to like the game right away or you’re not. Rooms: The Main Building isn’t going to hold much appeal for many gamers.

The reason for this is simple: slide puzzles. Yes, Rooms actually hearkens back to the days of (most of) our youths, where simple ‘analogue’ games like slide puzzles and marble mazes could hold our attention for longer than just a few minutes. But, much in the same way that most people would never want to play a pinball game on a console when they could just go to a bar and play the real thing, the translation from real life to a digital game isn’t needed. And, in the case of slide puzzles, which don’t hold much long-term demand in the first place, whatever limited appeal is there is even less than pinball. In the game’s defense, they did try to make the game a little more interesting than literally moving jumbled pictures around (like you might see in a survival horror game) to make a complete image. But, it kind of misses the point anyway.

Rooms: The Main Building screenshot

What Rooms, such as it is, makes an attempt at doing is straddling the line between a straight-up puzzle game and, for lack of a better comparative design, a point-and-click adventure. Rather than simply interacting with the slide puzzles from an objective point of view, your role is actually subjective-meaning you’re inside the puzzle itself (this is made possible thanks to a poorly-written story in which you get stuck in a world where all the environments are discombobulated and need to be arranged back together. Yes, this is about as exciting as it sounds. Needless to say, when you enter into a room, there’s a series of other rooms which can or can’t be connected depending on barriers that would force you to take other paths. You can move around a room, but there’s no point if you can’t connect it to another, which is where the slide puzzle mechanic comes in (you can move a room to any open space).

In order to successfully make it through a level, however, you have to use objects in the rooms to do so. Locked doors need keys, getting to rooms above you requires a ladder, and so on. As a way of trying to spice up the tedium of simply adjusting things to get from point A to point B, the developers even included some extra mechanics, like having to blow up wooden barriers with TNT, teleporters, and closets that swap room placement.

Rooms: The Main Building screenshot

As a particular map (which is what the bulk of Rooms is broken up into) wears on, these new mechanics are put into place more frequently, and the result is that the game has some surprisingly challenging puzzles that can admittedly be fun to best. But, even if there were a lot of harder puzzles-which there aren’t-the game’s touted 100 puzzles just feel like so much filler, since a good bit of them can be beaten in less than a minute.

Rooms: The Main Building screenshot

Making matters worse, the dev team also decided to break up the ‘action’ with some light elements ripped from a point-and-click adventure game. This doesn’t really involve more than going to various places and using items to stop whatever obstacle happens to be keeping you from progressing, but at least it’s not too much of a chore. You’re also forced to sit through the story between these sections, which I won’t waste your time by explaining any more than I already have; I’ll just say it involves a talking book and has production values that look ripped straight from a made-for-television Harry Potter knock-off. Not that it matters much, because just about anyone who plays Rooms for more than ten minutes (if that) will probably be ready to put the controller down and do something else.

Hudson hasn’t been doing too well as a brand (particularly one that’s owned by Konami) since their early days of arcade shooters, and games like Rooms or the truly awful Dreamcast-esque horror title Calling aren’t helping things.

Is going for the budget rack really the best idea if they want to keep making disc release games? I would say no. In any case, almost no one wants to play a game based on slide-puzzles, regardless. Maybe this would’ve worked as a downloadable, budget-priced distraction, but as it stands, there’s very little reason to bother with this one.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 2.0 Graphics
Rooms’ graphics do two things well: dated and ugly. 4.0 Control
Navigating the rooms is easy, but the other commands can be a bit finicky. 2.0 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
The music is ok, if a bit like generic elevator Muzak. Thankfully, there are no voices to bring life to the execrable script. 2.3

Play Value
You might have a little bit of fun with Rooms’ more challenging levels, if you like brain-teasers. Too bad there aren’t more of them and the rest of the game is such a slog.

2.4 Overall Rating – Poor
Not an average. See Rating legend above for a final score breakdown.

Game Features:

  • 100 puzzles to solve.
  • Two-player mode challenges your speed and puzzle skills.
  • Unlockable challenge mode.

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