The Room Three Review (Cracktus Jack)
The Room Three
...is a brain-teaser puzzle game. Still obsessed with the fate of your friend A.S., you are pulled from your train into a castle by the mysterious Craftman, who challenges you to solve his puzzles with promises to reveal the secret power of The Null.
⚙ Game Description & Mechanics ⚙
You begin in a train when a box suddenly appears before your eyes, containing a prism that summons the mysterious Null which transport you to a cell in a castle. From there, your goal is to escape, and explore other rooms that are unlocked one by one until you have collected all the prisms and required items to escape the castle. Each of these rooms is linked to a different building located on the island: the lighthouse, the clock tower, the mill and the observatory, each with puzzles of their own.
In each room or set of rooms, you must interact with objects in the room, pushing buttons, pulling levers and opening compartments to find objects and keys to unlock further buttons and compartments. Devices and items are spread across the rooms, but many will have a featured puzzle box you'll regularly need to get back to in order to progress.
Not all buttons or interactive parts are obvious, some of even very hidden, requiring you to look at everything from every angle. Some will often require to solve puzzle mini-games: moving items around on a board, rotating gears in a specific order, or solving a riddle. Carrying over from the previous games is the lens device that sees hidden markings and clues, and you early on upgrade it with an additional lens that allows you to peek into specific tiny spaces to activate a box or device from within.
☺ What I enjoyed ☺
There are a lot of puzzles in there, very varied, none of them too obvious. This isn't a typical Point & Click game and is leagues above the puzzles found in Hidden Object games. The puzzles feel very mechanical or physical, and solving each puzzle feels like it's articulating a mechanism or articulates a contraption, each lever or gear feels like it's serving a physical purpose, whether to open a door or to supply you with a key or object that will.
Every single step requires thought and observation. It mixes obviousness with extreme subtlety, often at the same time, throwing you off track. You opened a cabinet and found an item inside you need to progress? But did you see that on the inner face of the cabinet door, there was a small sliding button at near the bottom that opens a compartment accessible from behind the cabinet? This is a fictitious example, but is very representative of some of the traps in this game.
Although it is a mobile part, the game is complex enough to make it a worthy PC game, working well enough with a mouse that you wouldn't necessarily know it was originally a mobile game.
☹ What bothered me ☹
I can't help but feel like the game is losing some of the appeal the franchise had. You used to have one highly complex central puzzle box, and spent a lot of time working it and unlocking it from every angle, the few other items in the room merely serving as storage for keys and handles you needed to further unlock the box. In The Room Three, most devices have a one-time use single purpose, and you instead spend a lot more time moving around the room from one device or box to another, or even from one room to the other, forcing a lot a back and forth, so playtime relies a lot more on you missing something and backtracking to check dozens of locations again and again to see what it is you missed.
There just isn't as much care put into the quality of the environment. I clearly remember how The Room was proud of the new high-resolution textures, the added details, the extra work put into every simple part of the puzzles, showing off comparative "original release" versus "PC edition" screenshots in its marketing. It sure doesn't look like that care was put here, as if the attention to detail in the finer finishing touches were missing, making it feel much older than it actually is.
My Verdict: ★★★☆☆ - "It's up to you."
It's a nice game, but a step down to the original one in my experience. If you like busting your brain on solving puzzles, it's a medium challenge and still enjoyable enough to get me to recommend it, but in my opinion, the first games remain the superior ones.
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This was just my opinion.
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