The Room Three Review (Psyringe)
"The Room 3" is a fairly short (7h for me to see everything), competently done "puzzle box" game that delivers exactly what fans of the "Room" franchise expect and want.
1. Story & Setting
As in previous "The Room" games, the story is effectively just a loose narrative framework to tie the puzzles together. You start inside a building on a strange island that you felt compelled to visit for reasons you do not understand. As you keep solving puzzles, you occasionally find letters from someone who calls himself "the Craftsman" and encourages you to go on. Contrary to the previous two games, the story of this one has an interesting twist toward the end, which leads to four different possible endings.
As in the previous games, the story isn't anything innovative or special, but it's told well enough to keep players engaged, even though the game's main draw are clearly the puzzles, not the narrative.
2. Gameplay & Mechanics
Each of the game's six chapters consists of several interconnected puzzles that tie together into a more complex main puzzle. The puzzles are usually scattered across a few different rooms, and you navigate between those by double-clicking on certain hotspots on the screen (like a doorway).
Most puzzles are environmental and involve understanding, operating, and/or repairing various machines. In the best tradition of "The Room" games, many of these are intricate puzzle boxes with lots of buttons, levers, moving parts, and secret compartments. Some puzzles require items that you can carry around in your small inventory, and sometimes you need to manipulate items in your inventory by rotating them in a 3D view and clicking or pulling certain parts. You never need to combine items in your inventory, though.
You'll find a sort-of magical lens that distorts the screen, but often lets you see otherwise hidden information. This lens can be toggled on or off anytime by clicking on it.
I found the puzzles engaging and well-designed. There's a good degree of variation to them, and while some of them repeat several times (like power generators that all need to operated in the same way), that did not make them boring for me - rather, finding puzzles that I already knew how to handle contributed to my feeling of "mastering" the game.
In terms of difficulty, I found the puzzles more on the casual side, though there are a few exceptions. Hints unlock successively after certain amounts of time have passed, and these should usually prevent you from getting stuck - however, they will only lead you to one of the four endings. If you want to find the others, you'll have to solve several optional puzzles in the last chapter that the game won't provide any hints for. They aren't extremely difficult, but require you to identify additional puzzles in several rooms that aren't directly connected. After completing the game with one ending, you get transported back to a save from before tackling the very last puzzle, so you can search for optional puzzles you may have missed and go for a different ending.
3. Graphics & Presentation
Graphics are crisp with a decent level of detail, and look good even in 4k resolution on a 43'' monitor. The animations of various machinery, as well as the transitions between locations, are smooth and very well done. Sound effects fit the respective events excellently. Animations and sound effects both contribute a lot to the feeling of satisfaction when solving a puzzle and watching the parts move into place.
There is no voice-acting in the game, and while the letters that transport the narrative could have benefited from it, I don't think it's a necessity for a game like this.
4. Usability & Accessibility
Options are initally very sparse: there's just a fullscreen toggle, a resolution selector, and a quality setting that lets you choose between 5 presets. However, selecting a sixth preset ("Custom") opens up an additional menu that lets you select features like anti-aliasing, texture detail, shadow detail, etc. separately. Potentially undesired features like depth of field, motion blur, and chromatic aberration can be toggled on or off individually. Volume can be changed via a single setting.
Accessibility settings are completely absent. The game can only be controlled with the mouse, there are no keyboard shortcuts other than "Esc" for the pause menu. Settings for visually impaired players don't exist, nor are there visualizations of audio cues for deaf players. While this shouldn't prevent those players from completing the game, it would definitively have been nice to see such features.
You can switch between different profiles, but there is only one save state per profile, which gets updated frequently and automatically. Manual saves are not possible, but I did not miss them in this game.
I did not run into any bugs.
5. Conclusion
If you liked The Room 1 and 2, then you'll like The Room 3, as it simply provides more of the same - just with new puzzles and a new story, which (this time) even has different possible endings. If you didn't like the previous games, you won't like this one either. If you didn't play the previous games already, I suggest doing so first, as they introduce you to parts of the franchise's lore that the The Room 3 doesn't really explain to newcomers.