The Room Three Review (The Greater Sphinx)
The Room Three is the third game in the Room series. In this game, you follow the mysterious notes of someone called The Craftsman through a building full of puzzles.
Unlike the previous games, this game only has a couple of puzzle boxes and is mostly focused on solving whole rooms. In the early chapters of the game, you just focus on a specific room at a time, but towards the end there is some backtracking to previously explored areas. There are also a few puzzle elements scattered throughout that aren't required to solve the room and proceed. You can use these optional puzzles to "change your fate" and unlock alternate endings at the end of the game.
The puzzles in this game generally made sense, although I needed a couple of hints for the tricky ones. It was about as difficult as The Room Two. However, there were a couple of things that were just confusing. There is a lot of warping to mini-rooms within the chapters, which sometimes means a puzzle inside a puzzle inside another puzzle, which made me feel a little lost at times. The chapters also end when you collect a specific item, not when you place it in the hub. This was a little confusing at first, especially when I stopped at a chapter break and came back the next day, only to find myself in a room I had already finished.
I really like the way they do the hints in this game. There are 3 levels of hint, so it gives you a gentle nudge in the right direction at first and is more specific if you need additional hints about the same thing.
I like the idea of having extra puzzles and bonus endings in theory, but it just made the rooms more confusing to solve the first time around and led to a lot of backtracking. Once you enter the final puzzle room, you have to go through to the end before you get a chance to explore more for the bonus endings. The game isn't very clear on what "changing your fate" entails at first, so I ended up just walking through the final door again and having to do the puzzle twice in a row.
The movement on certain objects is still janky and there were a few switches that kept stopping halfway for no reason and took multiple tries to actually flip.
Overall, The Room Three is a decent game, but in my opinion wasn't quite as good as its predecessors. It expands on the previous games but is more confusing rather than more difficult. 6/10