subject: Rooms: The Main Building DSi Game Review - Download Rooms: The Main Building For Free! [print this page]
It's telling that the only time I identified with my character in Rooms: The Main Building was when he cried out in exasperation about how the game wasn't over. Rooms touts its 100 levels like a plea to justify its existence as a retail release, but this ends up being more than anyone -- save the stanchest slide-puzzle junkie -- would ever want. The myriad twists and tweaks just don't entertain much over the course of the stupid single-player story, leaving a game whose sometimes minor (and sometimes glaring) issues drag it deep into the realm of mediocrity.
Rooms' story mode is a tale about a young man who gets trapped in a world he can only escape from by solving slide puzzles. And while traditional slide puzzles are completed by moving pieces around so that they make a picture or form a word, these one see you guiding your character through the puzzle itself (pieces can only be moved when your character is in the square you wish to slide), with the ultimate goal of unlocking a doorway to the next level.
Forming pictures is still important if you want to get a "Gold" rating for the level, but it's not essential, acting as a guide for completion rather than the way to play a given puzzle. That probably sounds pretty dull... and that's because, well, it is: guiding your character through door after door becomes increasingly monotonous, and each successive stage made me feel more like a videogame Sisyphus than a slide-puzzle mastermind.
Thankfully, the team behind Rooms apparently realized that the small twist of guiding a character through puzzles rapidly becomes a bore, and added a series of twists that help inject some variety -- at least for a short while. Throughout the course of the game, additional mechanics are slowly introduced, including teleporters, water-filled rooms, and magic cupboards that switch tiles' places.
These quirks add a sense of spontaneity to the level design; toward the end of the game, these elements often get pulled together within a single stage, creating deceptively difficult puzzles that are downright satisfying to solve. It's unfortunate, though, that the number of clever, challenging puzzles gets overshadowed by a host of mind-numbingly simple levels that fail to engage for any extended amount of time.
Rooms: The Main Building DSi Game Review - Download Rooms: The Main Building For Free!
