by Faith Marlow

Created on: January 24, 2009   Last Updated: October 11, 2011

Rating: 5/5

Imagine walking outside to a bright sunny day, your birthday, and finding a package on your doorstep. You don't recognize the initials of the sender but you open the package anyway and find the most intriguing of puzzles. It's a golden board shaped like a great mansion, Rooms Mansion. As you inspect your new found treasure, you barely noticed the ticking sound coming from the board. Then suddenly, a flash of light and smoke and then everything goes black. The letter falls to the ground, on the back an ominous warning You open it, you start it. Welcome to Rooms, a clever sliding puzzle game from Handmade Games. You must navigate through the jumbled rooms of the mansion by moving the one in which you are currently standing in any of the available directions. There are locked doors and golden frames to block your path and objects to collect along the way to help you in your adventure. When you finally reach the golden trimmed door, you can leave that room and can move on to the next. But Rooms is more than just a puzzle game, there is an original and interesting storyline at work here. You are driven to not just solve the puzzles but to unravel the mystery and see how everything plays out.

To say that the graphics and design set this game apart would be an understatement. Puzzle games of all varieties are a dime a dozen these days but Handmade Games have succeeded in setting this one ahead of the pack with an interesting look, almost a cross between the world of Harry Potter and a classic Film Noir. The story is told with cutscenes in block style panes, similar to a graphic novel with a cross between live action characters and environments (think 13th guest), gameplay graphics, and creatively designed frames. The background of the puzzle boards and other screens display scenes of dark, rain slicked streets lit by faintly glowing streetlamps, lined with antique cars or different vantages of the mansion itself. This game looks so nice that it makes you want to play it. My one and only fault with this game is that at times the graphics can look a little flat and sometimes items and your character is too small to see much detail. In my opinion, these are minor flaws that do not deduct from the quality of the game. The sound effects in the game consist of what you would expect, footsteps, creaking doors and the like but the background and menu music is quite noteworthy. It is a creative mix of old jazz, Sherlock Holmes mystery music, and a child's music box. It is very well done and accents the game perfectly, adding to the mystery without distracting.

Rooms succeeds is both creativity and innovation. Handmade Games had an original idea to base their puzzle game on and they saw it through. More developers should be willing to go out on a limb and create, not just make another cookie-cutter game. Rooms is a expertly crafted puzzle mystery that plays as good as it looks and vice versa. I very much enjoyed this game and look forward to purchasing it.

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