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Rooms is a free game that you can either download or play online. It is similar to the sliding square puzzles that you may have played with as a child, where you moved plastic squares around in order to form a picture. Here, though, instead of trying to unscramble a picture, you are trying to escape from a room. One square contains a person, and you move that square around until the person can get to an exit.

The first thing I noticed about the game was that it had an arty look. You start off seeing a corridor containing many doors. The artwork has an attractive old-fashioned look, and the slightly menacing music went well with the artwork. The atmosphere reminded me of an old mystery movie.

I had trouble picking up some of the basics of the game. One of the rooms contained instructions, but they weren't really clear to me, so I just started playing. It took me a while to figure out how to pick up objects, and once, I got stuck on a level even though I'm pretty sure that I had all the squares in the right position. That may have been due to bugs in the game. Sometimes if you're not positioned exactly right, things don't work the way they should, so try moving the person a little bit to the left or the right.

One thing I would recommend to new players is to make sure to read the newspaper on every level. That gives you instructions. Although the instructions are in slightly fractured English, they are clearer than they are in the "how to play" room, and they also appear at exactly the time that you need them.

The game, I think, was created by students, and it doesn't have the slick look and feel of games built with a large budget. But it has a lot of charm. The artwork, especially, is very creative.

The game starts off with a simple puzzle, and then new wrinkles are added one at a time, including telephones that transport you between squares, fires and fire extinguishers, wardrobes that switch the contents of rooms, and rotating rooms. Again, the key to figuring out what to do is to pick up and read the newspaper on every level that has one.

One aspect of the game that I didn't like is that it required using both the mouse and keyboard arrow keys, and I had to do a lot of switching back and forth. I read on their site that they are working on a new version of the game which you can play using only the mouse. The new version will also have 80 additional levels.

I think I'm about half-way through the game. After I got past my initial frustration, I enjoyed the game, and now I'd like to try to solve all the remaining levels. I rate it a 3.5 out of 5.

Learn more about this author, May Monten.
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