Rooms is a series of puzzles — ninety-six on the main course and forty-eight you can discover and unlock — that challenge you to slide rooms in a mythical mansion around to reach the exit. The game has a charming story that unfolds as you progress through four differently themed mansions. The story sees a masterful toymaker discovering a strange jigsaw puzzle piece. It helps him further develop incredible toys, but, as he does so, the inherent glow of the piece fades more and more. Over time, the toymaker becomes more recluse in his mansion until one day, both he and the mansion vanish. A young girl, Anne, awakens one night in a trance-like state, apparently led by the oil lamp that she carries. She reaches the front gates of the mansion and enters, and the lamp begins to talk to her and help her. Together, with your puzzle-solving skills and maybe some help from walkthroughs, you control Anne as she navigates one room after another, looking for hidden jigsaw pieces and all the while trying to reach the next exit.
In VR, Rooms is perfectly comfortable to play and it promotes an interesting atmosphere right from the opening menu. The menu is situated in the middle of the courtyard in front of the mansion. From here you can turn around 360 degrees to survey the courtyard in a nicely drawn and animated form. A variety of different achievements are scattered about the yard behind you, for things like solving so many room puzzles and finding so many jigsaw pieces and unlocking the next mansion and so forth. You can also exit back to the desktop through the main gate directly behind the default view and change between a handful of instrumental-only music tracks by looking to your left and pressing A over the music prompt. The game takes place in the 100 degrees or so immediately in front of you, although the lantern’s dialog is shown slightly above the puzzle space so you will be moving your head around some too.
Making progress in Rooms is very easy at first as gameplay elements are introduced. The premise throughout is simple, you must guide Anne through a series of rooms by sliding them around, making connections both horizontally to walkthrough and also vertically (for ladder use) in order to reach a door. This door is sometimes locked so you’ll have to spot the key, snag it, and then get to the door. Along the way there are useful, magical items like old rotary telephones that teleport you between rooms with the same-colored phone. Wardrobes are similar, yet different in that when you enter a wardrobe, the entire room itself switches position with the other room with a wardrobe, not just Anne herself. Poisonous gas clouds, spooky dolls that you have to avoid touching, and other obstacles and tools get introduced at regular intervals to keep things fresh as well.
Rooms is designed such that you have to clear one room before you can go on to the next, and one mansion before you can go onto the next, so it’s fairly likely that you will get stumped at some point. For me it was only about twenty rooms in before I finally decided to check out a walkthrough. Fortunately in that regard, there are plenty of walkthroughs of the game available given that the puzzles are the same as they were when the game first released about thirteen months ago. How much you spoil the game for yourself is entirely up to you of course, and this is also the kind of game that, even if you see the puzzle solved for you once, you could play it a day later and probably not remember all of the moves, in sequence, needed to solve it again. Each puzzle does have a minimum number of moves to solve and this value is shown just off to your left while you play. You aren’t required to match this number and you can take as many moves as you want to and as long as you need to. I liked that the game doesn’t pressure players or throw-up a big ‘fail’ screen if they mess up. You can also restart the puzzle instantly at anytime from the pause menu. One nagging point that I came to ignore though was Anne was sometimes really quick to say ‘maybe I should restart?’ even though the player wasn’t really stuck yet. It’s not a big deal, but would have been a minor plus to be able to disable that.
The puzzles definitely get challenging, but I like how the games takes you from simple to increasingly challenging, and better yet, has a great story that unfolds as you progress. The story — figuring out the mystery of the toymaker, this mansion, and also trying to find the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle hidden within each room — is actually quite intriguing. It’s an effective hook HandMade uses right from the start. Additionally, the ramp up in puzzle challenge is such that you’re learning literally room-by-room — not just the gameplay mechanics but also how to better solve these sliding puzzles. I went from feeling stupid to triumphant several times in my play thus far and I appreciate a puzzle game that nurtures player improvement and learning.
So while Rooms may not be the most immersive and amazing VR experience you’ll have, it is a very comfortable, charming, challenging, and generally just enjoyable one that offers plenty of content for the cost of admission. This potent combination makes Rooms: The Unsolvable Puzzle a game I would recommend any Rift owner keep on their short list.
To the summary…
