With a title like Rooms: The Unsolvable Puzzle, you’d wonder who would ever buy a game you couldn’t win? Thankfully, the puzzles are “solvable” and actually quite clever at the same time with a nice progression of difficulty and intuitive rules and design concepts that make this game a joy from start to finish.
Inspired by those sliding tile puzzles found in cereal boxes from the last century and more recently those hacking puzzles in BioShock, Rooms takes a cross-section of a house, divides it into a varying number of rooms then scrambles those rooms and asks you to get from the starting location to the exit…and maybe collect a few things along the way. The concept is clever, and the execution is pure genius. By examine the rooms there are subtle clues as to which rooms go where; things like a staircase or railing or maybe a connected animation that leaves one room segment and appears on another. A hint outline shows you the finishing layout, but you still need to figure out which rooms go where.
Your main goal is to get Anne, a little girl trapped in a big house, out of this twisted mansion. You can slide around the rooms making connections that allow Anne to simple move to a new area or climb a ladder or ascend some stairs or get really clever with color-coded phones that teleport you from room to room. While the game is presented in a 2D cutaway view the power of the Oculus Rift comes into play by allowing you to peer into these rooms in a 3D nature, looking ink, under, and above, which is often necessary when trying to locate those hidden gold puzzle pieces. The whole 3D nature of the Rift turns this traditional tile puzzler into something more complicated; something more like a model.
The art and presentation is exceptional, from the detailed interiors, wallpaper, and textures of the various rooms to the intricate 3D objects inside them. Even the lighting effects are excellent and often a clue as to the location of a puzzle piece. You play the game from the front lawn of the large estate, which is also home to a number of interactive objects that serve as your menu to settings and unlockables. The opening cutscene is theater-quality and plays in an overlay across the mansion. Actually, everything integrates seamlessly into the game world.
Rooms: The Unsolvable Puzzle is not short on content with 96 core levels and 48 more you can unlock. Each puzzle is presented as a door from multiple menus of doors that unlock as you progress deeper into the game. It’s a nice sliding scale of difficulty that adds new concepts and rules to the design then builds on those before introducing something new. Puzzles have a set amount of moves to be solved if you want the best ranking, but you aren’t required to meet those numbers. You can replay puzzles or quickly restart if you find yourself stuck. Reload times are fast.
Rooms: The Unsolvable Puzzle definitely looks like a mobile game that was enhanced for PC then further enhanced for VR, but there is certainly nothing wrong with that. While this game doesn’t really exploit the power of VR it does use the 3D nature of the tech and the head tracking capabilities to get you inside this mansion in a way you can’t do with a conventional screen. And it still shows a full-screen view on the monitor, so anyone else in the room can assist you in solving the puzzles.
There are countless hours of mind-melting puzzles waiting for you in Rooms: The Unsolvable Puzzle, and the more you play the more you want to keep playing. I was surprised I never hit that wall of frustration, and it was usually VR fatigue that finally had me stopping to take a break or pass the headset to someone else in the room. The entire presentation is charming, the story engaging, and the gameplay challenging in all the right ways. This is a strong recommendation for anyone with an Oculus Rift who enjoys classic puzzle games with cools twists.
