Rooms - The Main Building : DS
When I first saw this game on the shop shelf, I took it down, looked at the back, thought ‘what junk’ and put it back, wondering why it was selling enough to put it in the charts. Some weeks after that, I saw a video of it on the Nintendo Channel and thought ‘ooh, that looks fun! I want that!’ and after mentioning it a few times to Jen, I found myself with a present of it a week or so ago.
On the back of the box, it suggests that Rooms is a load of those little sliding puzzles you do when you’re five (and hate even then). What the box doesn’t let you know is that other than a basic mechanic alluding to those puzzles, Rooms has nothing in common with them whatsoever. In fact, it’s quite a clever puzzle game where you have to navigate a man around a ‘room’ by moving bits of the room around, and taking into account various special abilites; like the teleporting phone, the block switching wardrobe, or the surreal subway system (yes, a subway in a room, it doesn’t make sense no matter how they try, but it’s fun to use). So what we have here is something that looks like it might be challenging and fun! Yay.
And it is fun! Thank God for that! Rooms is a hell of a lot of fun, as you slip and slide the room pieces around and teleport around and work it all out. Here’s the problem (and unfortunately, it’s a big problem): it’s not challenging. I completed the game in about three to four hours all told, and though I had to redo a couple of levels to get the ‘gold award’ in each, it wasn’t hard to do so. Some rooms could be completed in seconds, others took a few minutes, but none of them made your brain strain. Puzzle games have got to challenge and make you struggle, they have to make you walk away thinking ‘how the hell do I do that?’ and force you to come back later for another go. In the same way that Professor Layton 2 fails to impress, Rooms has the same problem. Simple, simple, too simple. No challenge.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There are some bonus levels to play through and I’ve not done that yet (I think I will though, because it is fun) so there may be a sudden steep jump in difficulty somewhere in them, but in the main game there’s nothing to stretch at all.
It’s all made worse by the ‘plot’ and ‘cutscenes’ which are truly the most awful of their type yet to be seen in a game! Some rubbish about a conniving book and a jigsaw which only needs four pieces as, God it’s so crap I can’t even be bothered to write about it. In the hope that something interesting would come from these between sections, I went through them all diligently, but there is a button to skip them, so I suggest doing that! The plot also forces you to do some stupid side sections that are neither challenging nor fun but you have to go through them to open the next part of the game. Sigh.
Still, my bitching aside, there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had from Rooms. It’s a great premise for a game and if some real thought had gone into the level design to stop it being so easy, it could have provided some real brain-working moments. As it is, it falls short. Still, it does come with a level creator and all that stuff you don’t normally play with, so maybe out there there’s a community of people making levels that are actually challenging. I can’t see me joining them though.
Fun but flawed; that’s Rooms. Oh, and what’s with the rubbish subtitle?!
