The Room 4: Old Sins
Fireproof Games are proud to bring the fourth instalment of the critically acclaimed game series ‘The Room’ to PC. The Room 4: Old Sins features a strange, multi-room dollhouse to explore and continues the engaging puzzle gameplay of its predecessors set against the background of a tragic story. In a considerable visual upgrade from the mobile release, Fireproof Games have re-built, re-textured and re-lit every shiny object and atmospheric environment in the game to pull players further into the mysterious world of The Room. The story of The Room 4: Old Sins centres on the sudden disappearance of an ambitious engineer and his high-society wife which provokes the hunt for a precious artefact. The trail leads to the attic of their home, and the discovery of an old, peculiar dollhouse… Explore unsettling locations, follow obscure clues and manipulate bizarre contraptions to uncover the mysteries within Waldegrave Manor.
Steam User 65
The Room 5 please.
Steam User 28
The Room 4: Old Sins
...is a brain-teaser puzzle game. Sent to investigate the circumstances of the disappearance of its occupants, you arrive at a burnt-down house and make your way to the intact attic where a model of the house reveals past events.
⚙ Game Description & Mechanics ⚙
A spin-off story from the previous three games, you play a new character investigating the presence of a mysterious power known as the Null, which brings you to a house where a mechanical engineer with an interest for chemistry has disappeared, along with his wife whose family house was at the center of unexplained events. That's where you find a dollhouse-sized model of the manor that doubles as a puzzle box. This time around, you bring your own eyepiece with a lens that allows you to magically peer into the rooms of the dollhouse.
Scattered across the dollhouse and all around each of the eight rooms (nine, if you include the attic), you will find objects you can pick up or interact with, and each action you take causes a chain reaction of new action you can take. Perhaps you find a hidden button on the bottom of a drawer, which opens a hidden panel when pushed, panel behind which is a lever, which when turned will move a mirror, which reflects light on a crystal that activates another contraption.
With each trinket or piece of information you find, you may need to zoom back out of the room you're in, activate another part of the dollhouse and reveal yet another room. The following action to take is rarely obvious, so you'll need to make careful observation and will be required to memorize any potential keyholes or missing piece you come across to go back to at a later time.
☺ What I enjoyed ☺
While there are many puzzles, few if any are alike. This has nothing to do with finishing a drawing, matching the colors in a pattern or any other puzzles typically found in Hidden Object games. Here, all puzzles are mechanical in nature, and they all feel plausible, as if the physical pressure or motion of your action causes the result, to the point where you could almost imagine the mechanism activating and the gears turning within the object or behind the wall.
This specific iteration is a nice balance of the features found in the previous games. You're back to a single, main puzzle box to solve (the dollhouse), and while the lens allows you to zoom into the rooms and even zoom into objects inside those rooms (inception-style), you're no longer walking around larger areas with corridors and multiple doorways, and strictly focus on an object or room at hand.
Even though this game is once again a mobile port released a few years before arriving on PC, it is perfectly adapted to controlling with a mouse. Using a mouse is perfectly responsive, lacking any "click and hold" often required in games originally meant for touch control. Using your mouse cursor is precise and moving your mouse for the desired motion works very well. The game's visuals and the textures' resolution received quite a step up from original mobile release as well.
☹ What bothered me ☹
While no one plays these games exclusively for the story, the fact that it is an entirely self-contained disconnected story (save for the presence of the Null) has made me feel a little let down. I like a good mystery, and was used to the story being fed in bite-size increments, but I was still hoping to find out what happened to our character after The Room Three and its various endings. This expectation would not have been there if the game's name dropped the number completely, and would probably feel more approachable to those that haven't already played the previous three games.
I can't say I'm that fond of the magical/surreal nature of using the lens. Sure, it works as intended to unlock rooms from the dollhouse instead of merely unlocking doors from within a house, but it's immersion-breaking for me to see inside a keyhole to activate triggers from an angle you just wouldn't see from the hole, or moving something around in lens mode to see the physical reality of the world having changed once you remove the lens. When they were first revealed in earlier games, they served to reveal hidden information to move forward, like invisible paint, x-rays or something else more tangible.
My Verdict: ★★★★☆ - "Next on your list!"
It's definitely my favorite game of the series. The developers have obviously learned a great deal on puzzle boxes, on what works and what doesn't work within the frame of a videogame, and have leveraged their experience from the three previous games. Since it is a standalone game, it's a good opportunity for newcomers to the puzzle box genre to jump in!
—————————————————————————
This was just my opinion.
If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up, and feel free to check out more of my (purely opinionated) reviews.
Steam User 31
Very good puzzle game with beautiful design. But it's rather a step back compared to The Room Three. This part is very linear and casual, much simpler than the previous title. It's closer to the first two titles, but somewhat longer and still rather more casual. About 5 hours of gameplay, and it's very unlikely to take much longer if you use tips, those are very bold, so unlikely to get stuck for long. No additional/alternative content in contrast to the previous title. 9/10.
Steam User 24
The Room 4: Old Sins feels like the definitive game in this series. The game is so well executed and a joy to experience. Having played through each game, it's easy to see how this 4th game is the culmination of all the developer's hard work and thoughtful design. These games are short (in a good way) and reasonably priced. Pick them up if you like spooky puzzles.
There are three aspects of The Room 4 that I'd like to praise specifically. First is the more efficient movement. At the end of the 3rd game, I remember feeling constrained by the slow, cinematic camera movements across large spaces that required specific navigation. This really became an issue when I wasn't sure what to do, but wanted to explore and experiment in many places. This 4th game makes moving to interactive locations much more efficient. Not only is the camera quicker now, but every inner room is directly connected to the outer hub space. No longer do you have to walk across a room, then into an elevator, then tell it to go down, then into a new room, then down a hallway, just to get back to the hub; instead you simply right-click indiscriminately a couple times and you're there. This might sound like a small detail, but it's a huge quality of life improvement and a result of smart design.
In a similar vein, I really like how this game handles closing off obsolete areas. Completing a room of the dollhouse already feels rewarding, but it also means closing a door connected to the hub. This does a great job of preventing needless backtracking and reduces opportunity for the player to feel lost. This is balanced perfectly with the interconnection of the rooms. Closing one door usually opens the next, and every currently open room plays a part in solving the next puzzle. I also want to mention how this is used on the small scale. When you've completed everything connected to a portion of a room, the game prevents you from zooming in on that section. As an example, when you finish all the puzzles in a desk, then the desk will pack itself up and no longer be interactable. If the game lets you interact and zoom in, then there's more to do in that space.
Lastly, I need to bring up the excellent setting. We're back in one "room" but with a vast dollhouse to explore. You get the best of both worlds: one big puzzle box, but also a host of interesting locations. It really feels like the perfect solution to balance the growing scope of these games. I also really appreciate the recursive nature of the ending sequence. And let's not forget to mention how great the game looks and sounds. The ambiance is fantastic.
It's safe to say that I'm eagerly anticipating the next game in this series. I've always been a big fan of point-and-click puzzle games and this is the best one I've played in a while. Keep up the great work, Fireproof Games!
Steam User 26
Where 5?
Steam User 14
WE NEED MORE
Steam User 13
Brilliant as The Room series always did! The 4th entry Old Sins seems lower down it's difficulty but adding more scenes and puzzle mechanism. Highly recommended.