THE ROOM VR: A DARK MATTER
We reach out, grab the turntable the puzzle box sits on, and spin it idly, thinking. The air almost feels chilly. A light in the ceiling of the large stone chamber in the British Institute Of Archeology occasionally sparks, interrupting our thoughts, in which hieroglyphs dance. Two sides of the box feature symbols on parallel rails; it is clear we are supposed to slide the Eye Of Horus underneath one of the posed Egyptians, but which one? Suddenly, a flash – not the broken light, but a memory of where we saw a potential clue. And we’re off to the other side of a room, poring over a stone tablet riddled with keyholes, sockets and carvings. It’s a treasure hunt-cum-escape-room game that feels more real than any we’ve ever played before.
The Room feels like a concept made for VR. It wasn’t, of course – the puzzle-box game was originally developed for iOS, Fireproof’s first release as a new studio formed by a group of Criterion veterans. Fireproof needed something inexpensive to develop, something that would prove its artistic chops; Apple’s desire to publish and promote good-looking games that showed off the capabilities of its hardware looked promising. From practicality sprang creativity. “We weren’t really sure of the horsepower of an iPad 2, we were very wary about rendering too many objects,” creative director Mark Hamilton says. Walls were not in the budget. “So it was like, ‘Well, let’s make it dark.’” There was suddenly the suggestion of horror (which pleased the team, who were fans of the genre). “‘And let’s make it one object, because then we can render that object really well, make it all shiny, and make it look like a really convincing wooden box.’ But then, what do you do if that’s all you’ve rendered? How do you keep a player on that for a very long time?”
The answer was to make a puzzle box that opened, matryoshka-like, to reveal yet more boxes inside. Thus, the concept of The Room was born. “These decisions were informed by previous decisions – it wasn’t like they were all planned out beforehand,” commercial director Barry Meade says. “It was just, ‘What does the game suggest should happen?’” Having worked in a big-budget environment for many years, the team were confident they could execute their ideas efficiently and to a high standard. “So our big problem was, do we have any good ideas?” They gave themselves seven months to finish the game, and did it in nine. “And that was all of our money that we’d saved over four years, just gone.”
The gamble paid off. The Room was a hit, number one on the App Store within a week of release, and immediately started making good money for the studio (which, embarrassed by the game’s rushed ending, put the first chunk of it towards making free DLC). It won several awards, including a BAFTA. And Fireproof’s course was set, the studio going on to create three sequels. But a change to the App Store in 2017 threw a wrench in the works. The format had been changed from weekly to daily, meaning seven-day-long promotions for games now only lasted for 24 hours, at a time where mobile-game developers relied heavily on digital stores to promote and sell their games. The resulting hit to the discoverability of Fireproof’s games, and the revenue it was using to keep the studio running, was significant. And so it was time to think about making The Room games – designed to be small-scale, inexpensive, less resource-intensive – for other, inevitably more powerful platforms.
No one could accuse The Room VR of being small-scale. It is lavishly done, our demo taking us from our softly lit detective’s office to that cold and imposing storeroom, before placing us among the mahogany pews and vaulted ceilings of a quiet chapel. At the behest of a character with whom fans of the series will be intimately familiar, we’re exploring each area in order to learn more about key figures – the first two being the Egyptologist and the priest – and their dealings with the series’ mysterious ‘Null’ element.
As ever in The Room games, it’s the tactility of the puzzles that delights most. On a touchscreen, we would tap and slide our finger to pop open hidden compartments, slot strange trinkets into sockets, or configure shifting keys for various locks. In virtual reality, the tinkering is even more rewarding. The very first puzzle, in the tutorial area of our
As ever in The Room games, it’s the tactility of the puzzles that delights the most
office, sets expectations for a game all about the joy of interacting with bizarre, beautiful gadgetry that’s not just rendered on a screen in two dimensions, but appears to exist before your very eyes and under your very hands. Having worked out the pattern of numbers on a half-rubbed blackboard containing evidence locker records, and entered the code we need, we’re able to reach out and grab the handle sticking out of the wall – and pull it down with an enormously satisfying ker-chunk, before a dumb-waiter-style contraption delivers the evidence we need to progress.
Not every interaction makes the transition from Apple device to VR so smoothly: a detailed maze (a type of puzzle used in the other The Room games) tasks us with dragging a small metal marker through tiny grooves to flip a series of lights on in order. The device proves perhaps slightly too intricate, the marker not always obeying the controller’s inputs as exactly as a finger on a touchscreen.
But such niggles are rare: Fireproof has clearly invested considerable time and effort into making things as player-friendly as possible, in order to preserve the meditative quality for which The Room’s tinkerings are so revered. The Room has always been about the wonder of the intricate and mysterious – the satisfaction of spotting something slightly out of place, a delicate line in a surface that betrays a hidden panel containing a switch. One of The Room VR’s mechanics takes the series’ love of the miniature a step further: using a second lens, we’re able to spot shattered red crystals forming portals. Entering one, we shrink to Borrower size, and are able to solve puzzle boxes from the inside. It’s a brilliant conceit that makes the most of VR’s ability to play with scale – Fireproof does wonderful things with puzzles where you set up miniature interior scenes as your regular (giant?) self, then shrink down to navigate them.
It’s just one of the signs that the studio has had plenty of fun creating a The Room game for a new platform – alongside a puzzle that stumps us for a while until we spot a clue on the underside of a piece of level furniture, the devs really taking advantage of the VR platform and making the player physically crane around to find hidden things. Indeed, Fireproof has always wanted to make a VR The Room game – it was a matter of waiting for the technology to catch up. In the meantime, the team experimented with making an openworld jetpack-flight Gear VR game called Omega Agent. “Which was daft,” Meade laughs. Hamilton explains: “We were halfway through making it, and John Carmack was doing a talk about [Gear VR] and he said, ‘The one thing no one should ever try and do is do an openworld game on these things, because it’s a tiny, little…’ So we learned what not to do!
“It was only when Oculus’ second iteration of the main headset came out that your hands were in the space, and suddenly it’s like, ‘Oh, we can pick things up and interact with objects now’,” Hamilton recalls. “But we came into The Room VR still not knowing very much at all. And we spent the first six months doing it wrong.” But the suitability – even simplicity – of The Room’s concept, plus the studio’s wealth of experience in drawing creativity out of a determinedly practical approach to creating games, has resulted in what will surely be one of VR’s stars, and another Fireproof hit.
The studio has been working on The Room games for eight years now – we wonder whether, five years down the line, the devs will still be as happy making them. “We’ve actually planned quite a few times to break off and do something else,” Meade says. “And that didn’t happen for various reasons, none of which were bad. At the end of the day, it makes a lot of money. And it keeps us going, and it moves us on to the next thing – and to be fair it has allowed us to try out different things for a company of our size that otherwise we wouldn’t have.” He points to the increased
scope of this VR title, and that Fireproof will be publishing on PlayStation for the first time. “I’ve always said that we don’t have plans, but we have goals. And all we’ll do is make decisions that trend us towards that. I mean, we want to make hits. We’ve always wanted to make hits. So we just try and keep our eyes open about what things are like and try not to get buffeted by industry pressures.”
It’s perhaps taboo for an indie studio to admit to gunning for mainstream success, but it makes sense for Fireproof’s members who, after a rough time at Criterion, want to protect their creative freedom. “When we say we want to make hits, it doesn’t mean we want to make loads of money – if that was the case, we would have made free-to-play games fucking years ago,” Meade says. “We want to make a game… if we were to dream the impossible, a classic game, a game that’s remembered. A Populous, a GTA – you’ve done both, you’ve been a massive hit, and had a creative whack as well. That’s what a hit is to us.
“I guess we have to be careful when we say this in public, because someone might read it and just say, ‘Oh, the fucking whores!’” Meade laughs. “Whereas we’re saying the exact opposite: the money that we’ve made right now we use to buy our freedom from those pressures. If you put it in the bank instead of spending it, that’s ‘fuck you’ money. That means when people come to us, and they offer us things and say, ‘You need to do this’, we can
“We have goals. And all we’ll do is make decisions that trend us towards that”
just say no. So our day-to-day existence as developers is massively stress-free, because we don’t have anything to do with the rest of the industry. We just make our games and release them. And we try not to be assholes to the people that we work with. And that’s it.”