The Room: Old Sins

A CREEPY ROOM-ESCAPE PUZZLE GAME.

THE ROOM: OLD Sins is a game for fans of escape rooms. The title finds you investigating the disappearance of an engineer and his ‘high-society’ wife, and the trail leads you to a spooky attic — never a good sign. On getting the lights working, you see a strange and prominent dollhouse, which then sucks you inside. Just a normal day at the office...

You discover the toy is, in fact, a full reconstruction of a mansion, with a side order of Lovecraftian horror. Unravelling the mystery at the heart of the game and its impossible world then happens by way of devious, complex, tactile logic puzzles.

Of course, if you’ve played The Room from 2002 and the others in the series ( The Room Two and The Room Three), you’ll know all this already. If you haven’t (that was the boat we were in, by the way), grab Old Sins immediately — and then check out its predecessors, too. They’re some of the finest games on the mobile platform. While The Room Three may have deviated a little away from what made those original two games amazing, Old Sins appears to want to steer the series back on track. (Although, we would like to mention that the titles aren’t actually connected by story, just by theme.)

Old Sins looks and sounds great, and moving around is swift — there’s none of the dull trudging you find in the likes of Myst. The touch controls are pretty intuitive: you control the camera by dragging your finger across the screen, interact with objects by double-tapping, and zooming in and out is super easy. This all combines to give you a real sense of, well, realism — that you’re interacting with real objects on your hunt for the next bread crumb of evidence in your investigation.

We found ourselves becoming distracted multiple times, though, and this is by no means a bad thing. The puzzles will have you as hooked with this game as the story itself, meaning you may realise you’re playing in to the wee hours of the morning, or missing your stop on the train journey home. You sometimes forget that you’re actually interacting with a dollhouse and not a full-sized environment, which speaks volumes for the detail and overall game design.

There’s an intricate inventory system, which seems a bit overwhelming at first when the items keep stacking up, but you’ll soon get the hang of it. And don’t forget the useful hint system, although you will probably rarely use it, if at all. You’ll want to use those little grey cells on these puzzles, as figuring them out yourself is such a thrill.

At the end of the day, we’re glad that Old Sins is bringing The Room series back on track and would definitely recommend it.