Rooms: The Main Building

Imagine you find a note. You read it and voilà you are transported to another dimension. In this dimension you will find one lift, a telephone booth and a talking book. The talking book tells you that you now find yourself in a world filled with rooms. These have been all mixed up and in order to get back to your own world, you need to solve the puzzle and make your way to the door that leads to the next room.

It is roughly the idea behind Rooms: The Main Building for Nintendo DS. Why one has chosen to package this puzzle game with some kind of story is a mystery to me, especially when it's so lifeless and predictable.

The story doesn't add anything to the game and I could have done without it. The only character you meet in this world is the aforementioned book, and one can safely say that after five minutes, the story and the world felt both trivial and unimaginative. The book's comments are unfortunately mindnumbingly boring and the main character is not much more interesting.

But what about the gameplay? The goal is, as mentioned earlier, getting pieces of the rooms in place so you can move onto the next room. This is done by moving boxes around and use the things that, sometimes, are present in these spaces, be it ladders, telephone booths, etc. You could call it a modified version of the small picture puzzles where you push a piece at a time in order to complete the image.

And yes, that's all what you are doing the whole game through. As a mini-game in a larger game, it would work quite well, as seen in, Machinarium for instance, but as a full game, with no diversity, it is simply too thin of a concept. If I wasn't tasked with reviewing Rooms: The Main Building, I would have been far likelier to have ripped it out of my DS after ten minutes rather than completing it.

The technical side of things don't help the overall impression. Graphically the game is downright ugly. At some points it is so hard to make out the details that you have trouble seeing how the room is supposed to look. A huge problem as you are trying to reassemble the room to its original shape.

This would have been a problem on its own, but the controls are also unresponsive. You use your stylus to interact with the game, but often the game fails to pick up your instructions. At times I felt as if I had to press frantically in one place for almost a minute just in order for the game to register what piece I wanted to move. Unforgivable in a game like this.

Apart from some background music the soundscape is made up of small and shrill bleep blop sounds when you move the pieces. At first I found the music enjoyable and pleasant. However, after a short while I grew tired of the repetitive sound and I felt as though the same song was on constant repeat.

I cannot honestly recommend Rooms: The Main Building to anyone. Well, perhaps if you feel like you want to challenge your patience to the limit or if you have some kind of sadomasochistic tendencies you feel you can live out with puzzles wrapped in a dull story.

Everyone else should stay away. If you enjoy puzzle games, there are a number of excellent choices out there you should explore before investing time or money in this awful game.