Room Serial

Time to completion: 15-20 minutes

[This game describes an abusive and violent relationship.]

The key conceit of this game is that the more rooms you escape, the more abilities you gain. This is an interesting play on the idea of restricted actions. Your powers parallel what you know about yourself and the thing that brought you here in the first place.

The rest of the game is thinly implemented. There are some rooms with poorly disambiguated nouns. The choice of verbs and the implementation thereof sometimes feels clunky. There are built-in walkthroughs for individual rooms which make this much less painful, though I found myself relying on them more often than I should have.

The game overall is buoyed by its underlying story and its unreliable narrator. The reveal of the story feels satisfying and the journal tied things together - some might find it contrived, but I felt it worked.

In any case, the changing verb set is thematically appropriate, never mind that the puzzles could be frustrating at times.

In the game you proceed through a series of rooms, gaining new verbs as you go. It works as a metaphor for someone gaining confidence after a controlling relationship.

The puzzles themselves are quite arbitrary, somewhat alleviated by the in-built walkthrough. The game also falls into the common trap of having a lot of similarly named objects to disambiguate between. All in all, it's an interesting idea let down a little by the implementation.

This is a quick game to play, less than an hour if you don't get stuck on anything for too long. It's hard to get too stuck due to the I appreciate that. Not everyone has the time to play a game that requires a large time commitment with complex puzzles. I love those too, but when you have just a little time to kill, a game like this one is great.

The point of the game is something you don't realize while you're playing it:
(Spoiler - click to show) The conceit of this game is a person overcoming their own fear. Slowly gaining courage through actions solely within their own mind.

In the end, I really appreciated the metaphorical nature of the game. There's a reason the author chose to limit the set of actions. The limited action set is kind of the point of the game, as is the non-traditional nature of the puzzles.