Screenshot: Fireproof Games / Kotaku

Long before you kids in your short pants and fashionable haircuts were escaping escape rooms, there was one developer far ahead of that curve. In 2012, Fireproof Games released their first game in their The Room series of puzzle games. Last week they just released The Room 4: Old Sins on PC, and its a doozy.

You may well have played Old Sins when it came out on electronic telephones in 2018. Such is the way of Fireproof that they release the millions-selling Room games on mobile first, with PC ports coming a good while later. Except, well, theyre not really ports, which is why this is worth your attention. Theyre remakes, from the ground up.

Each game is based on the concept of a puzzle box, writ increasingly large and elaborate with each iteration. In the shiniest of shiny pre-rendered graphics (as we used to call them), ornate wooden curios impossibly unfold, slide, rearrange and majestically transform, as you poke and prod, press buttons, turn wheels, and slide in that errant cog. By the third game, imaginatively titled The Room Three, this had spread into exploring interconnecting rooms, teleporting to lighthouses, and using magical eye lenses that allowed you to be shrunk down and appear inside the intricate puzzle-furniture.

In some ways, The Room 4: Old Sins reels that feature creep back in a little, yet manages to feel like an advancement of the format all the same. Instead of roaming free about a mansion, trying to remember what the bloody hell is going on its almost incomprehensible story of the null and warring scientists and... honestly, I really dont knowIve played them all multiple times and never made head nor tail of itthis is all, technically, in one room.

G/O Media may get a commission

In fact, its all in one dollhouse. Its just, with that funny old lens thing, you get transported into each of the mini-mansions rooms, and solve the dozens and dozens of interconnected puzzles within.

Theres so much to this, with interweaving elements spread across multiple locations, and then applied to the overall dollhouse itself too. As you finish each room its overtaken by the black tendrils that are, maybe?, the null, you feel a step closer to completion, only for another room to be revealed and an armful of new inventory objects, locked cabinets, and transforming wooden keys to deal with. This is all delivered with the unnerving sound effects and rumbling background menace that underlines the series unsettling ambience.

And as I said, this isnt simply a port of the mobile version from three years back. According to Fireproof, its how long it takes them to rebuild the entire game from scratch, this time to take advantage of the vastly more powerful PC graphics and indeed to make it playable with mouse, rather than a finger.

You may know that at Fireproof we dont port our games to PC but instead remaster them from the ground up for a new audience and platform, explain Fireproof. [We] recreate pretty much 100% of our artwork at much higher resolution as well as refitting & re-lighting the entire game world.

Its something I appreciate. Not just because it looks damned great, but because that three years is just about long enough for me to completely forget all the puzzles from the first time Ive played it, so I can enjoy it all over again. Ive been doing that the last few days, and having such a good time doing it. Its out on Steam now.

Read this article:
The Room 4: Old Sins Is Out For PC, And Prettier Than Ever - Kotaku