Welcome all to The Room 4: The Revenge of the Oh Hai Doggy. Honestly, I don't know why Fireproof hasn't renamed this series to "The Rooms" since there's been multiple of the things in several entries now, just to avoid the usual jokes from hacky game reviewers. But, yes, we're back once again twiddling around with our Victorian knobs and edifices until something pops for another chapter of slightly spooky but mostly brain-melty mechanical puzzles. I'll admit, I might not have been particularly fair on the third one of these back when I covered it on here many moons ago (IGotW #134, if we're being all helpful about it). The system I was using was growing increasingly incapable of handling the intricate wizardry of this game's puzzle instances and was running like hogwash through Piccadilly Circus on a particularly foggy noon (I don't know why I'm performing as a British stereotype when I'm actually British, but then I am not a patriotic man) and I left the game slightly irked by some of its control systems, particularly those involving sliding or revolving an object, not performing the way they should. These games were all built for mobile first—the act of pushing switches and moving levers having a more visceral feel with touch controls, I'd imagine—and later ported, sometimes years later, to Steam and other participating digital storefronts. A fine case in point would be this game, which first released in 2018 on mobile devices but only hit Steam in 2021. Yet, even if the last one left me cold, I still dig these games a lot and now that I have a PC that shouldn't have any issue sliding wooden frames around at whatever framerate and resolution I dare throw at it I've returned once again to this macabre steampunk universe.

Nothing's changed too much, besides that all the puzzles are different (I guess that's the one thing you can't really carry over). The goal of the game is to piece together a mystery by completing a series of puzzle box-like dioramas, some of which might involve an intricate 3D box with secret panels and the like or something a bit more elaborate like a steam-powered engine or completing a model of the globe (no geography knowledge is required, do not be concerned). In addition to your busy fingers there's also an eyepiece, something of a trademark of the series and its curiosity of the realms beyond, which highlights glyphs and other extradimensional miscellany that might serve as a hint to a puzzle solution, point an arrow at a particularly subtle hidden drawer or panel, or is otherwise part of a puzzle instance of its own. In this game, which uses a dollhouse as its "hub" and the individual rooms as the source of the more detailed puzzles to solve, you also need the eyepiece to enter those rooms. Ever a trusty companion, the game never lets you forget that it's on-hand in case you're lost for direction. (More overt help comes in the form of a hint button that needs some time to charge between uses, just so you're not tempted to let the game you paid for completely solve itself on its own; honestly, if you're that far gone you might as well boot up a YouTube video and save yourself the loose change).

The appeal of the game is twofold. The first is that ever-present characteristic in any puzzle game that doesn't rely on reflexes where you feel like a million dollars that somehow enrolled itself at Harvard (turning itself into something like $230,000 in the process) for solving each of its puzzles and getting some important little animation of a display popping out of the table or some other piece of clockwork machinery ticking to life to celebrate your perception and resourcefulness. The second is that visceral feeling I mentioned, interacting with what feel like props at a particularly high-rate escape room type establishment that didn't just hit up Party Central for everything it needed: devices that feel real to the touch and respond to your inputs in ways that, while maybe not expected, feel intuitively correct. There's magic behind everything, which does rob the mechanical complexity of some its verisimilitude, but largely the devices you're tinkering with have a logic and a progression and a sense of place and scale that tricks your brain into thinking it's all real and valid. It's a wonderful illusion that these games have pulled off multiple times now, and they keep getting better at it as the graphical tech behind its visuals and the smoothness of the animations continue to improve.

It's hard to point at any one of these games and say "this had the best puzzles" or "what this game does with this particular wooden box makes it the franchise standout for sure" but each new one is always a treat regardless. Some franchises defy any attempts to separate their games in a meaningfully apparent way—the faceless protagonist of this game is still going on about the Null element and the power it might confer to any genius engineer looking to supplement their inventions with just a smidge of Cthulhu power, should they consider their own souls to be less valuable than technological progress, which has been the case with all four The Rooms—but that broken record of a narrative doesn't really matter, because just one or two of these games in and you'll know whether or not you want to keep playing more of them whenever they happen to draw your eye while browsing your app store of choice.

I'm still only some ways into The Room 4, which complicates things by having multiple rooms accessible at given time plus the dollhouse hub itself thus giving you more real estate to prod away at once you find some new emblem or key and have no idea where to stick it (though I might have a few crude suggestions if I've been stymied for too long and am growing slightly impatient), but it's otherwise another excellent game from this series that continually has me guessing and offers a few surprises and spooks in those unguarded moments where I forget that these are nominally horror games and not "poke everything until something starts moving and where in the seven hells does this metal thing with five prongs go?" type games. I'll let you know if Johnny finally defeats the diabolical shrew Lisa and her cancer-ridden mother at the end of this one, with a spoiler tab of course.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)