Beyond the Room

The story follows a boy who lives next to an abandoned apartment building. He has been having the same nightmare about a girl who apparently needs his help, but after one particularly strange nightmare, he spots the same girl inside the apartment building and decides to investigate. Although you can move between several locations, the game is essentially an escape room experience, so the mechanics and overall concept should feel familiar if you have played similar games before. The objective is to click around, gather clues and items, and use them to open doors, drawers, and other containers in order to find a way out. Nothing is specifically marked on the screen, and there are no hotspot reveals or text prompts when you move the mouse over something interesting, as you might find in a traditional adventure game. Because of this, you are encouraged to click around and examine everything, since you never know what might be important. That said, most interactive objects are fairly obvious and tend to be placed in areas that naturally draw your attention. The same applies to moving between different locations, as doors and passageways make it clear where you can go next. Most hotspots open up a close up view where you can either collect an item and add it to your inventory, or interact with a knob, button, or another object to enter a code. The codes and symbols you need are always found somewhere in the surrounding environment, and they are generally quite easy to spot. In other cases, the close up scene requires you to use an inventory item. This is done by selecting the item from your inventory and then clicking on the appropriate spot. Compared to most games in the genre, progression is very smooth and the codes are simple to find, making the overall experience quite easy. There is no need to think outside the box, decipher complicated clues, or solve particularly logical puzzles that might leave you stuck. Even if you do run into trouble, there is a very generous and completely free hint system that provides concrete solutions and should allow anyone to finish the game without much frustration. There are no achievements, but there are hidden black cats in certain scenes for anyone who wants to fully explore everything. They are easy to miss because some are hidden inside a close up within another close up. There is no real reward for finding them all, so they are more of a small extra challenge. The game has a decent length and takes less than two hours to complete. You will make your way through several floors, each containing its own collection of rooms and puzzles, followed by a bonus location that takes place before the main story. While there is an ending, it does not provide the full picture, as the game appears to be part of a larger series. Since I have only played this particular title, I cannot say how the different games are connected.