Rooms: The Main Building is about as exciting as the name suggests. It’s a game full of sliding puzzles. You know those little puzzles you’ve mostly played on a Christmas day after one drops out of your cracker when all you really wanted was a bouncy ball? Yup, those puzzles. If you’ve spent any time playing said puzzles, you’ll realise that it’s quite good fun for five minutes then utterly repetitive afterwards. Rooms: The Main Building epitomises this perfectly.
There is a semblance of a story going on here. You are Mr X and you’ve been transported to a strange mansion. Your mission is to figure out what’s going on and solve over 100 sliding puzzles along the way. There’s no real need for the story admittedly as you’ll find yourself forgetting about it all too quickly.
The puzzles themselves are fairly simple. You rearrange tiles until you reach the correct solution. Unlike the cracker puzzles, instead of forming an image, you have to figure out a way for Mr X to leave the room. Complete a room and a jigsaw piece is placed on the mansion map enabling you to move onto the next one. There are 4 mansions in all so there’s plenty to do.
Rooms: The Main Building does a good job of introducing various elements that add a twist to proceedings. The first few levels ease you in gently adding telephones which act as transporters and wardrobes which, bizarrely, allow you to switch tiles with another wardrobe tile. Candles light explosives and fish bowls, humorously, allows Mr X to breathe in flooded tiles. Most stages offer a few different solutions so secondary objectives are thrown in for good measure. These are mostly there to make you feel a bit smug. Complete a puzzle quickly, and in the way that the developers intended, and you gain a gold jigsaw piece to add to the map. It’s all to do with satisfaction rather than having any material to reward you. The problem was it got boring very fast.
It didn’t help that the presentation is abysmal. Everything is very drab and dull. Even worse, it occasionally makes it difficult to actually see what’s going on and difficult to ascertain what tile does what action.
There are moments of inspiration with some puzzles such as a subway based one being particularly intriguing. Far too often though, it feels run of the mill and mundane.
Eventually I passed it onto my mother, an avid puzzle fan who always liked the cracker toys. I figured I was possibly being unfair to it and she’d see the light. She didn’t. She handed it back to me shortly afterwards complaining that it just wasn’t interesting enough. It wasn’t just me then.
So, Rooms: The Main Building is a curious one. It feels like a game that should be more compelling. It starts reasonably well and ensures that you feel as if you’re being challenged yet never cheated out of success. The flaw in this plan is it never really goes anywhere. Instead it stays on a very even keel that never improves, nor ever gets worse either. Completely and utterly average.
VideogameUK verdict: 5/10
