What happens when the developer fully understands the platform he is developing for? What happens when they combine all their previous experience into one package? Well, you get a masterpiece like The Room 3.
The Room 3 is the latest instalment in the critically acclaimed The Room series. By now you should be more than familiar with this series as they are among the best iOS games ever made. We reviewed The Room 2 back in 2014, which btw you can read by clicking here, and well lets just say that it was a remarkable puzzle game experience with a terrific atmosphere powered by phenomenal photo realistic graphics. Beating that has to be a difficult task, but the guys at Fireproof Games have managed that making The Room 3 a true masterpiece.
See, these guys are master geniuses at what they do. The Room 3 is bigger and better than the previous two games with more interesting puzzles to solve, an intriguing story and secrets to discover. Bigger in the sense that it has more puzzles to solve, more rooms to find and explore and better cause each puzzle serves as a coherent step towards the next one. An intriguing story cause in the sense that now you know who made these puzzles or why they made them. You also start to understand that things may not be as they seem, is he a friend or is he a foe and what does he wants from you. And secrets to discover in the sense that once you finish the game, you have not seen all of it. You have the ability to go back in time to change your fate and each alternate ending paints the big picture.
I tried describing the puzzles before, but it is nearly impossible to capture the intelligent design and creative thinking that has gone behind each and every one of them. It is impossible to describe the feeling of achievement and satisfaction you get once you crack the puzzles. It is something special, something you have to experience first hand and believe me when I say you will want to do so. Once you step out of that train, you will not stop playing until you seen through the ending or endings, I, at least, did.
Man, it is just so good. You get this new part for your spectacles from The Room 2 which allows you to travel through space and time and Fireproof uses this concept in very strange and interesting ways. You will get to travel inside the rooms inside the puzzle boxes and from there solve the puzzle from inside out. It opens new possibilities, new perspectives of how to solve a puzzle and it messes with you Inception-style. But the thing is, no matter how crazy or hard the puzzle seems, the answer is always right there in from of your eyes, you just have to pay attention. If you can't find your way, there's the hint system to help you which is subtle enough as to not blatantly give out the solution so you still feel a sense of accomplishment.
Now I've seen a couple of Tweets where people were calling the game out for using the same mechanics over and over again just as a filler and well, while it is partially true, yes they use the same basic mechanic, in each instance they change it, sometimes a little sometimes too much, so there's no feeling of "been there done that". They mix and match mechanics which produce up some interesting and surprising results. And the best thing of all is that these "fusions" and every puzzle or step feels very logical. Slide this, rotate and push to open a port so you can insert a thing in order to open another thing so you can create something to use on the first you slid.
You might not see it at first, but it is there. The attention to detail on these puzzle boxes and the rooms is just crazy. The photorealism stuff has just gotten better and it looks bloody gorgeous running smoothly on the iPhone 6. I cannot comment on how it looks on the new iPad since I don't have access to one, but I guess still gorgeous. And like the first two games, the atmosphere is creepy, not like scary or anything like that, but just a creepy unsettling atmosphere. An abandoned building, a creepy basement with a creepy altar with creepy lighting, a creepy library with a creepy animatronic magician machine... yeah you get the idea.
In the end the guys at Fireproof Games have outdone themselves, again, by a large margin this time. The Room was a cool thing, The Room 2 was a fantastic thing, but The Room 3 is just a masterpiece. It is not just one of the best games I've ever played on smartphone, but one of the best games I've ever played anywhere and for us at Duuro is a serious contender for Game of The Year 2015 and that is pretty much the answer to "Should you buy it?". Thanks for reading!
