 Crimson Room online game
Deceptively simple-looking Flash game in which you wake up having drunk too much last night, and you're locked in a room with no apparent means of escape. You click around the room searching for clues, and find items that will help you unlock the door and get the hell out. What seems at first to be the beginning stage of a pretty entertaining multi-level game quickly proves more complex than you'd think, as you click around the seemingly empty room to find tiny items that ultimately work together to provide your escape. And, strangely enough, there is no second level: the entire game consists of getting out of the crimson room. The banal items – a key, a compact disc case, a battery – are frustrating as hell to find, and even when you think you've clicked on every inch of the fucking room, you realize you're still fairly emptyhanded. Even after finding the items, you're not certain how they are supposed to fit together, so the game becomes a puzzle within a puzzle within a puzzle. It's addictive, challenging, and totally flustering – I must admit I had to refer to a page detailing the solution to find the one missing piece, ingeniously hidden in such a way that you'd pretty much have to know where and how to look for it to find it. Whether my failure indicates that I'm more stupid than I thought, or merely that I'm just as impatient as I thought, I can't be sure. But the eventual end of the game was extremely pleasing and cool, either way. Crimson Room is an excellent waste of time, good brain-teasing fun that might humble even Myst masters (pardon my extremely dated comparison; I don't stay in much). It's like if Games magazine made a foray into the videogame world … incidentally, do they still make Games magazine? I sure used to love spotting the fake ads.
Review by La Fée |