Hudson have made some of the best puzzle games on the DS, but sadly none of them have made it out of Japan. Fortunately, Nintendo published this one so it has been released in Europe. Unfortunately it’s not nearly as good as some of their others. The DS has been a wonderful console for puzzlers (those who like a little puzzle-solving) in the past, but recently there’s been a bit of a dearth of them, so I while do recommend the game for those looking for a puzzle game and have exhausted all the others, it doesn’t match up anywhere near some of the other games on the system like Picross, Picross 3D and the Layton games.

Sliding tiles and Mr X

Rooms: The Main Building is, at heart, a sliding-tile puzzle game with a few twists. Each puzzle begins with a set of tiles which are arranged in a grid, and the main character, Mr X standing in one of them. You can move the tile that Mr X is in by sliding it into a space, or you can move Mr X to another tile if there is no wall between them by touching the adjacent tile. The main goal is to get Mr X to the exit tile, and the secondary goal is to get the tiles in the correct locations in the grid to make a picture. A few more twists are added to this formula over time, such as ladders on certain tiles to allow vertical movement, telephones to allow teleportation between two tiles, cupboards to allow the swapping of two tiles, metro stations to allow movement along a row even if there are walls, keys and doors, explosives and wooden doors. These are introduced slowly – arguably far too slowly as the puzzles never really get difficult. In some puzzles it is more of a challenge to achieve the secondary goal of placing the tiles correctly, but overall the puzzles required to complete in order to finish the game don’t get very hard, and the total time to do this is only six or so hours. For puzzle games this isn’t very good going.

The problem with the mechanic used in Rooms is that it’s very difficult to make a difficult puzzle and still provide enough clues for the player to solve it. Games like Picross, Sudoku or Slitherlink don’t have this problem – they always provide you with just enough clues. Layton works around this by enabling you to buy clues which reveal more and more of how to solve a puzzle. In Rooms it would be difficult to provide any such clues for really difficult puzzles without showing the player certain moves, thus making things much easier and ruining the puzzle-solving aspect. Because of this limitation the puzzles never get that big, and if they did it would be extremely frustrating to just be sliding things around without any feedback as to progress. It is possible to work through your options and narrow them down to viable ones, but with a move-tree so big after just a few items and tiles are added that’s unrealistic too.

Rooms: an odd name for a Main Building

The basic puzzle mechanic is couched in a quite significant amount of narrative involving a talking book and a building called Rooms. I don’t know why it’s called Rooms – it’s like me calling my car “Parts.” There are four main mansions in the game, and each mansion has many “rooms,” each of which is a puzzle. When you complete a puzzle you get a piece of a map of the mansion filled in, and this map looks remarkably like the map of a town rather than a mansion. It’s very confusing. As you complete puzzles you also unlock tools which help you solve inventory-style story puzzles in places around town, and solving these puzzles gets you a puzzle piece which Mr Book uses to unlock another mansion. Nothing makes sense, and it all seems a contrived way of hanging together a bunch of abstract slide puzzles. A mildly entertaining, but contrived, hub, so to speak.

The prerendered graphics don’t help too much either. Being able to make out the picture on the tiles would be helpful, but instead they all look like a different pattern of various shades of brown. Fortunately you can touch a button to show you which pieces are in their correct places as you’re playing. If the picture is supposed to help you know this then it should be clear, and if it isn’t then no picture would be a better solution. Often the different objects, such as the crate of dynamite and the fire hydrant, blend into the background too, making it hard to see what you have available to solve the puzzle. Fortunately there is a button that highlights the objects on screen. Unnecessary features like these – those that could be easily solved by a simple, more colourful hand-drawn art style – are not normal for Hudson puzzle games or Nintendo games, so I can’t tell why things were done like this. I might note that the graphics are aesthetically pleasing, but they’re just a little functionally poor, and when it comes to puzzle games function is far more important than form.

Distracting, but limited

The graphics and overwrought but entertaining framework aside, the problem with Rooms is that the puzzle mechanic used does not stretch very well over the length of a full retail release because of the limited number of puzzles and puzzle mechanics that don’t scale well. I should add that you can create your own puzzles and share them with your friends, but that’s an unlikely source of new puzzles. It would have far better value-for-money as a DSiWare download with lower production values and online puzzle uploading/downloading, but as a full-priced cart-based game it’s very hard to recommend. Puzzle gamers will find an enjoyable few hours’ distraction, while those drawn into DS puzzle games by Layton or Picross will find it not nearly as good, much shorter and far less satisfying.

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