GENRE
	Puzzle
	DEVELOPER
	Hudson Soft
	PUBLISHER
	Hudson Entertainment
	NUMBER OF PLAYERS
	1-2
	WI-FI ENHANCED
	No
	DS COMPATIBLE
	No
	BUY NOW AT

The reaction to Rooms: The Main Building has been interesting. Several reviewers have ridiculed that the game's based on slide puzzles, but really, are any of the best puzzle games built on concepts more enrapturing, tangible or no? If anything, Rooms' novel twist of putting the gamer's character into its sliding puzzles, trying to escape a labyrinth of sliding rooms with life-threatening perils, is clever and engrossing. If anything, this budget title's not hampered by its concept, but rather its presentation and a story that only annoys instead of engages.

As the game's box proudly proclaims, there are 100 puzzles to be found in Rooms: The Main Building. 80 of those are in the single player mode, and another 20 are in the two-player battle mode. The single player puzzles are split into groups of 20 across four "mansions" that are unlocked by completing a preceding mansion's puzzles and solving some rudimentary adventure game tasks outside the mansions.

The stars of the game are the puzzles themselves, which, at the start of each mansion, start out simple and quickly get more difficult. New means of transportation and room manipulation are steadily introduced throughout the game, making the occasional difficulty reset appreciable. Taking the role of "Mr. X," gamers must travel through the sliding puzzles' rooms, but there is a catch: gamers can only slide a room if Mr. X is standing within it. And since some rooms are walled off from others, or only accessible via magical transportation, this can get very tricky. Further, Mr. X can only walk from left to right; in order to move to a room above or below him, there must be a ladder to climb or descend. Layer these rules on top of a secondary, but not required, goal of correctly arranging the picture shown in the background of the rooms, and the challenge is amplified.

Sliding and walking is only so much fun, though, so additional items start to show up in later puzzles. There's a phone that, when used, will teleport Mr. X to whichever other room has a phone. Some rooms are blocked off by timber that must have a room with explosives placed next to it, and Mr. X must fetch a candle (in yet another room), light the explosives and run away before getting caught in the blast. Magical wardrobes will cause two rooms and their contents (save for Mr. X) to switch places, pairs of rooms with mirrors in them will move opposite of each other whenever Mr. X moves one, and some rooms are filled with water that must be drained by placing a room with a hydrant over it-- and of course stepping away before drowning in the newly flooded room. By game's end, some puzzles can feature over a dozen sliding rooms, heavily layered with all these little gadgets and hazards, making their navigation quite challenging and also rewarding. The primary frustration gamers will have is that there's usually a straightforward sequence to solve any puzzle, but it's also quite easy to put Mr. X in a room and position where the puzzle is unsolveable and must be started over-- and that's not always immediately obvious.

All throughout this adventure, Mr. X is pretty whiney. He starts off the game saying he's bored, and then when he foolishly opens an unexpected birthday gift on his porch and is caught in a terrorist-styled explosion that puts him in the world of Rooms, he continues to complain. Not that his companion-- the overseer of the Rooms world-- is any more charismatic. Taking a page (no pun intended) out of Harry Potter, the master of Rooms is a goofy-looking talking book with a penchant for bad jokes and nervous laughter. Neither Mr. X nor the book are voice acted, but their text can be painfully slow when typing out across the screen considering how uninteresting everything they have to say-- setting the text speed to fastest or skipping the scenes altogether is advised.

Rooms: The Main Building's visual presentation is replete with spinning gears, eerie sliding devices, and nighttime, sepia-toned, photograph collages of European cities. The sliding puzzles' background images are often photo snippets layered over one another to look like a single unique scene, but they can quickly blend together one puzzle to the next and be difficult to figure out their correct positioning. The user interface in the game is pretty intriguing with all its antiquated knobs and filigree, and the vaguely foreign newspaper menus add to the atmosphere that seems alluring and sinister at the same time. The problem is everything's blurry and chunky, looking as if it were a direct port of the DS version or made originally for the N64. Mr. X, who looks genderless and like he walked off a Harry Potter movie set in his black robe, is particularly featureless and animated with the simplest of motion capturing. There are definitely some interesting concepts at play from an artistic design standpoint, but they're diminished by the quality of the images themselves.

The audio side of things doesn't fare as poorly. There's a unique tune for each of the mansions, as well as other tracks for title screens and other modes. The music is at times mysteriously eerie, like something out of Harry Potter (again), yet it can also switch to '60s mod in another area.

For longevity's sake, gamers can create their own puzzles using all the gadgets and arrangements found in the single player mode. This is pretty fun, but the visuals again detract from that and there's no way to share any of your creations with anyone online. There's also a challenge mode that puts a time limit or limited number of moves on the player-- this is all unlocked after finishing the single player mode. And, there's also the fun, local two player mode that has two people trying to navigate out of their own sliding puzzles to reach the single exit between the two of them.

Those extra features round out Rooms' $30 package nicely, but purchasers shouldn't expect the world. There's a lot of content and novel concepts in this game, but you'll need to look past the cheesier elements and muddy presentation to love what's underneath.

6.5/10