Samsara Room

Say it with me: you wake up in a room that you cannot get out of at least at first and you are confused. This time it's also not entirely clear who you even are though the mirror confirms that you do have human form. And this time there isn't even a door. You learn soon enough why the window also isn't going to let you leave.

So it's something of a return to their roots. In fact in more ways than one. The interesting thing here is that it isn't. This is a remake of what appears to be the very first game they released. I'm not sure how much was changed, certainly some things are up to the standards that they raised later.

They continue to have a lot of interesting ideas for the format. I've hardly played any escape rooms that were not by these guys. I can't really compare in that way. The best thing here is the version of the time travel that we saw in cube escape paradox.

Here it is a perspective switch . You can go between ground, normal and several other variants. I'm trying to keep it vague because I really don't want to give much away here. So this isn't quite as cool as the aforementioned but again this came out before that did originally.

And with both of them it really opens up this otherwise tremendously limited area. And it's not the only thing that has that effect. This means that though you don't really go places it ends up feeling like you do. Nowhere near as many as the classic 90s point and clicks.

And it means that it is almost impossible to brute force this. If you want to get through it you will have to engage with it or I guess go for a walk through or something. As usual the puzzles start out as just introducing you to the concept of it and then gradually get to where they are much more intricate.

By the end there are multipart ones where several things that you change independently of one another have to match up in order for you to proceed. It is not as deep there as paradise but it doesn't need to be.

There continues to be a certain dream logic . You won't really have to make ridiculous leaps, you just have to get on the same page as this is. If David Lynch became aware of these I think he would appreciate this aspect.

This does not have a story and as best as I can tell not much lore either. It's more metaphor symbolism and poetry. It does have the drag ability. In a number of ways it does feel like the prototype or proof of concept for the Rusty Lake franchise.

The ending left me quite satisfied. This is currently free, has been for a while and seems like it might always be. Like all other entries or at least the ones that came out before this chronologically on there, this serves as a great place to start on these.

None of them so far spoil any of the others. You're not going to understand very much of what's going on before you take in multiple of them anyway. This does not have much in the way of interacting with other characters.

It also does not have you do very much of the morbid stuff though its presence is still felt. I'm glad there are at least some because that really does make such a huge difference. I love both Silent Hill and outlast. While I would not under any circumstances claim that they're comparable and overall quality, one major reason why the former surpasses the latter is that you get to do some really gnarly stuff and I'm not talking about fighting enemies.

They continue showing a mastery of freaking us out including by mildly changing context around everyday things often it's a part of the human body or a function thereof. I refuse to detail but I will say they appreciate that you don't actually have to do very much with the human eye in order to really mess with our heads.

Even though we all have them and use them on a daily basis. The overall game play is the same as the rest. You can interact with a bunch of static things. Sometimes you'll pick something up that goes in your inventory and you can use those things on other things.

One thing I hope they have or will get around to is that if you have to use multiple things from the second page of the inventory it'll keep only showing the first page each time you've used something from the 2nd one. I think we should be allowed to toggle as the player if we want to see one or both.

Also why does it put things on the second that could go on the first leaving a bunch of empty spaces sometimes? Other than that they have taken care of all of the issues that there used to be and none of them were ever game breaking or anything.

This is quite short and I got six of the eight achievements just by playing it normally. That's another area where this considering when it came out can feel like a step back even though it technically isn't.

Can I just say how much I appreciate that they did make all of these original ones available although you do have to pay for the first nine cube escape titles? Now you can get them on the digital storefronts where they used to be given away on the website which used flash that is no longer functional.

It really sucks that there are so many great games that relied on that that we now simply can't play because of that. These aren't the only ones that you can now get elsewhere though. I saw that the same was true of shift.

Graphics and user interface are also the same as we're used to. It continues to have a really strong contrast on account of the slightly friendly looking pastel art style and then this really dark content. 8/10.