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| What's in the box? |
In the field of artificial intelligence it is sometimes said that all AI is search. The idea is that there are a vast number of ways you can look at a problem. The point of the artificial intelligence is finding an efficient way of finding good solutions. This usually involves finding ways you can ignore most of the possibilities for some reason (often sacrificing the optimal solution). AI problems are a lot like puzzles and if you have a computational problem which is easy to search, you don't need AI. The Room seems to have taken the idea of search to something of an extreme.
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| That's right. A smaller box. |
In my own subjective view of language I make some distinctions about what is and is not a puzzle. A word search is entirely about looking for words on a grid. You don’t need an efficient strategy for a word search. In terms of AI there is nothing you need to realise about the problem to prune out some of the possibilities and search more efficiently. You might be able to get faster at word searches by practise, but ultimately there is nothing to think about. Just a repetitive task to be carried out.
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| Hmm, it seems I can turn these dials. Some kind of cryptic puzzle no doubt. |
Now I’m not going to say a word search is not enjoyable, however it’s rather a stretch to call it a puzzle. You could consider it a form of meditation, or just something to pass the time but there is nothing to work out and learn.
The Room follows this mentality. There are a selection of puzzles dotted throughout the game, however it’s not the focus of the game. The focus of the game is looking for things. Your job is to get into a box and to get into the box you need to find compartments, keys and cogs and work out how they can affect other things on the box. You also need to find codes written in different places on the box so you can enter it in somewhere else on the box.
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| Oh boy! It was actually a jigsaw puzzle. |
If at any point in the game you are stuck you can click the question mark in the top right hand corner of the screen and it will give you a hint. Unfortunately it will only give you a hint on how to solve a puzzle. It will not give you a hint on where to find something. The design decision was likely that anyone can find something, but not everyone can solve a puzzle. However I don’t think this was the best idea. The puzzles are rather simple and almost anyone could solve them and finding things can just be irritating.
The game began with disappointment for me, it begins with a riddle: “Feed me and I shall survive, Give me a drink and I shall die”[sic]. Easy enough, I’ve got the answer. What do I do with it? Several confused minutes pass (mostly spent looking at the lighting), eventually I find out: nothing. No one needs to solve that riddle, instead you find it somewhere on the box. Knowing the answer doesn’t assist in finding it in any way, you just tap around until you bump into it and your character goes “Ah, that’s the answer!”.
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| Can you get it? |
As an aside from the review: this idea of what is and is not a puzzle is subjective and changes the more you play a puzzle. Once you have worked out all the relevant logic for a particular puzzle, the puzzle element vanishes. You can get faster at solving a puzzle, but really you’ve already learnt everything you can from that puzzle. It might be nice to play the puzzle a little more for the satisfaction and to ensure that you really do have everything, but ultimately there’s no puzzle left, it’s finished. Now you’re just learning to recognise and respond to patterns quicker. This goes for people that solve Rubik’s cubes in seconds and people that solve difficult Sudokus in a few minutes. Again, I'm not saying these things aren’t enjoyable, but they are no longer puzzles.
That about wraps it up. To finish I’ll introduce the latest element to my reviews - arbitrary scores:
| Puzzle difficulty | 2 / 10 |
| Puzzle elegance | 1 / 10 |
| Fun | 5 / 10 |
| Polish | 10 / 10 |
| Total | 45% |
