First Looks// EGX First Looks: The Room Three and Toryansé

Chris has been at it again, haunting the floor of any games show careless enough to leave an air vent accessible from the outside. Recently he was at EGX, putting his hands on any- and everything he could. Here, he reports back.


The Room Three by Fireproof Studios

The first two The Room games set the mobile platforms alight as they were games that not only did not feature a match-three mechanic but were also not free-to-play. Many of Fireproof Studio's contemporaries scoffed at the notion of making a game that doesn't leech money from the player on a regular basis as they attempted to play through it. Despite this The Room and The Room Two were so successful that Fireproof Studios has now embarked on the third outing of the series, cryptically titled The Room Three.

The Room Three is essentially an adventure game with a very strong emphasis on puzzles. The player is placed in an enclosed space that typically contains a table or tables with various objects on them. These objects need to be inspected then manipulated in such a way as to be able to unlock a door into the next room. These objects have sliding components, draws, hatches and other interactive elements that the player needs to operate by touching and swiping the screen.

Making its debut at EGX 2014, The Room Three has a number of key features that set it apart from the previous two games. The first being that there is someone else in the rooms that the player traverses through. This was quite unsettling when I saw it during the 10 minute demo I played as I always regarded The Room games as a solitary experience, so to find someone else into the environment was quite unexpected. There is no indication of what or who this person is, or if the player interacts with them in any way, but their presence is very much felt.

The other new feature is the ability of the player to enter smaller spaces. In other words, to shrink. Like in the previous two games, the player has a special lens, which once looked through reveals hidden messages and sometimes spaces in otherwise mundane objects. The Room Three has an additional lens that, once looked through and pointed at some objects, will temporarily shrink the player and teleport them into objects for them to manipulate. It's an ingenious addition to The Room games and one I look forward to when The Room Three arrives on iOS and Android sometime in Spring 2015.


Toryansé by Holyfingers

It's a brave thing to make a game with a minimalist GUI and interface. A lot of expectation is placed on the player to understand what is going on and what they are supposed to do, when there is so little direct feedback from the game itself. Toryansé, an adventure game by Northern Irish developer Holyfingers sports such a minimalist interface and while I personally found it to be elegant, many other EGX 2014 attendees sadly became frustrated to the point of being baffled by it.

But let's focus on what Toryansé is about before we go plunging into too much detail. Set in a contemporary environment, the main protagonist is a woman who is the midst of questioning the very foundations of her life and her beliefs. One day she follows a stranger after a train journey she takes home from work every day and things start to unravel from there.

The demo being shown in the Left Field section of EGX 2014 focused on a mishap at the woman's place of work, where she has locked herself in and needs to get her pass in order to use the lift to leave the office.

The demo does an excellent job of explaining how the interface in Toryansé works. Using a reactive icon system, as the player moves the mouse pointer across the screen an icon appears indicating how they can interact with it. Sometimes an item (a key, for example) is needed in order for the action to be successful. In the demo there are number of areas the player can explore and items they can pick up and use in combination with one another in order to complete a task and eventually solve a puzzle. Items in the player's inventory can also be combined to make new items, which of course is nothing new, but an important mechanic that Toryansé uses frequently.

In order for the pass to be retrieved the woman must somehow get it from the locked room to her so that she can use it on the lift. Travelling around the office is an automated vacuum cleaner, which is diligently clearing anything up that drops to the floor. By using the shredded paper that the woman collected from the office shredder, she is able to get the robotic cleaner to have the pass lodged onto its lid. The next task is to get the pass from the top of the cleaner; but I won't go into that for fear of spoiling things.

The visual style of Toryansé is reminiscent of Another World with low polygon models and simple textures. This is a common feature in many indie games as it is far quicker to create games using this method rather than having to develop art assets for each object being represented in the game. It's possible to conclude that this style of presentation has led to the minimalist interface that Toryansé has, but only the developer could inform us on that.

Toryansé is set to appear on Windows PC, Mac and Linux sometime in the future; probably when it's done.