Nerd Mentality

Wii PREVIEW – Rooms: The Main Building

Posted March 12th 2010 by Brandon Schmidt.

Hudson Software is preparing to release a new title for the Nintendo Wii and DS titled Rooms: The Main Building.  While I'd heard very little on the game up until previewing it, I was immediately intrigued by the promise of a new puzzle game – one of my favorite genres.  While the preview copy of the Wii version didn't feature all of the modes and levels, there was more than enough there to whet my appetite for this quirky title.

The main story mode centers around what appears to be an early 20th century city.  No information is given regarding your character's background, but his story begins when he receives a mysterious gift waiting for him outside in the street.  Upon opening the gift the man is knocked unconscious only to awaken in a strange world.  When encounters with other characters include a talking book and a sleeping treasure chest, among others, it's hard not get a slight Alice in Wonderland feel.  The talking book explains the predicament the main character is in and also serves as a guide of sorts in helping to clue you, the player, in on how to continue forward.  Your character is stuck in this place until he can obtain the necessary puzzle pieces to unlock the way out, and how to acquire these pieces isn't readily apparent.  All you know is that you must make your way through room after room collecting keys and unlocking other treasures that will help you solve the mystery of how to get home.

While there's the encompassing story of finding your way home, the crux of the game is solving puzzles within the building you're in.  Each room you encounter on the map has been scrambled into pieces, not unlike a slide puzzle where you move tiles around to form a sequence or picture.  In the case of Rooms, you must slide the tiles around in order to provide a path to get your character from an initial location to a tile containing the exit door.  It's not as simple as moving your character from one tile to another.  Some tiles contain ladders for you to travel up or down.  Some have telephones to magically make your character warp from one phone to another.  Some have walls that limit which way you can enter or leave the tile.  These tools and obstacles all work to help and hinder your character from reaching the exit.  As the puzzles get more and more difficult you'll have to backtrack paths you've previously crossed.  You'll have to move tiles in roundabout ways if you want to not only get to the exit, but also achieve the bonus goal of arranging all of the tiles in such a way that the backdrops form the correct picture.

What I liked about the difficulty is that you're eased in with some very small and basic puzzles, but the game ramps up as you go along.  Branching paths can offer you the choice of whether you want to be more conservative in your approach or whether you're aggressively trying to complete all the rooms.  One complaint I did have was that there was no explanation for how some of the items work that you will encounter.  While I imagine the retail version will come complete with instructions, I was caught a little off guard.  I never felt completely frustrated though and was able to figure out everything through experimentation.

While I wasn't very impressed with the production quality of the Wii version – the low-res graphics appear as if they're from the DS version – the presentation thankfully is overshadowed by the controls.  The Wii remote lends itself naturally to the puzzle solving. The pointer functionality is the primary method of moving the tiles around and works very well.  I imagine only the DS's stylus or perhaps a mouse would be better-suited.

The true litmus test for a demo is if it leaves you wanting more.  Not in the sense that it was lacking, but that you eagerly want to play on.  I found my playthrough of Rooms: The Main Building to be just that.  I'm very eager to give the full retail version a spin later this month in order to complete the main mode and find out what the other modes offer.  If you're at all interested in the puzzle genre of gaming, this is a title to keep your eyes on in late March.

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