Crimson Room (DS) review "A majority of frequent internet users (gamers in particular) has played, or at least heard of the Crimson Room series of flash “escape-the-room” games by Toshimitsu Takagi. Hosted on approximately four trillion flash gaming websites, you play a character who awakens within a room and has to use household items littered about or deceptively hidden as a means to escape. Such a simple premise has a catch, and that is the difficulty – or simply the absurdity of the solutions and item placements. Pan..."

A majority of frequent internet users (gamers in particular) has played, or at least heard of the Crimson Room series of flash “escape-the-room” games by Toshimitsu Takagi. Hosted on approximately four trillion flash gaming websites, you play a character who awakens within a room and has to use household items littered about or deceptively hidden as a means to escape. Such a simple premise has a catch, and that is the difficulty – or simply the absurdity of the solutions and item placements. Panning around the room is restricted to certain views, with unique view points or hard to reach objects requiring finite clicking in a certain position that is just about in-view. Objects, when found, require random combinations and placements within the room in order to move on to the next non-sensical step. The result? A lot of random clicking, combining of objects and overall frustration. Hence the four trillion walkthroughs to cater for the hosted games.

As part of the Superlite 2500 DS series, the four flash games - Crimson Room, Viridian Room, Blue Chamber and White Chamber have been ported in one tight little package. The games are hardly reworked, but make use of the DS capabilities. As well as using the touch screen for interaction, the time and date works for certain puzzles; website referrals have been altered to give you the direct clue, and moving around the room is a much smoother affair. The menu system on the upper screen is horribly clunky and requires plenty of screen switching to use and combine objects – a far cry from the ease of drag dropping from the flash versions. A great advantage to moving around the rooms are a border on the display with arrows, requiring a quick tap to swivel around instead of edge clicking. However they are only unlocked when you have found that view in the first place, so the random clicking (or now tapping) is still largely intact. The pin point nature of the game has been removed due to the smaller resolution and larger tapping radius of the stylus, so exploration is far more forgivable than the flash versions. Note that if you are considering importing this title, then it is not that English friendly; while you'll able to do a lot of the puzzles, a few require the text in order to help you out - Viridian Room in particular.

The rooms or chambers themselves whilst enjoyable are not diverse enough to warrant multiple playthroughs, and can be each beaten within twenty minutes if you know what you are doing, while long term sessions can be easily saved to the card for later. The main issue with this package is that the flash games are free to find on the internet. Go on, Google away and you'll be playing in no time, legally, in English, and without paying a single Yen. This almost negates the entire product. However if you fancy playing four enjoyable if horribly frustrating games on the move (and in Japanese, for the time being) then this budget release might be for you.

Community review by Crazyreyn (February 26, 2008) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.