#fireproof studios

The Room is sleek and minimalist and a little bit wonderful. There's no pointless wandering, but rather a single room (hence, the title) with a giant, impossibly elaborate puzzle box sitting on a table. The puzzles are embedded in the box, which turns and unfolds with an elegant Steampunk sensibility that looks even better on PC than it did on iOS.

The narrative is elliptical and thus far more evocative, working some basic Lovecraftian tropes with no more than a few stray notes and scrawled worlds. Most of this is merely atmosphere, however, and combined with an eerie score and sound effects, adds a steady background hum of nervous unease as you go about exploring the box's many levels, drawers, buttons, doors, and mechanisms.

It's this tight structure, as well as the the vastly superior puzzle design, that strips away the dead weight of Myst to offer a sleek and effective puzzle experience. Lasting only a couple of hours, it concentrates on what you want from a game such as this: a bit of atmosphere, a hint of story, and some challenging puzzles.

There are no characters, no dialogue, and no movement: just a box you can view from different angles and letters from a mysterious figure. But it's a game you just won't be able to stop playing. Each element in the puzzle flows so perfectly to the next that it draws you along. You simply have to finish it. I'm not kidding when I say it may well be the best mechanical puzzler of all time: a virtual Chinese box unbound by spatial limitations.

In the end, that's what's most striking about this minimalist creation. The box is a work of art: a think of beauty of ingenuity, fascinating to watch and interesting to explore.