Crimson Room ’11 Review – A broken port of the popular PC game

Our rating:

By: AXEL MARK

Version #: 1.0.1

Date Released: 2011-06-09

Developer: Axel Mark

Price: 1.99

User Rating:

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Crimson Room was an extremely popular browser-based flash game back in its heyday. It was a patience-testing puzzle game in which you wake up in the titular room, and have to find your way out by searching for – and piecing together – various objects hidden around the room. Suffice to say its release on the iPhone was long overdue and forthcoming.

The iPhone version of Crimson Room is fundamentally the same as the PC version. The game plays out from a first person perspective, in which you click at various points around the room in the hope of finding the necessary objects. While some may find this form of gameplay ingenious, I fail to see it, and think of it more as a random click-fest, where if you click frequently and frantically around the room, you’re bound to find the things you need.

The only logic that the game really requires for you is the same as is required from a child playing with one of those shape-slotting toys; you put keys in locks, cassettes in rectangular-shaped spaces, and rings in round slots. Finding some of the items around the room is often a matter of click on a random spot in the room in the hope that it takes you to a previously undiscovered space.

The controls on the iPhone version are decent enough, though it takes some time to get used to tapping on precisely the right spot for the camera to take you where you want it to. Holding down on a space zooms the camera in, though there is no point in the game where you actually need to do this.

Considering the game should theoretically take you no more than an hour to complete, then $1.99 is not spectacular value for money. I say ‘theoretically’ because there is currently a fundamental flaw in the game that means you can’t currently complete it, which obviously defeats the whole point of the game. Even if this did get fixed though, clicking almost at random around a room for half an hour is not my idea of ingenious ‘room escape’ gameplay, and this game offers little to people looking for to test their brainpower and not just their patience.