The Room 4: Old Sins

The Room 4: Old Sins is an escape room game about exploring a dollhouse full of intricate puzzle mechanisms. You must manipulate contraptions within the rooms of the dollhouse in order to open up new rooms and find out the dollhouse’s secrets. This entry takes the series’ intricate environments and elaborate animations to a new level.

The Room 4 has a more substantial plot than the rest of the series, and it doesn’t require any prior knowledge. A man has gone missing along with a mysterious substance called the Null, and his wife is believed to be involved in their disappearance. Notes and short cutscenes tell the story of their relationship and what ultimately happened.

The clockpunk dollhouse contains many elaborate clockwork toys and devices, often based on old-fashioned household equipment like wood-burning stoves. The devices are filled with levers, dials, locks, and mechanisms that you can turn, lift, rotate, or pull. You often have access to several rooms at a time and need to move back and forth to get everything working. An in-game hint system is there to help if you get stuck.

The magical eyepiece which appears in all The Room games gets used much more heavily in this one. Every room is decorated with symbols that are only visible through the eyepiece, highlighting where to start, what the final objective is, and which objects are interactable. Sometimes you also need the eyepiece to enter tiny doorways on specific dollhouse props. These mind-bending changes of scale enhance the dark atmosphere, which contains mild horror elements.

The Room 4 has even higher production values than the previous games in the series. It introduces full-motion video in the cutscenes. The animations of the mechanical devices are elaborate and eye-catching, making it more satisfying than ever to solve each room and unlock the dollhouse’s secrets.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz.