The Room Three

The Room Three is an escape room game about exploring a mansion full of intricate puzzle mechanisms. You must figure out how to complete or operate all the mechanisms in order to magically reveal new doors and—hopefully—escape. It follows The Room Two’s trend of containing some mild horror elements while maintaining the series’ signature highly-detailed visuals.

Once again, the minimal story doesn’t require any knowledge of the previous games. A mysterious figure called the Craftsman has trapped you in an elaborate clockpunk mansion to teach you the secrets of a powerful but dangerous substance called the Null. As you reveal the different rooms of the mansion, his motives become more and more questionable. The dark atmosphere includes some horror elements, especially the psychological horror of being trapped.

The Room Three is significantly more open than the previous games and requires more exploration, although like the previous games, there’s still no free movement—you have a fixed position and double-click to move through doorways or to zoom in on parts of the scene. You begin in a central room and reveal doorways to other parts of the mansion one by one, leaving previous rooms still accessible to explore.

The mansion is filled with elaborate clockwork puzzle boxes, model buildings, telescopes, and other devices. There are levers, dials, locks, and clockwork mechanisms that you can turn, lift, rotate, or pull. It’s not always clear what the purpose of the devices is or what parts of them are interactable, and you will need careful observation skills and logical thinking to figure out what to do. An in-game hint system is there to help if you get stuck.

The magical eyepiece, a signature element of the franchise, gains a new use here. In addition to showing hidden text and allowing you to see through some surfaces, it now allows you to enter tiny doorways in the puzzle boxes to interact with even tinier devices inside, playing with scale in sometimes mind-bending ways.

This is also the only game in the franchise that features multiple endings. Once you finish the game, you are given the opportunity to change your fate and unlock alternate pathways. This gives you even more time to enjoy the series’ signature beautiful environments, detailed prop design, and realistically-animated mechanisms.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz.