The Room is widely considered one of the greatest mobile video games of all time. When Fireproof Games first released it, the game stood out from a crowd of point-and-click puzzles, tying an Eldritch dread with all the fun of an escape room. Two more followed in the series, keeping the flame alive and continuing their strong run as we delved into the Null and solved our ways through other worlds across multiple gaming platforms.

Then came The Room VR: A Dark Matter.

It wasn’t the first escape room type room to make the jump to virtual reality. With the pandemic, a lot of physical escape room companies had already moved in that direction to keep afloat, so the video game side following suit and shifting to compete more directly isn’t the strangest thing to come out of that time. Unfortunately for Fireproof Games, the move for them and The Room franchise was probably one of the best ways to cripple its momentum and alienate the bulk of their audience.

The Room‘s success heavily benefited from its availability across platforms. You could play it on your phone, on your iPad, on Nintendo Switch, or even your laptop, allowing Fireproof Games to tap into both casual touch-screen gamers and hardcore mystery lovers. By locking A Dark Matter behind VR, Fireproof Games effectively put up a hundreds of dollar paywall between their game and their primary audience.

For those who already had VR systems, it wasn’t all peachy either. Catering to VR standards, the intricate, highly focused puzzles became room-sized environments that tried to impress on scale without maintaining the core mechanisms which made the franchise great. While we saw some of this micro to macro move in The Room III, the puzzles themselves found a balance between spanning multiples rooms and having the fine-tuned clockwork micro-mechanisms which had always been at the core of the series.

The Room never needed virtual reality. It was already an immersive, brilliant game with fantastic three-dimensional artwork and clever puzzles that required focus and care. Sacrificing all that made it unique to make it a bog-standard escape-room simulator in VR did not save The Room, it shoved it feet first into an early grave, and we can only hope that Fireproof Games will realize this and shift directions.

Agree? Disagree? Share your thoughts and join the conversation on Boss Rush Network’s Discord and Facebook. If you know a puzzle game that’s available across platforms and could give the original game a run for its money, leave the details in the comments below.

Featured Image: Fireproof Games

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