Hudson recently sent along a demo for the Wii version of their upcoming release Rooms: The Main Building. I've been intrigued by this title for some time, so this weekend, I gave it a spin.
Out of the hundred puzzles that are included in the final version, I was able to play maybe a touch over a dozen—the demo kicked me back to the main screen at its conclusion, so I didn't get to count exactly. Each puzzle is, at its most basic, a sliding puzzle like the 15 Puzzle; but the rules are a little different. You control an avatar who can stand in only one of the rooms at a time, and only the room he's standing in can be slid into empty space. Rooms have walls on various sides and devices such as keys to open doors, ladders to climb up to the room above, warp telephones to jump to another room, or wardrobes to swap the room you're in for another.
There's also plenty of additional trappings. The backgrounds of the rooms make up a picture; it's possible to solve some puzzles without making that picture, but that additional goal is also available. There are also items you get as you solve the various puzzles which can be used for little quests in other areas of the game—the one quest that I had available, I wasn't able to complete before the demo ran out; but that could aspect could also prove interesting.
One small complaint I had about the Wii version is that its text size was awfully small for the system's SD resolution and sort of blurry as a result. Everything was also fairly dark, though I didn't have a hard time identifying anything that I needed to. Neither got in the way of enjoying the puzzle action of this game, which I'm looking forward to doing in full on March 23 when both the Wii and DS versions release.
Out of the hundred puzzles that are included in the final version, I was able to play maybe a touch over a dozen—the demo kicked me back to the main screen at its conclusion, so I didn't get to count exactly. Each puzzle is, at its most basic, a sliding puzzle like the 15 Puzzle; but the rules are a little different. You control an avatar who can stand in only one of the rooms at a time, and only the room he's standing in can be slid into empty space. Rooms have walls on various sides and devices such as keys to open doors, ladders to climb up to the room above, warp telephones to jump to another room, or wardrobes to swap the room you're in for another.
There's also plenty of additional trappings. The backgrounds of the rooms make up a picture; it's possible to solve some puzzles without making that picture, but that additional goal is also available. There are also items you get as you solve the various puzzles which can be used for little quests in other areas of the game—the one quest that I had available, I wasn't able to complete before the demo ran out; but that could aspect could also prove interesting.
One small complaint I had about the Wii version is that its text size was awfully small for the system's SD resolution and sort of blurry as a result. Everything was also fairly dark, though I didn't have a hard time identifying anything that I needed to. Neither got in the way of enjoying the puzzle action of this game, which I'm looking forward to doing in full on March 23 when both the Wii and DS versions release.