Nine great room-escapers

As part of my ongoing series of links to online adventure games, I present today's installment, room-escapers.

The Mystery of Time and Space, or MOTAS, is one of the classic room-escapers, involving not just one but a series of levels for you to find your way out of. With good puzzles and nice graphics, it's an all-around fun game. Includes an in-game chat room for hints, and you can find a walkthrough in the game's forum.




Another of the classics is the series by FASCO-CS, including the original Crimson Room, the Viridian Room, and the Blue Chamber, which is a rather weak add-on to the series. A fourth game, the Pink Prison, has been in the works for quite some time. In these games, which feature simple, line-drawn graphics in bold solid colors, you are sealed in a single room and must poke and prod in all the corners to find the items you need to escape. Sometimes success can depend on finding very tiny hidden clickspots -- they can be frustrating, but very rewarding. In Japanese and English.
The site provides its own help and game guides for each game.






Another interesting room-escaper is Droom, also Japanese. Droom has nice 3D graphics and some interesting plot features. Your speed in this game -- number of moves -- matters, and there are multiple endings. This is one of my favorites.
There is a walkthrough in the Nordinho forums.




The Doors is a fun, surreal game in which you are trapped in a hallway with four doors. The line-graphics are slick and appealing, and this game, unlike the others, features sound, with atmospheric music and ambient noise.
There is a walkthrough in the Nordinho forums.




Finally, the French designer Anode & Cathode has a trilogy of games that I absolutely adore: the Office, the House, and the Museum. Each game has a unique visual style, from the cute pastel pixel-art of the Office to the stylish hand-drawn House to the sleek painted Museum, my favorite of the three. While the Office is definitely a room-escaper (with a somewhat arbitrary solution mechanism, but it's fun enough to forgive), the others probably don't strictly fall into this category -- you're restricted to one area, but your primary motivation is discovery, not escape. In the House, you must put together the pieces to uncover an event that happened in your past, and in the Museum, you must interact with the works of art in a very strange gallery. I've heard that there is a fourth game, the Car, that can only be accessed if you perform a particular sequence of events in the House, but I've never found it. In French and (good) English.
You can find help for the games at the Anode & Cathode Forum.






Up next: Samarost-style games.