Part 25: Crimson Room

So, now that we have a moment, let's utilise it to go back in time. This'll probably be a one-off, but I think it's going to be a pretty good contrast to what we've seen so far.






The Crimson Room is a... very basic flash game. It's not the first of its genre, but it's often considered to be one of, like, two progenitors of it anyway. The relevance to this thread? This little flash game is an example of how such a simple concept can go so horribly wrong so very easily. That being, the escape sections we've seen several of already.



I thought what time it was now.



There's very, very little text in this and yet there's a surprisingly high proportion of Engrish.

The bed was different from usual. Is this a hotel? No, it does not seem to be a hotel. I am shut up. I have to escape.

And that's all the... "plot" we're getting. It's pretty simple: you are in a room. Leave it.





Seeing as how the implication is You start lying down, this is the only time we get to see the ceiling. I hope you enjoy red. There's lots of it. The walls are nothing but it.

The title is a very accurate descriptor is what I'm getting at here.



The sole door in here is our starting point and our exit point.



Of course, it starts locked so we have to actually do things. Not very many things, but apparently people find this hard.

We'll use this as the basic point of reference in order to know when we're done or not. Going clockwise is a good idea here, so let's do that.



The first real screen has about as much content as all the others (that is to say: very little). We can click on the curtain though, which is generous enough to give us...



A rather simple faux-outside with a HMV billboard. Remember when they were relevant? And now they're bankrupt. Funny how that dates this more than the actual date on the title screen.

Oh and there's like 7ish pixels of black on the windowsill.



Apparently that represents a key. A silver key.

Sometimes its best to just not ask questions.

There's also something else here, but we have to open and close the curtain several times in a row to get it. Incidentally, you have no reason to think this is a thing you have to do and there's no hints in the room to do this either.



Doing this enough times makes a ring fall from the curtain. On the plus side, at least it tells you about it when it falls and the camera auto-pans to it.

There's nothing else here, though, so we can pan around to the bed and look under the pillow.



There's two other things hidden in the bed, on top of this golden key. One we can only get with the pillow lifted up, the other is a right bastard to find if you don't know about it.



With the pillow up, if we find the right small area to click on the camera pans and we can get a stick. This is the easier of the two non-key items on the bed.



Unfortunately, we can't get the other from there so we need to pan around to this oddly blank wall. This screen is outright useless on its own, as you might have guessed from the giant expanse of nothing.

For now though, if we find the right maybe 4 or 5 pixels at most to click on...



We can find a battery. If you don't know this is here, and where exactly to click, it's functionally impossible to find. It's not just a pixel hunt, it's an unmarked, unmentioned, completely unguessable pixel hunt. You have to know in advance where this is to find it, otherwise you'll be clicking on everything on every screen until you luck out and bump into it.

Alternatively you'll just give up because this is annoyingly tedious and unfun. Either/or.



Still, there's nothing left over there so we get our last area to check. And it's the biggest of them all. For whatever that counts for (not a lot).



These two drawers up top both contain stuff but we don't actually need either. The "CD" is an empty case that does fuck all, and is entirely unused until the first sequel.

The other drawer contains a memo. This used to be mandatory, but it's not anymore.



The bottom two drawers are normally locked, but we have the gold and silver keys which unlock them.



This is pretty redundant, and just serves to make you waste more time. The box alone is triple locked and we only have two of the three things needed to open it.

...At which point we need two more things to be able to use it.



The power cord just lets us turn on the stereo, which we need to do to open the CD drawer. You might thing this leads to an audio clue or something.

In a better game it might. Here?



A key. A grey key. That you can barely see because it blends into the cd drawer. We can't use this until we open the strange box and deal with everything that contains.

In order to do that, though, we need to go look at that unmarked bowl next to the right stereo.



With this ring, we can open the box with a face on it.



Sorry, the box of mistery. We need to stick the rings on the eyes and the metal stick on the mouth.



Like so. This lets us open it, because it just does.



Unfortunately, we only have the second battery for the inside. We need a cassette tape before we can do anything else with it (hey remember those too? I don't).



Thankfully, it's easy to find since it's just under the chest of drawers. Now we just go slot it into the box and have it do its thing...



As an incredibly arbitrary step, you need that whole dance to play before you can click where he indicates to click. If you don't, it cancels everything and you can't complete the... "puzzle" I guess it's supposed to be.



We need the dance to finish, but we also can't dawdle because if we do it ends the event and we need to watch the dance. In full. Again.

It's about as fun as it sounds.



Our reward is a safe.

A safe we can't open. We can never open. We need the passcode before we can use the key to open it. The passcode is nowhere in the game. Remember that memo?



If we look at it, it gives us a URL. As I recall from like 2005, we need to visit this URL to get the passcode to open the safe. The problem?



The site is now dead. It gives us an error message of... some kind, I think (the japanese beneath the URL here).

(it might be hard to read so I made a copy of it just in case)

We can't solve this puzzle. We can't finish the game. Ever.



Normally, that'd be true. Thankfully the internet has multiple resources to just cheat and look up the solution if you really wanted to. I didn't need to do that, since I somehow remembered that this was the answer, but there's no way for anyone trying to play the game "normally" for the first time to manage this.

Except for brute forcing it, and trying every possible numeric combination until they hit 1994. Since it's a four number code, and the dials go from 0 to 9 there's 10000 possible combinations. Have fun!



Between that and the key, we can open the safe and get a screwdriver.



With this, we can remove the door knob and only the door knob. Somehow, this lets us leave.












Out of the three games "Takagism" credits as his inspirations, I haven't played two of them. I have, however, played Mystery of Time and Space which I distinctly remember as being sort of decent save for a few points. It's probably aged really, really badly though (being created 12 years ago now and all) and the last time I played it it wasn't even close to finished. Granted, this was like 6 years ago but still.

Oh, and remember when I mentioned the CD being relevant for the "first" sequel?



He leaves a hook for it here in all its wonderful MSPaint glory. It'd practically be a threat except he didn't just make one sequel.

He made three.



...I'm definitely not going to touch them. Sorry. Neither the Viridian Room, nor the Blue Chamber nor the White Chamber are worth it.