Find Room 96

Genre: First-Person Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Included in Find Room 96 + Exit Station 7 + The Eerie Surroundings +HighScore Anomaly Shop +HighScore Anomaly Underground, along with Exit Station 7, HighScore Anomaly Shop, HighScore Anomaly Underground, and The Eerie Surroundings. Also included in Santa’s Spot It + Exit Station 7 + Find Room 96 +HighScore Anomaly Shop +HighScore Anomaly Underground along with Santa’s Spot It, Exit Station 7, HighScore Anomaly Shop, and HighScore Anomaly Underground.)

Find Room 96, released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2024, is a First-Person Puzzle game where players ride an elevator to multiple floors and are asked one simple question: apart from the floor number, is there anything different about this floor from the floor at the very beginning? If there is, you’re supposed to walk into the elevator labeled “confirm anomaly”. If there isn’t and the floor is identical, you’re supposed to walk into the elevator labeled “no anomaly”. Answer correctly and you move on, answer incorrectly and you have to start over from the beginning.

It’s a simple premise that only requires careful observation, making this essentially a glorified first-person take on “spot the differences”. However, early on the problem with this game makes itself known – if you miss a difference, the game doesn’t tell you what you missed after the fact, so you can’t learn from your mistake. You might not even know what you’re looking for! The game does include an optional “visual assist” mode to highlight the areas you need to watch, but you never quite know what changes might be made.

You need to check the pictures on the wall to make sure they haven’t been swapped out for another, but do you need to see if they’ve been flipped to face the other way? You need to check if the doors are ajar, but do you need to check to see if the patterns on the door have changed? You need to check for extra (or missing) fire extinguishers, but do you need to check the fire alarm pulls too? There are so many potential places to miss that when you do, it’s hard to feel like you did something wrong, because the game never gives you an idea of what you even can get wrong.

The presentation is at least decent, albeit with a few caveats, including a major one. The rooms’ textures and some decent lighting are all quite nice here, with good detail in everything, backed by a light, jazzy theme (though sometimes it’s just silence). However, there’s some nasty aliasing here. More importantly, the clunky menus and slapped-together interface elements definitely make a strong argument that the visually-appealing elements here are purchased assets, resulting in a game that has professional-looking elements in an overall amateurish-looking game.

In the end, I do think Find Room 96 has a decent, if simple, core idea. However, it fails to deliver on this idea because it neglects to give players the information they need to improve and become better at the game. The result is a game that seems like it could be enjoyable, but ends up just being frustrating in ways that make you want to put it down and never come back. I suggest you just skip straight to the end and not get it in the first place.

tl;dr – Find Room 96 is a First-Person Puzzle game where players are trying to see if the floor they’re on matches the floor they started in, basically playing like an alternate take on “spot the difference”. It’s not a bad concept, but the way the game refuses to show you what you got wrong when you get something wrong and have to start over keeps players from improving and makes this a game you’ll tire of quickly and won’t want to return to.

Grade: D

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