| The Room: The Game | |
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An instance where the game makes fun of the overuse of the line "Oh hai ____" in the movie. |
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| Developer(s) | Newgrounds |
| Publisher(s) | Newgrounds/WB Games |
| Engine | Adobe Flash |
| Platform(s) | All operating systems with Flash Player. |
| Release date(s) | September 9, 2010 |
| Genre(s) | Adventure game, Point-and-click |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
| Media/distribution | Browser, download |
The Room Tribute or The Room is an unofficial video game released on September 9, 2010, based on the film of the same name. It was programmed by Tom Fulp and the game's artwork was provided by staff member Jeff "JohnnyUtah" Bandelin, with music by animator Chris O'Neill. The game was designed in the style of 16-bit graphics, much like a similar game based on the film Tremors for Newgrounds own 2010 April Fools joke.
Contents |
The Room is a role-playing / adventure game with a point-and-click interface. The player assumes the role of Johnny, a banker in San Francisco, as he goes about his daily life-- showering, going to work, and pleasing his fiance Lisa. The game is divided up into several levels, each of which takes the form of a new day. Each level begins with Johnny being required to bathe and ends with him going to bed; in between, Johnny is tasked with various missions, which usually involve him engaging in mundane activities such as meeting friends for coffee, buying new clothes, and playing catch. When not on a mission, the player is given free roam over a small area of San Francisco, which includes a park, several stores, and the homes of Johnny's friends Mark and Denny. There are several side quests that the player can engage in when not on missions, such as finding and reading Denny's daily diary entries; successfully completing a side quest involving finding ten unique spoons unlocks an extended ending to the game.
For the most part, the game follows the plot of the movie: Amiable banker Johnny helps out his friends with their day-to-day problems while preparing for his wedding to his long-time fiancee, Lisa. When he discovers that Lisa is cheating on him, Johnny decides to expose her infidelity. The game primarily diverges from the film in that it shows the events nominally from Johnny's point of view as opposed to Lisa's; the player gets to control Johnny as he engages in activities that were only referred to in the film, such as his taking on a mystery client at his bank and his turning over drug dealer Chris-R to the police. The game also contains several in-jokes that attempt to fill in plot-holes in the film; a scene in the game's final level attempts to explain the inexplicable disappearance of main character Peter from the movie's final act.
The game also contains a Prologue, beginning with Lisa and Denny at Johnny's grave (a statue of Tommy Wiseau) and then seguing into a level that occurs a day before the main action of the movie begins, in which Johnny learns that an earthquake has sealed San Francisco off from the rest of the state (an apparent reference to the Grand Theft Auto video game series, in which each entry begins by limiting the player to a small section of the city by virtue of some natural or man made disaster).
The final level of the game permits players to "tie up" loose plot threads left hanging at the end of the movie, such as the fate of Chris-R and Johnny's contentious relationship with his superiors at the bank. The game also includes an epilogue revealing that Johnny was, in fact, an alien being inhabiting a human body; after Johnny's "suicide," he returns to his mothership, a giant mechanical spoon orbiting the Earth, and laments how he and his fellow extraterrestrials may never understand human life. Johnny and two of his fellow aliens then assume forms resembling a naked Tommy Wiseau and begin dancing, ending the game.
Should the player collect each of the hidden spoons throughout the game, rather than simply dance during the climax, the aliens fire a ray gun at Earth that reshapes the planet into a giant spoon.
Entertainment Weekly called the flash game "as addictive as scotchka!"[1]. The game has also had positive reviews from press such as TIME[2], Wired[3], Destructoid[4], The Escapist[5], Bitmob[6], Infinite Lives[7], Westword[8], Game Culture[9], and Geeks of Doom.[10] There is talk of a console addaption on production.