The Room Stalker Review (PC)

The Exit 8 has single-handedly warped the way I think about inanimate objects and their true nature. I’m not saying that all objects that I pass on my commute invoke a specific emotion, but that certain things—mirrors, portraits, and questionable decor of a peculiar time period, etc.—make me feel uneasy, as if there is something else hawking at me through the lens of a spiritual vessel. In The Room Stalker, it’s the same story: objects, no matter how harmless they appear at face value, bear an alternate motive—like a hidden power that allows certain anomalies to pass through their material to enact their intended purpose. No, things here act differently. And in a hotel room, of all places, the objects in question are more mischievous and sinister than ever.

Without a guiding light or the ability to dial room service to rescue me from these shackles, I have no choice but to examine the contents of this room with a fine-tooth comb. But there’s a problem: the more I look, and the more I begin to discover, the more the rooms talks back to me. And not in a pleasant way, but in a sort of keep-digging-and-you’ll-feel-the-wrath-of-these-haunted-walls way. It’s a tight space, and there are really only so many places that I can go from here. Oh, the options are limited, but in spite of my best efforts to quench the foe’s hunger for power, I must press on and continue to upset the apple cart if I am to release myself from these restraints. The room is watching, but I have little choice but to look it dead in the eye.

The Fly on Your Wall

The Room Stalker doesn’t stray all that far from the basic setup of The Exit 8’s, meaning, as players, the primary objective of exploring an area, and carefully examining objects of interest to help separate genuine items from possessed ones remains in play. Here, though, there are no subway tunnels to roam around. Instead, there is a relatively small hotel room, which features bleached walls, landscape portraiture, and a selection of charcoal-smitten decor that compliments a relatively “modern” look. And it’s within these four walls that, true to the spirit of The Exit 8, an anomaly takes the form of various objects dotted around the room. It’s your job, in short, to decipher the details behind these anomalies and their whereabouts.

As far as gameplay goes, The Room Stalker plays out like a traditional first-person horror, with the bulk of the experience consisting mostly of actively searching various areas of the room, and using a combination of intuition and hawk-like hearing to sniff out one of the breadcrumb trails that it leaves out. As you locate one of these anomalies, the loop begins to take shape, with new objects introducing themselves to the mix, and the room itself resetting to reflect your ever-shifting perspective of what’s what and who’s whom. But that’s about as much as it asks of you: to unearth the anomalies, and to gradually progress toward an endgame. Or, in this case, the exit.

Breaking the Loop

The Room Stalker can be beaten in just under an hour, and so, if it’s a lengthy campaign that you’re looking for, then you won’t find anything of the sort here. Moreover, you won’t find any post-credits tasks or secret endings to sift through, either, what with the experience being more of a one-and-done ordeal than anything else. Still, for what it does have in its rather small casket, you shouldn’t struggle to carve out a few worthy psychological surprises here.

To make it absolutely clear, The Room Stalker isn’t so much a video game as it is an atmospheric experience with the occasional interactive element for you to tap away at. With a compressed set of mechanics and only a handful of things to work with, you don’t need to be all that experienced in this particular field to figure out how to get the ball rolling, so to speak. It’s also incredibly linear, with most of the story beats taking place as part of one continuous chain of events, with each passing milestone more or less being activated by successfully locating an anomaly and then moving on to the next phase.

The good news is, The Room Stalker isn’t predictable, which is why I’m more inclined to give it the credit it deserves. Is it scary? Eh — it’s creepy, and the atmosphere does most of the talking here, I’ll admit. So while it isn’t exactly the nightmare fuel of an outstanding indie horror, it is, however, more than capable of setting a scene and giving you the fodder needed to exhume some paranoiac tendencies. That’s something. It’s just a shame that it doesn’t make the effort to build its suspense over a longer period of time.

Verdict

If you enjoyed strolling through The Exit 8 and several other anomaly-stitched search-and-segregate horrors, then you should feel right at home with The Room Stalker. Admittedly, it doesn’t do anything majorly special to elevate the blueprint of its source material, but it does manage to take full advantage of the tools at its disposal. The setting—a black-and-white hotel room with minimal space and set pieces—isn’t exactly bursting at the seams with interesting objects, I’ll admit. That said, The Room Stalker does go on to encapsulate a surprising amount of genuinely solid and hard-hitting scares and unsettling moments in its brief sixty-minute window.

It’s a short one, I’ll give it that, and so I wouldn’t recommend waltzing into The Room Stalker with the expectations of spending a week-long vacation in this particular hotel room. However, if you’ve an hour to spare and an unshakable craving for a quick romp through the paranormal boroughs of an indie horror, then you might find solace in this affordable page turner of Manja Studios’.