The Desolate Room

By: Derek Yu

On: August 24th, 2007

To say that The Desolate Room is not your typical RPG would be an understatement. I’m actually having trouble deciding what I should say in this post, because I don’t want to spoil the experience for you.

I’ll say this much: the game “happens” in three different places. The first is an island, where a lonely, egg-obsessed coffee machine robot resides. The second place is a virtual world. The third is the past… in the memories of other, long-dead robots. The way the coffee robot, the long-dead robots, and the three places connect to each other is a great bit of storytelling. It’s not complex or anything… just thoughtful and well-done.

The game begins on the island, and you play as the coffee robot. PLEASE don’t let the rather mundane fetch quests in the first part of the game (or the overall clunkiness of its presentation) deter you from continuing! It picks up quite quickly from then on and I promise that (some of) you will really dig the battle/experience system, which is evenly-paced and quite satisfying (and a little overwhelming at first).

If you are at all interested in RPG’s or unique, emotional narratives, this game is worth a look for you. It’s sad and strange and not a little bit scary. When you realize what the title of the game means, it’s a genuinely chilling moment. I’ll be thinking about this game for a while.

Click here (The Daily Click) for a more thorough explanation of the story and about how the game mechanics work.

Posted in Freeware, Highly Recommended, RPG, Windows | Tags: scottgames

Dominic White

This is a great little game – and has been featured on blogs and sites before, only to be completely overlooked.

Seriously, give it a shot, people. It’s really rather good.
sam

What the fuck
pkt-zer0

Odd game, but sort of fun. The first boss (Deathflect) keeps mopping the floor with me, though. Is that what I’m even supposed to do after the first story cutscene, beat that guy?
Dominic White

Yeah. The first boss gave me hell, too, until I came up with a less-than-standard strategy.

I simply put a few levels into Derelicts ‘Doom Claw’ ability – it has a chance of scoring a critical hit that starts a countdown. When that timer runs out, whatever you hit, dies.

Hence, I hit him and then just defended/repaired/shielded for the 120 seconds I had to hold out.
Dave

HALP! How do I save? The game is meant to save automatically when you enter a room, or begin/end a battle, but how do I access the save? I exit the game by pressing escape, then next time I run the .exe the game starts from the beginning.
Derek

pkt-zer0: Another way to do it is to use Alphus’s “Uh Oh Ball” skill, which triples (!) damage done for a short period of time. Combine that with one of the Derelict’s big attacks, keep healing with Tool, and you should be fine. :)

Dave: It probably is loading your save game. It just plays the very first few lines in the intro, first.
Dominic White

The fact that Derek came up with a totally different solution to the same problem really highlights how well designed the game is. It’s a combat-centric game, but how you go about each fight and developing your characters is entirely up to personal preference.
Melly

Derelict’s Searing Beam attack is also very powerful against the high HP enemies. Combined with damage increasing abilities it can make short work of them.

Tool’s Magic Hammer is also godly against enemies that can kill your party members with two hits.

The game certainly has an unique aesthetic, the plot is intriguing enough to keep me going, and the battle system is quite refreshing compared to most other games of the kind. Very good game.
pkt-zer0

Thanks for the suggestions, got past the boss now (and the next two boss fights as well, actually) Due to random luck, he was killed in a single critical hit of Searing Beam.
http://www.fadupinator.com larsiusprime

Hey, I’ve got a question… I’ll try not to make this a spoiler. When you get to the end after the big boss, and you’re supposed to search for that one last thing… where do you have to look to find it? Is it in the terminal or in the overworld?
RavenWorks

Man, I really wanted to hate this game for all the questionable decisions (like filling up your speed/charge meter for a boss battle, only to have it depleted by a random encounter whether you wanted to use those points or not) but the fact is I keep coming back to it, just because I love the battles, in presentation and in gameplay. Having distinct skills I can powerup when I want (as opposed to say, ‘fire’, ‘fire 2’, ‘fire 3’ coming at random intervals) has always been my favourite kind of RPG battle system, and those robots are just so endearing (and that’s not something I usually say about robots so un-androidy..) But yeah, it’s kinda ruining the game for me, the fact that the only way I’ve ever seen to even stand a chance against a boss character is to Doom Claw and then just heal yourself like crazy (and lower the boss’s attack, and raise your defense..) It means I’m sort of splitting my experience points between attack moves meant to fight the normal enemies, and defense moves meant to keep me afloat while the boss’s timer ticks down..

Personally, the one thing that I feel was a really missed opportunity in this game was the presentation for the ‘virtual world’, the lo-fi pixelly screens… I appreciate the aesthetic, but I can’t help but feel it would’ve looked better with scanlines, flickery glowing vectors, stuff like that, rather than these photoshop-embossed pixels… To each their own, though!

I’m still continuing on my quest to dig MP3 headers out of the EXE to get a copy of that battle music on my iPod. ;)
Akhel

I’m having the same problem as Dave. The game won’t save – no files created in the folder, and when I start it again it goes all the way back to the beginning (finding eggs for Alphus). :<
Melly

I have no problems with saving. It doesn’t create a new file, no, but it’s still saved, somewhere, because when I start the game again I’m at the spot I was when I quit it (or in front of the console if I was in the virtual world).

The lo-fi aesthetic for the virtual world actually caught me by surprise, but it was a good one. I really dig this game’s presentation, and I really want to know the whole story.
pkt-zer0

You don’t need to use Doom Claw against bosses, actually. I didn’t need to thus far, at least. Various attribute boosts and lowering the enemy’s defenses works just as well.

I’m up to Model 0 now, Proto Wall + Med Beacon is starting to get lacking for defense and healing in face of attacks like 0101010, which seems to insta-kill three of your characters. Oh joy. Time to invest in Magic Hammer.
Chris L

Ravenworks, before going after a boss, go egg hunting. That fills up your speed and charge pretty good.

Fun game. I love the design and character of Coffee. I just want to be him. Make coffee and cook eggs all day… I’d be so popular.
Zocolo

I’m also curious about that last thing that the CoffeeBot needs to search for. Where the hell is it? I searched everywhere in both realms…
Zocolo

Never mind. I found Model 0.
http://www.fadupinator.com larsiusprime

Yeah I did the same :) Just an fyi to anyone else stuck looking for the last thing the CoffeBot needs to search for, sometimes walls aren’t what they seem
Melly

Magic Hammer is godly. Everybody should use it. Cause I said so.
http://ithamore.blogspot.com/ ithamore

It’s an interesting RPG, but I wish the boss battles weren’t so brutal.
Optrirominiluikus

This seems like a really interesting game, and I really like the look of it, but alas, I cannot play it on my 400 Mhz Pentium II, everything but the battles works fine. But the battles. Dang.
Gonna try it later, when I have a better can.
Circy

It won GOTW at The Daily Click.
Cube

I’ve totally been abusing the combo bonus to get massive experience points from the battles. Hit ’em with a doom claw, then just keep using the tazer turret and weakass attacks. It’s funny.

Does anyone really know what the skill bonus is? I thought it might be how fast you finish the battle, but I dunno.
Cube

Oh, and I totally beat the first boss using the Uh Oh Ball and Derelict’s Searing Beam attack. Except it didn’t kill him because I have crappy luck.

But I finished him off with Tool’s wrecking ball. That kicked ass.
Derek

@Cube: The skill bonus has to do with how many different kinds of attacks you used!

Also: Damn, Model 0 is hard. :'(
Zocolo

One hit kill every boss:
Uh-oh-ball, concentration, and Searing Beam.

Uh-oh and searing beam have a 50-66% chance to one-hit kill, but adding concentration puts it above 90% (probably not 100%, but definitely less than 1 in 10 chance of failing).
pkt-zer0

And aside from the rather cheap one-hit KO and Doom Claw methods, would anything work?

Also, save games seem to be stored in C:rstat, in case it helps those with saving issues. It also seems easily hackable if anyone’s inclined to cheat.
Sciere

For the bosses, I used Hack 2 (lower stats) + Rupture 101 (hit + lasting virus attack) and then Uh-oh-ball (damage x3) + Tool-X Virus (damage x2). If you max out the stats before entering a fight, you can pull this off right away. You then have 6x damage going on for multiple rounds, with hits up to 800HP per blow. It takes about 20 seconds to bring down Model 0.
Kinoko

Sciere: That’s fantastic, I’m gona try that next.

Zocolo: Also that!

I’ve been using a constant stream of Magic Hammer and MedBall (or whatever it’s called) to stay alive and healed, Remnant’s last attack (forgot the name of that too) to keep charging quickly and using LevelDown every chance I got to basically kill the enemy. It takes off about 2000HP each round and it doesn’t take many of them to bring down any boss.

It’s slow but it’s a wonderful defense against enemies that like to spring death upon you quickly and mercilessly.
pkt-zer0

Sciere: my usual tactics are quite similar to that, but the damage output is not quite as large, even with both multipliers. What skill levels would that happen on? Since as it is, I don’t last long enough kill Model 0 that way.
Sciere

I had Ion Rupture at level 10, the multipliers at 9 and Hack 2 at level 7. There is some luck involved to the damage as well, Viral Code was a lot tougher (or the rolls were worse) and I survived with one character there with 1HP. Model 0 was a breeze.
Chris

A bit late, but I didn’t use any of the damage skills. Derelict only used Magananobot (sp?) to let my other characters go, Tool alternated Magic Hammer and Supercharge, Alphy used void gas to keep the enemy from killing us, med beacon/protowall when needed. The star of the show was Defect with Level Down. After upgrading level down, I could drop an enemy 3 levels per cast. Even Model 0 had less than a 100 hp at level 1. Void Gas drops defense to 0. Easy to kill with any skill at that point.
pkt-zer0

Phew, killed the bastard “properly” now. I swear, Magic Hammer tends to run out at the worst possible moment.

Would anyone be interested in a savegame editor? More specifically, one geared towards a sort of “boss challenge” mode – you’re given a limited amount of tokens, spend them on skills, then load up the game and try to take on any of the bosses. So you could see how few skills you could still do the battles with, or try out unusual skill sets.