The Room bills itself as a series of puzzle games, and this is nominally true. There are puzzles, and you solve them, but that is not the main draw of the series for me. What The Room is is an exercise in spectacle. The games are excellent at drawing you deeper into the madness of the setting, much like its main character (the wild, dark Null element) draws the characters deeper into its own madness. Every puzzle completed is an invitation to wonder just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Not all the puzzles are entirely intuitive, but they all succeed in leading the player down the garden path to hell.

The Room 4: Old Sins feels like a fresh start, utilizing what the team learned from the first three games and iterating upon it to create something that rivals the third game for the best in the series thus far.

So many of the issues with the previous games have been ironed out, namely the puzzle difficulty. There was a lot more challenge to each solution than any of the previous games offered, without resorting to moon logic to complete its puzzles.

The game is also much more interwoven in its design, thanks to using a (technically) much tighter space instead of expanding endlessly beyond a single room. It's a welcome return to form, since it offered a lot of cohesion through both flow and puzzle design affecting different parts of the central dollhouse.

And lastly, story has seen a welcome uplift. Where The Room 1 and 2 both feel like they were still trying to find their footing, and 3 offered some semblance of story, The Room 4 offers a story that's much more engaging even if the team is still perfecting their craft.

The only complaint I can give is the removal once again of branching ending paths. While a bit tedious in gameplay, having those various endings based on your dedication to the game in The Room 3 was welcome. I know this story wouldn't have made sense for a multi-ending structure, but it would've been good to see nonetheless.

Either way, I'm excited to see how the team further iterates in The Room 5, since it's creeping closer and closer to masterpiece status.

With a four hour playtime, the game was probably twice as long as the first game. I jumped from one to four, exactly how a series is meant to be played!
I gave it the same rating as the first game for different reasons. I think it has more going on, the puzzles are still solid though never too hard. A few seem hard because I don't think you're given enough contextual information from some of the components, like maybe you weren't aware something could turn. I also found the "tentacle" scenes to be quite boring eventually. Once you complete a room, tentacles swarm the place and either kick you out or your character flees before darkening the room and prevent re-entry. The first time you see them they're a bit spooky, maybe even the time after that, but then it happens six more times. It just feels like loading screens, even though I doubt that's what they are. Same with the in-game journals you find in each room. Like the first game, they don't make much sense, arguably ever, but certainly not until the end where they really ramp up. It's seemingly a bizarre attempt at adding a story, until the very end of the game where there's a cutscene and your character apparently has a name and you see this cult and your crystal is one of many. So clearly there is a story here, but it's just sort of tucked in at the end and you don't ever really care.
But it's a puzzle game, first and foremost, and I'd say they all work pretty well. Towards the end, maybe it's simply the four hour time requirement, I was ready for it to be over. Even though I think they nailed the pace at which you open new rooms, thus keeping a sense of "freshness" going the whole time, four hours was simply too long. Probably could have lost an entire one of the rooms, here, maybe even two.
All in all, a fun game, another solid entry, though sadly while it improved it also managed to falter. I wonder if the fifth game will change the formula at all, though not likely, as these are also mobile games. That's probably where all the money is these days. It sucks that that is likely a limiter as to how much more this series can do.

This series of underappreciated puzzle games just gets better and better. The Room 4 is another entry into the puzzle-box, pseudo-point and click adventure games, but this time tasks the player with exploring different rooms of a mansion to uncover its secrets. Because the whole game takes place inside this framework, it feels way more cohesive, and I loved swapping between rooms to get solutions, rather than having all of the answers stuck in one room. Like most of the series, it's not too much of a challenge to get through, and if there is ever a moment you get stuck, an intelligently balanced and fair hint system can point you in the right direction. My only gripe is I was hoping to see more room movement like in the Room Three, with double-floored environments and secrets/hidden rooms. While I appreciate the one ending, I really wanted some other reason to explore the house. Cannot wait for the eventual return to this franchise.

The Room 4: Old Sins was the culmination of all previous games, simultaneously going back to its roots with a singular object being the main focus while still including an entire mansion with various rooms to step into just like the last instalment. The big difference was the new protagonist and storyline, but like the rest of the series the story had to be pieced together because it was all rather vague. The Null was definitely an interesting concept and I’ve always appreciated the Lovecraftian themes.

It was a good run—I don’t consider any of the four games to be bad. The physics were always satisfying, the puzzles always varied.