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 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 series is a very consistent series, with titles that all have the same qualities and weaknesses. These games are basically like shape-sorter toys pretending to be puzzle games. But it comes with an excellent dark art direction, very creative visuals and cool animations that it's still worth playing if you're into that gothic horror vibe. This 4th episode takes place entirely inside a mansion, with each room having a specific theme. It's pretty cool, I especially like the Japanese themed room.
Just don't expect a real puzzle game a la Myst, as all the puzzles can be solved by pressing buttons and inserting objects into the right holes. There isn't really any moments in which you really have to think about the solution. Most of the time if I got stuck, it was because I didn't know what part of the mechanism could be interacted with.

Played the Steam version, which is called "The Room 4: Old Sins", and came out this year. This is definitely the best in the series so far (I say this not having played the VR entry). And that's saying something, because the other three are also fantastic. It's structured sort of like 3, except more open. You're always able to return to the overworld and access different areas, and there are a lot of puzzles which require you to swap between them. Pretty bold move on the part of the developers, but they're a talented bunch, so of course it was done expertly and never felt overwhelming. This also has the best story element of the series thus far. There's nothing I didn't love about this, go play it.

It's another Room game! As beautiful as ever and dials up the style even more. The puzzles aren't that hard and some are switch/handle/button hunting but they're really not the point of these games. The atmosphere, the creepiness and the feeling of fiddling with intricate toys is what really makes these games shine. This is a fairly good instalment with one tiny problem. The puzzle "rooms" in this one are even more connected than ever. Previous games made you complete one room before moving on to the next except for the last one and this one where all the rooms are interconnected and cross each other in terms of solutions where one item found in one Room is useful in the next. Room 4 fixes the tedious backtracking of Room 3 but this has a fresh problem of some Rooms being much shorter than the others. Almost as soon as you solve one, you have the key item necessary to solve the other. This makes the pacing of the puzzles a bit uneven

This is a worthy successor to the Room franchise and I don't think I need to really tell fans of the series to buy this one. Maybe you've bought it already but if you haven't, this is a fine addition to the collection

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.

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.