[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Room 713 through Keymailer, a third-party company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game key was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that it be played, and content be created. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Systems: Windows
Release Date: April 30, 2026
Publisher: GoragarX
Developer: GoragarX
Time Spent: 3 Hours 12 Minutes
I'm going to gingerly describe Room 713 to you, and then I want you to forget that I said it.
Room 713 is like The Exit 8, if The Exit 8 took place in The Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's 1977 novel, The Shining*. Room 713 is like The Exit 8, but it's not, because apart from the "walk down a hallway and spot anomalies," it is vastly different in ways that are both expansive on the formula and regressive in terms of playability.
.png)
We're going to need to do a spot of contextualizing here, otherwise I'm going to write myself in circles. The general premise of the two games is similar. You walk through a looping hallway and look for things that are out of place. But where The Exit 8 has you turn around to acknowledge being a witness to an anomaly, in Room 713, you walk down a different hallway and go up a different flight of stairs that will lead you to the beginning of the same hallway you started in, but a floor higher, if you're correct, otherwise you start back at Floor 0. The other major difference is that Room 713 includes more than a single hallway, but also an elevator landing/lobby, and three hotel rooms of varying sizes, from a single room up to three individual rooms, including a living room, bedroom, and bathroom. All of these spaces need to be taken into account when trying to locate anomalies and, as I found out after the fact, finding an anomaly in one place might mean that there are similar anomalies on the same floor in different areas, not just limited to one location.
.png)
And that brings us to the concept of Change Blindness, or the inability to notice changes in the environment, something that the developers of all of these spot the anomaly mechanic video games are playing with against the players. I don't know if there's an additional phenomenon coupled with Change Blindness when taking into account the player playing a game for an audience. As in, when I was recording myself playing Room 713, knowing that I was recording what I was playing, did that have any effect on my ability to recognize differences in the different environments? Was the need to "create good/watchable content" getting in the way of my not noticing that the pattern of the carpet was flipped upside down, or that the doors on the rooms didn't have the usual room numbers on them? It's hard for the player to miss something as obvious as a dinner table in the middle of a hallway, compared to the light fixtures on overhead lights changing from a dome to a flattened box.
.png)
Room 713 does something I haven't seen before in the 'spot the anomaly' genre, and that's giving clues when you end up going up the "No Anomalies" staircase when you missed the statement on the radio about the elevator not working. Clues like, "How's anyone supposed to find their room like this?" or "Did the carpet always look like that?" are obvious when you know what to look for, but at times seem obtuse when you're faced with failure while on the fifth floor, and you might have to start back at the beginning. For the three times I got the first clue above, I was convinced that the map of the hotel floor would be missing or altered in some way, so I would frequently look at the map each time I entered the hallway.
.png)
There were several changes to the spot the anomaly formula (is there really a formula, though?) that the developer took. In at least one instance, an anomaly will outright kill the player if not avoided. In The Exit 8, this manifested as a darkening of the metro tunnel, a door opening to darkness, or a flood rushing towards the player. When you died, you would respawn at the beginning of the hallway. In Floor 713, respawning after the dying mechanic felt a lot clunkier and less user-friendly as it functioned more like an old-school Game Over screen, and took you back to the starting menu screen. Likewise, every time you started the game, you began at the entrance to the hotel, where you would need to pick up your room key, enter the nearby stairwell, and enter Hallway 0. There is a notice at the start of this hallway that lets the player know that Hallway 0 will never have any anomalies, so unless you feel you need a refresher on what the default rooms look like, you can just sprint through up to Hallway 1. On some level, I can understand having this default setting for the player to compare against, but like being sent back to the starting menu screen, it often times just feels unnecessary.
.png)
The last way that Room 713 differentiates itself significantly from several other anomaly games is that there is an attempt at telling a story here, which I did not discover until ~13 minutes into my sixth playthrough. Prior to this, I thought that there was some kind of overarching story, but I wasn't picking up on it, and then the table appeared, coupled with the bloody bathtub anomaly from the previous floor, and everything clicked. The knife in the bathroom, the body on the floor of the kitchen, the bloody footprints, the numerous radio stories about a murder, and the introductory text that "A man full of guilt arrives at a lonely hotel." But what to do with these revelations? The two times I reached room 713, they both resulted in your playable character committing suicide, going back to the starting menu with the following message: "You learned nothing. The cycle continues." There are three possible endings in the game: A, B, and C, and according to the Steam Achievements page, while over 50% of players have reached room 713 and gotten the bad ending (Ending A), only 7.8% and 2.4% have reached Ending B & C, respectively. Even the trailer hints that there is a lot of story to uncover, with the presence of the briefcase and the code-locked door in the lobby all but claim this to be the case, but how that story is discovered, remains to be discovered. U
.png)
Unless you're required to play through the three additional modes the game offers, then there might be a way to see the whole story. Maybe. There's a speed running mode, which only adds a timer to the top of the screen, but the gameplay is identical to the standard mode. There's an Extreme mode that requires you to go up 21 stories (compared to only seven) to acquire a warm slice of pizza, but there might be other things to find along the way. Lastly, there's a custom mode where you can set which of the anomalies you've already experienced to be the pool of anomalies the game pulls from as you play through an otherwise regular run. So maybe you have to experience all of the anomalies (6.6% achievement rating on Steam) to have the chance to experience and unlock the full story? If you've watched any of my playthrough videos, you'll also know that I looked in a lot of drawers, dressers, wardrobes, looking for anything, even when the game tells you that anomalies aren't hidden behind drawers.
So that was Room 713. A fun 'spot the anomaly' game that feels like it's only pulling from The Shining as an homage, rather than a gimmicky crutch, and is different enough from other games of this similar genre and just enough content to stand on its own.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
How I Yearn For My Return
* Yes, I know the carpet is different from the one that was used in the movie. Maybe it was too on the nose, or maybe GoragarX changed it to avoid potential copyright infringement? The color is similar, and I understand the sentiment, so I wasn't offended at the change, and it does not make the game unplayable. I mean, it's called "The Grand Hotel," not "The Overlook Hotel."
No comments:
Post a Comment