O Quarto

You wake up in the dark, and your first question is the one the character asks out loud: where am I, and how did I end up here? The second one is more practical. How do I get out?

Before you start: this game is in Brazilian Portuguese only, and the puzzles depend on reading it. If you do not read Portuguese, most of it will be closed to you, and I would rather say that here than have you find out while stuck.

The Room is a point and click escape game. You turn over one small bedroom looking for hidden stones, drawer keys, a torn sheet of paper full of little punched holes, and a safe that only opens in the right order. Somewhere in the middle you become an amateur chemist, counting drops of reagent on a bench to make acid and rust remover, because nothing in this room opens the easy way.

This is the 2006 original, whole, exactly as it was. The laptop in the room still runs Windows XP. The character still complains that he would rather be checking his Orkut, the social network Brazil lived on before the rest of the world moved to Facebook, or asking a friend for help on MSN Messenger. The game still invites you to sign up for an online leaderboard whose server has been gone for years. More than a hundred thousand people played this back in the days of Flash portals, and it has been sitting still ever since.

Nothing to install, no plugin, no Flash Player. It runs straight in the browser through Ruffle, a Flash emulator, so it plays on a machine from today the same way it played on a machine from back then.

Twenty years later, the room is being built again from scratch. If you want to see how it turned out: mepixa.com/o-quarto