I've got a fever, and the only cure is more escape games! Luckily prolific developer Hottategoya is back for more with Escape from the Similar Rooms 2. As before, you've got three seemingly identical rooms, each with their own puzzle to solve before you eventually escape, and with no inventory, success largely comes down to examining everything around you while going "Hmmmmm" in a very wise, scholarly fashion. It's not a particularly long game, or a challenging one, where simple logic and observation rule the day, and so for many of you this is going to be over almost before it starts. Hopefully somewhere down the road we'll meet up with a real Hottategoya behemoth of a game that will give us a real meaty challenge, but in the meantime, these little bites pf gameplay will do just fine... even if you probably would need a whole handful of them to satisfy.
Are others around? I'm a bit stuck on the first door-
I've tried
Using heights of the shelves, and the size of the cups on each shelf, along with the third painting
but nothing is working.
Nevermind- POP! Working on a walkthrough.
@VoxPopuli42
For the first room.
It's not the height of the shelves that you need. Try turning your head.
WALKTHROUGH (with colorblind hints)
Room 1
First view: a door. Needs a combination of colors.
Go left to see some nice tables. Nothing to note yet.
Left once more: Paintings. That green painting (on the right) looks useful.
Left again: shelves, with different types of glasses on it. Note which size glass is on which color shelf
(hint for colorblind)
top shelf mugs - green, middle shelf wine glasses - blue, bottom shelf cups - red
FIRST DOOR CODE.
Combine the size of glasses and their colored shelves with the green painting clue
smallest is Green, medium is Blue, biggest is Red.
Combination is Green, Red, Green, Red, Blue, Red
(for colorblind: Middle, Left, Middle, Left, Right, Left
Room 2
First view: a door. Needs sizes of circles. Note the arrow
Go left to see some familiar (and still useless) tables
Left again: Pretty pictures, and the door we came through. Nothing to note
Left once more: shelves. Look closer at the bottom shelf. Note the order.
SECOND DOOR CODE
Remembering the left-pointing arrow, and using the glass sizes of the cups on the bottom shelf, we get
Small, Large, Large, Medium, Small, Medium
Room 3
First view: Door. Lock has 4 different shapes
Left once: Oh, these old tables. But wait! Is that a clue? This piece of paper has a mini-map of the room we're in- note the arrow.
Left again: paintings. The arrow from the drawing should correlate to this view. Look up- see those interesting lights?
Left again: Shelves. They don't seem to hold any secrets.
THIRD DOOR CODE
Using the hint from the note, and the lights, the combination is
CIRCLE, SQUARE, TRIANGLE, HEXAGON
And, we're out! Ahh, that was refreshing.
Blink and you'll miss it indeed. That was short!
Hey... what a braincracker...
Paris : cloudy and warmer
I'm with you - when I see a new Hottategoya game I drool a little tiny bit. It's so tantalizing and appealing, like the bread smell from the bakery in my neighborhood. I love the look and feel and sounds in these games - if only there were some longer ones. (Nobody's ever found that bakery, by the way.)
FYI, there's an extraneous "/" at the end of the URL on the first link to the game at Hottategoya's site, making it yield a 404 page. The big-green-button link works fine.
Now that I've had a chance to play, I think I found a minor error in the walkthrough:
In the first room, the key clue isn't
"which size glass is on which color shelf"
as stated, but rather
the sizes of the three shelves themselves.
This is actually more easily discerned by
looking at the zoomed-out view of the wall than by zooming in to see what exactly is on the shelves,
due to a trick of perspective.
The color-blind-help does give the correct solution, albeit without giving players with red-green colorblindness a chance to solve room 1 on their own.
(Another minor nitpick: the pictures seem to me to be photographs
and a diagram in one case
rather than "paintings" as described in the walkthrough. That distinction might potentially confuse someone trying to use the walkthrough.)
It's a shame that designers are still using color schemes that render their games unplayable for people with the most common form of colorblindness. I'm not color-blind myself, but like many people I have both friends and family members who are red-green or blue-yellow color-blind.
That issue aside, though, for those of us with normal color vision, Escape from the Similar Rooms 2 -- like the first game in its series -- is a perfectly coffee-break-sized morsel of room-escape fun. Thanks for reviewing it, Dora!
Update