The Haunted Hoard: Oxide Room 104 (PS5)
Oxide Room 104 is a horror game that gets more dangerous and difficult each time you die. The motel the game takes place in grows more hostile, more decrepit, and more unnerving as each death leads to more monsters to worry about as the way you navigate it keeps changing to keep you on your toes. All of this sounds interesting in theory, almost making it sound like a rogue-like game especially since you reawaken at its starting room after each death, but this first-person adventure also runs into a bit of a conceptual issue. If the game starts at its easiest and least fascinating, you may very well end up beating it before you see the game’s defining element.
When the game begins, you find yourself as Matt as he rushes to a motel he knows all too well. While we are initially in the dark on his connection to it, once he’s been knocked out and awakens in room 104, we start to piece together why he felt he had to return to it even when he was warned how dangerous it could be. While Matt starts off naked and disoriented, as he starts finding keys for other rooms, he can find notes left by a woman named Eva who also knows the motel well, but more interestingly, he also finds notes left by himself that lay out the growing understanding of how he relates to the horrors he’s now wrapped up in. The notes dole out details about the central mysteries well, building up tension even if you don’t find them all or end up taking different paths through the motel’s rooms, and even when you’ve started to get some of the larger important details, there are still elements left to uncover if you keep poking around for more documents. The notes left by those only referred to as Evils can be a bit too over the top or on the nose at times, but they do also have an important connection to the truth of the mysterious idea of Oxide.
Unfortunately, Oxide Room 104 elected to have voice acting, and not particularly good performances at that. Matt’s voice actor can’t really sell any sort of surprise or fear, his comments often undermining things when it might have been better to have him completely silent. The game’s main antagonist is unfortunately harmed even more by a bad vocal performance, because while the twisted doctor has some notes to find, most of how you’ll get to know him involves what happens after you die. A death in Oxide Room 104 has you waking chained in a bathtub where the doctor has you at his mercy, taking some time to monologue and menace you. If you get to know him through his notes he could have seemed delusional in a believable manner, but the acting during his scenes gives him moments that are meant to feel unhinged but fail to gel with his general behavior. He’ll be making silly jokes that are meant to show he is deranged, but he can’t muster up a believable tone for it in the same way his darker dialogue can’t sound too intimidating. The substance of the doctor’s character is also one of the first things clearly impacted by the short-sighted approach to death. If you beat the game without dying, the best ending will provide the documents that flesh him out into a character that could have been interesting, but if you die even once, you will be locked out of finding those notes. Each death locks you into worse endings with four deaths in total being a full game over, and if you want to try again with the clean slate you do need to go through each loss. Generally the game is pretty short since the motel isn’t too large with deaths and the changes to its layout being what might take it beyond being about a 1 or 2 hour experience, but the nature of its endings just makes you want to engage with its death mechanics even less.
As for what you’re doing in the motel, Oxide Room 104 equates its gameplay to a series of escape rooms and that feels a bit more accurate than calling it a puzzler. Before you factor in any destruction, supernatural elements, or warped human monstrosities, the motel rooms are fairly closely modeled to how one might look in reality. Most every room has a kitchenette, bathroom, and beds, although the state they’re in will change based on what might lurk within or how many times you’ve died previously. Some rooms do stand out a touch more, one having a bit of a casino theming while another has an electric chair installed with explosive gas tanks littered about. Even in your first run you can still encounter an eerie or disturbing room like one with a crib with some crying lump of flesh squirming in it, but your major concern will likely be the headless terrors whose torso splits open sideways to reveal a toothy maw. You can sneak around these, the more effective escape rooms being ones where you have to tiptoe around the creatures to search the area for useful keys or whatever item is necessary for the room’s small “puzzle”. Puzzles are often of the stripe where you need a code or specific arrangement of objects so you look around until you find the straightforward clue, and due to the room’s size and lack of extraneous objects, it’s pretty clear how things will connect much of the time. Dying will shift objects around and sometimes alter how a puzzle can be solved, but not by changing the degree of thought necessary to solve it. Rooms without a monster in them end up a bit plain as a result, although there are also special rooms like one where you need to find a gas mask elsewhere that at least broaden the work it takes to follow certain paths through the story.
However, Oxide Room 104 runs into a pretty clear issue on your first run through. While some random elements alter rooms primarily by shifting where objects are found or where useful pick-ups like bandages or antidotes are found, there is a way to clear the game in the first run without encountering much risk. If you happen upon the path that takes you to the low stakes rooms where you mostly just sneak around the toothy monsters, you won’t be at too much risk of death. One touch that tries to make it likely you will die is any damage you take can be deadly, a single injury causing you to bleed out or suffer poison no matter how small it was. This is why you need the medical pick-ups with you, but since stealth is easiest on this first attempt, you can probably find enough to survive and also make use of a pistol you easily find should you need to stand and fight. There are rooms with some cruel ambushes that almost force a fight, the moment you take a required action within triggering a monster’s appearance from thin air as it moves to attack you. These almost feel like they were put in to try and force a death, but after each time you die, the game gets better at making some more interesting dangers to overcome while also removing the cushion of abundant healing and pistol ammo. The toothy maws start patrolling the areas between rooms, making them harder to avoid. The walls get covered with new dangers like poison spewing conjoined mutants or hands that reach out periodically so you have to time when you move to avoid them. Even plant-like flesh creatures block specific paths unless you’re willing to shoot them, but noise can alert other monsters, the risks much more interesting when it’s in your hands how to handle them rather than just taking a required action to escape a room and suddenly an almost unavoidable encounter begins.
Beyond watching the metal rust, the walls get covered with odd and ethereal sights, and the increasing number of outright dangers, the changes after a death can also shift up how your route through the motel unfolds by changing how certain paths can be taken. Much of the time, entering a motel room and clearing its simple puzzle will give you a key for another room or rarely two others, the player given a clear guiding line that actually can lead to that first run feeling too easy should you pick the right key when you’re given options. However, if you poke around a bit more, you can find keys in other areas like the pool or even buried in a garden area, sending you down different paths even though these can be riskier to follow. These are the options that tend to shift most between deaths, the extra keys or the means to find them altered in the same way the game eventually starts giving you the gun at the start to speed up your work. Curiosity isn’t really rewarded though since taking the same obvious path is not only wisest but helps you work towards eventually mastering it to get an ending, no matter how bad it might be. Once again, it feels like Oxide Room 104 doesn’t want you to engage with its defining mechanic as alternate routes seem to make you less likely to succeed, the only reward for making it harder for yourself being rooms that might contain interesting sights or notes that flesh out the wasted story a bit more.
THE VERDICT: Oxide Room 104 has a promising horror premise both in its story and how the gameplay can change after a death, but the game struggles to accommodate them. The bad voice acting undermines the tale told through the documents you find, but if you wish to engage with the motel’s gradually more horrific state, you have to die and inherently get a worse experience the more you do. Not only do you get a weaker story for it, but the most interesting rooms and dangers are down the more perilous paths that you’ll avoid when possible or get ambushed by in ways that feel like an unfair shove into failure. With most of the escape room style puzzles not being much beyond finding the right code or object by poking around, Oxide Room 104 couldn’t afford to fumble the horror in the way it ended up doing.
And so, I give Oxide Room 104 for PlayStation 5…
A BAD rating. Oxide Room 104 can feel like it takes a range of good ideas and spreads them across the different runs only possible after each death. Seeing parts of the motel shift around or get gradually corrupted is a nice touch since you do get a bit familiar with them poking around for notes and the room’s puzzle items. The rooms having designs that hew close to reality also make breaking it up with unexpected changes more effective, and the added monsters start to give the game a greater sense of danger than the easily avoided tooth mutants of the first run. At the same time, the game is getting worse the more you die. Each death wipes your items away and sets you back to square one, only the documents you find retained, but now there are more monsters that are difficult to avoid with each failure and you don’t have the tools to avoid them well. The optimal winning run is on that first attempt when the motel is at its simplest and the plot actually tries to have a proper resolution, and it even seems to be the most natural path and one of least resistance so you might bumble into it without seeing what else the game has in store. It’s not like you’re missing out on an exceptional experience if you do, the bad voice acting and straightforward escape rooms bound to hold it back regardless, but it feels like there could have been a better way to execute all of its ideas without making it a punishment to properly experience them. Oxide Room 104 could have had moments that force a change to the motel regardless of how well you’re doing for example, and with the deaths at present mostly being a chance for the doctor to make himself a worse antagonist, removing it wouldn’t feel like a big loss as long as you better sprinkled him in elsewhere.
If you do happen to be fortunate like me and get a winning run through Oxide Room 104 on your first attempt, the game will feel a bit slight but still have tense moments as you sneak around, encounter unknown dangers, and read the notes that build up to a finale well enough. If you do start dying though, you will like the game less and less, the player’s curiosity often punished with more dangerous areas that push you towards more repetition and less satisfaction. Some of its ideas could possibly work if applied carefully. A dangerous horror game that expects many deaths but doesn’t punish it too much could have its setting shift to become more unnerving or have monsters in new locations. These ideas simply do not gel well when you don’t carefully consider how they’ll interact, Oxide Room 104 not able to get the most out of any component part because they too often prevent other concepts from thriving.