Anyone playing this? It’s a fairly new game that’s gotten a lot of good reviews, and I highly recommend it. It’s apparently a “puzzle roguelite”, a term I just learned.
The basic idea is that you are a young boy exploring a magical mansion which you will inherit if you can find the secret room hidden within (well, a specific one of the many secret rooms!). Every time you open a door, you get a choice of three rooms to appear on the other side. There are various resources that you use to help you on your way, so on the simplest level it’s a strategy game where you have to balance the need for drafting rooms which will likely have resources against the need for rooms which have exit doors, ideally pointing the way you want to go, and any given runthrough is heavily influenced by luck. Once you run out of space and/or energy, you have to start over from scratch the next day…but you can occasionally do and find things that will give you permanent advantages on all subsequent runthroughs, and the game very gradually gets easier on that level.
The whole game is about word, math and logic puzzles; layers and layers of puzzles, small puzzles forming parts of larger puzzles. Besides the straightforward goal of finding the secret room, you’re learning about the history of your family (including the mysterious disappearance of your mother many years ago) and the fictional world in which the game is set…and about other, even less accessible secret areas you can continue hunting for.
I finally found “Room 46” on my 144th run, which is longer than it took most people on the Steam forums (my runs averaged about 45 minutes, but with a lot of variance depending on luck of the draw).