The Room (2010 video game)

Gameplay

The Room is a role-playing/adventure game with a point-and-click interface. The player assumes the role of Johnny, a banker in San Francisco, as he goes about his daily life — showering, going to work and pleasing his future wife Lisa. The game is divided up into several levels, each of which takes the form of a new day. Each level begins with Johnny being required to bathe and ends with him going to bed; in between, Johnny is tasked with various missions, which usually involve him engaging in mundane activities such as meeting friends for coffee, buying new clothes and playing catch. When not on a mission, the player is given free roam over a small area of San Francisco, which includes a park, several stores and the homes of Johnny's friends Mark and Denny. There are several side quests that the player can engage in when not on missions, such as reading Denny's daily diary entries or finding ten hidden spoons, which unlocks an extended ending to the game.

Plot

For the most part, the game follows the plot of the movie: amiable banker Johnny helps out his friends with their day-to-day problems while preparing for his wedding to his future wife, Lisa. When he discovers that Lisa is cheating on him with his best friend Mark, Johnny is outraged and ultimately kills himself. The game diverges from the film by only showing the events from Johnny's point of view. The player controls Johnny as he engages in activities that were only referred to in the film, such as his taking on a mystery client at his bank and his turning over drug dealer Chris-R to the police. The game also contains several in-jokes that attempt to fill in plot holes in the film. For example, a scene in the game's final level attempts to explain the inexplicable disappearance of main character Peter from the movie's final act.

The game also contains a prologue, beginning with Lisa and Denny at Johnny's grave (a statue of Tommy Wiseau) and then segueing into a level that occurs a day before the main action of the movie begins, in which Johnny learns that an earthquake has sealed San Francisco off from the rest of the state.

The final level of the game permits players to "tie up" loose plot threads left hanging at the end of the movie, such as the fate of Chris-R and Johnny's contentious relationship with his superiors at the bank. The game also includes an epilogue revealing that Johnny was, in fact, an alien being inhabiting a human body; after Johnny's "suicide", he returns to his mothership, a giant mechanical spoon orbiting the Earth, and laments how he and his fellow extraterrestrials may never understand human life. Johnny and two of his fellow aliens then assume forms resembling a naked Tommy Wiseau and begin dancing, ending the game.

Should the player collect each of the hidden spoons throughout the game, rather than simply dance during the climax the aliens fire a ray gun at Earth that reshapes the planet into a giant spoon.

Reception

Entertainment Weekly called the flash game "as addictive as scotchka!". The game has also had positive reviews from press such as TIME, Wired, Destructoid, The Escapist, Bitmob, Infinite Lives, Westword, Game Culture, and Geeks of Doom.

In The Disaster Artist, Greg Sestero (Mark in the film) stated that during the filming of The Room, he came up with the idea of having Mark be an undercover narcotics cop, but the idea was rejected by Wiseau. Sestero "had a good laugh" when playing the game and seeing that its developers had given Mark a similar backstory.