I drank too much last night. I thought what time it was now. I felt thirst of the throat. The bed was different from usual. Is this a hotel? No, it does not seem to be a hotel. I am shut up. I have to escape.
Crimson Room is a short Flash Room Escape Game created by Toshimitsu Takagi in 2004. The story is simple as can be: you have woken up in a mysterious room, and need to figure out a way to open the door and escape. It is considered to be an early Trope Codifier of the Room Escape Game genre.
It received a number of sequels, including the Flash games Viridian Room (2004), Blue Chamber, White Chamber (all of which have been ported to the Nintendo DS and PSP), and the PC game Crimson Room "Decade" (2016).
A screenshotted playthrough with commentary can be found here
(part of a Let's Play for Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors).
Crimson Room features the following tropes:
- Chekhov's Gun: The CD case is the only item that ends up unused during your escape. It finally sees use in the Viridian Room sequel.
- Excuse Plot: You wake up after a night of drinking in a strange room. That's about the only "story" element in the game.
- Featureless Protagonist: The entire game is played in a first-person perspective, and nothing is known about the character you're playing as.
- Guide Dang It!:
- There is no indication that you need to click at a very specific spot just to get the camera to pan in a way that shows you an object of interest.
- Items are small and can be easily missed in this low-resolution game.
- Getting one of the rings involves repeatedly opening and closing the curtains. Again, there is no indication that clues the player towards this step.
- Paradiegetic Gameplay: At one point you find a note with an URL. When visited in your browser, the URL would lead to a page containing the words "Takagism since 1994", hinting at the combination ("1994") to a hidden safe. Today the webpage is long offline, so the game can't be finished without checking a walkthrough (unless you feel like checking all the 10,000 possible combinations).
- Pixel Hunt: Many items are very small. To quote the Let's Play linked above:Oh and there's like 7ish pixels of black on the windowsill. Apparently that represents a key. A silver key.
- The Place: The title, Crimson Room, describes the room you're trying to escape. The sequels similarly are titled after their respective colored rooms.
- Sequel Hook: Escaping the Crimson Room teases you with a view of the Viridian Room, the direct sequel.
- You Wake Up in a Room: The main premise: you've waken up alone in a strange room, without knowing how you got here.
