Room5

About the game

You wake up in what looks like a hotel room. You don't know who you are or why you are there, and the only guide is an anonymous voice on the telephone asking you to reach room number 5. Every door you open leads to a new challenge: a room that fits on one screen, with no scrolling and no hiding places, but plenty of secrets.

You move your wheelchair left and right and interact with whatever is in front of you. Rooms are full of small mechanisms to figure out: locked doors and the keys that open them, lifts, switches, telephones that ring with a message, and objects to pick up and use later from the inventory at the bottom of the screen. Some rooms are about order and timing, others about noticing what changes when you press something.

Between rooms, the voice asks you questions, and the answers you choose shape which of the three endings you reach. Each room also shows an eight-character code at the bottom. Note it down: on the title screen, the computer lets you type a code to come back to that room later, with your story choices and your time kept.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game for the MSX, the 1980s home computer standard that was especially popular in Japan, Europe and Brazil (where it sold as the Gradiente Expert and the Sharp Hotbit). It is a new game, made for MSX1 machines by a team from the French association MO5.COM, which preserves the history of computing; it was developed live on stream and entered in the MSXdev'24 competition. It runs here in the blueMSX emulator with C-BIOS, a free replacement for the MSX system software.

Click Play and choose a language with the arrows and Space (English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Tagalog or Japanese). On the title screen, roll right to the door and press Space to begin. F2 saves the full state of the emulator in this browser and F4 brings it back. A gamepad acts as the MSX joystick: the bottom button interacts, and holding the right button restarts the room.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Face what you want to use. Space acts on the thing right in front of the wheelchair, so turn towards a door or a switch before pressing it.

Stuck? Start over. Holding Esc puts the room back the way it was, which is often the fastest way out of a dead end.

Write down the codes. The code shown in each room is your save. Enter it on the computer at the start to continue where you stopped.

Credits and licence

Room5 was designed and drawn by Benoist "Kazerlelutin" Bouteiller and programmed by Guillaume "Aoineko" Blanchard, Sylvain "Mokona" Glaize and Kazerlelutin, with sound effects by Aoineko and music by Thomas "Totta" Lundgren, and translated by a group of volunteers; it was produced by the Association MO5.COM, which publishes it under the MIT licence. It is built with MSXgl, Aoineko's library for MSX development, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence, so the game as a whole is also offered here under CC BY-SA 4.0. The licence texts are linked from this page.