I had played a few of the The Room games on iOS, but not all of them. They’re all very similar, but well-crafted puzzle games where you explore a location and uncover secrets by pushing, pulling, sliding and otherwise interacting in different ways with your environment. Old Sins has the character explore a dollhouse sitting in the attic of an old mansion in order to unlock nine seals in nine different rooms. I had a good time with it even if sometimes I just -had- to use hints in order to figure out what to do next. At least the game doesn’t sell these hints as in-app purchases and is otherwise very generous with letting you do what you want.
After a quick tutorial, you’re looking at this dollhouse full of hidden rooms and secret compartments that you need to solve. Things start pretty obvious and the first few rooms are self-contained, but the game becomes a bit more complicated when you need to find things in one room to solve a puzzle in another one. By figuring out layer upon layer of puzzles in each of them, with the help of your eyepiece that lets you see another dimension of puzzles, you uncover a strange artefact that breaks one seal on the dollhouse and will usually contain an item necessary to continue with the game, all in an atmosphere of eldritch horrors and strange science-meets-magic stuff.
I won’t go over all the puzzles because there are a ton of them and the fun of the game is figuring them out, but I have to say that I much more enjoy the ones that revolve around moving things around to unlock mechanisms rather than the “find which item to put where” ones. I gotta say that the ‘story’ wasn’t pushing me forward, but I really wanted to solve all the puzzles, which I did! I finished The Room: Old Sins and enjoyed my time with it. If you enjoyed any other The Room game on iOS (or like calm puzzlers), I really recommend this one. The hint system is generous enough if you get stuck - although I kinda wish it was available immediately instead of you having to wait a while - and the puzzles are elegant and flow real well. You feel pretty good for solving them!
