I’ve noticed that Shockwave/Flash-based games seem to have gotten a lot better recently. Gone are the days where the only Shockwave games were shoot the drunken clown or click the dancing pony fucker. There are actually some pretty interesting games out there.

One of these games is Crimson Room. In the game, you had gotten shitfaced the night before, and you wake up hungover locked in an amazingly ugly Crimson Room. And there’s no bathroom either—the horror! Can you make it out alive?!?!

The game has kind of the Myst-style interface, and requires just a bit of thinking. I don’t want to give anything away though, so forgive me if I’m light on the details.

I have only two gripes about the game. One is that there are some parts that could make you think a little more; there are times it was more of a clickfest than anything else.

My other gripe was there was one part where I was completely stuck, and only after I decided to completely restart the game did it work (perhaps it was a bug)? It almost reminds me of the time I was trying to play the game 7th Guest on a PowerMac (as opposed to the older 68000 machines); there was a bug in the code that caused the game to crash on PowerMacs, and corrupt the preferences, making you start your game completely over. A pure exercise in frustration really. Crimson Room wasn’t quite as annoying, but that bug almost had me cracking open the Jack Daniels. Especially since I was trying to feed it the bomb before I had to write up this article.

One interesting thing about the game (and other games like Myst) is that there really is no "Game Over" until you complete it. In other words, you don’t really end up running out of oxygen or suffocating in your own waste. If you can’t make it out of the room, you’re still there, forever, destined to be in that little craphole. It really makes you want to finish the game.

So feel free to give Crimson Room a try. If you beat it, feel free to leave a comment with the time it took you to feed it the bomb. It took me about an hour, but it probably would have taken me less than 30 minutes if it weren’t for the aforementioned bug.