Cramped Room of Death mini-review

Making it through life with an oversized polearm. 

Following a night of voracious eating and drinking, armor-clad Lance fell into a deep sleep. While slumbering, a duplicitous army of skeletons stole his treasure and made off with most of his weapons. The sole remaining offensive device was a long spear, that was too cumbersome for the bony baddies to remove from a labyrinthine dungeon filled with narrow passageways.

Cramped Room of Death put players in control of Lance and that maddening elongated polearm on a quest for revenge through 170 rooms spread out across five distinct milieus.  By carefully moving across grid-based environments and rotating his mighty spear in the four cardinal directions, the pony-tailed hero can eliminate each of the game’s varied threats, before leaving through each room’s exit door.

In execution, Cramped Room of Death feels like a distant descendant of Sokoban, Hiroyuki Imabayashi’s seminal puzzler. Each turn you can elect to move onto adjacent squares. Often, this can get a bit tricky, since Lance and his spear takes up two grid spaces. As such, you’ll be constantly rotating his pike. But to do this, walls or enemies can’t obstruct the movement of your weapon. Early on, you’ll learn to master counterintuitive approaches like backing Lance into a room, before finding an area wide enough to turn his polearm toward an unfortunate foe.

Like most puzzle games, Room of Death provides a few succinct lessons to explain the fundamentals of movement. But the stages themselves are the true tutorial, with each level conveying some kind of new technique or enemy type. Early on, you’ll be confronted by two weapon-wielding guards, standing in front of a ditch. By going to the edge of the trench and pressing toward the enemies, you’ll be able to eliminate them from across the gap. Later, you’ll learn how to traverse across crumbling platforms, sidestep foes capable of performing ranged attacks, and deal with sliding around the environment. Expectedly, when Room of Death mixes these tricks with different types of oh-so-strategically placed opponents, navigating through a stage can be tricky.

When inevitability arises, and you’re stuck in a particular room, you can use coins earned from killing enemies to purchase keys. When used, the keys allow Lance to potentially sneak past foes. But this assist isn’t a panacea. Even if you have enough coins to purchase multiple keys, some of Cramped Room of Death’s tougher rooms could cause an impasse. Although there’s always a solution, some of the game’s thornier chambers are brain strainers. Even if you rely on heuristics to get by, figuring out that first kill on a stage can be difficult.

Cramped’s introductory stills are well-done, rivaling the artistry of any mid-range visual novel. When it comes to aesthetics, the game opts for a charismatic pixel art approach. Room of Death’s sprite-based characters and environments resemble a Game Boy Advance title. Had this game been released during the lifespan of Nintendo’s portable, it would have probably been considered a commendable puzzler. Escaping from each cramped room is certainly a cerebral workout, but it’s an expedition that’s probably enjoyed in smaller doses.

Cramped Room of Death was played on PC
with review code provided by the publisher.