Oxide Room 104 is an indie first-person escape room themed horror game with Survival Horror elements. Developed by WildSphere (a pair of Spanish indie programmers with some assistance from additional asset creators), it was released on Jun 16, 2022 for the PC, Xbox One/Xbox X, and Playstation 4/5.
Players take the role of Matt, a shady NFT computer tech who has been called to the Night Soul Motel by his partner, Josh, to dispose of evidence after a job goes bad. However, upon entering the motel Matt is knocked unconscious by the motel's caretaker, the Doctor, and some time later awakens naked in a bathtub in the bathroom of Room 104. Now, Matt must find a way to escape the vacant, run-down motel while dealing with puzzle/deathtrap rooms and bizarre monsters. Every time Matt dies, he experiences being mutilated by the Doctor in an unknown location before waking back up again in the bathtub of Room 104 (which gets progressively bloodier the more he dies), losing all his items and having the puzzles and enemy locations change with each death.
No relation to the HBO anthology series Room 104.
Oxide Room 104 contains examples of:
- An Arm and a Leg: The main source of the game's Body Horror is the Doctor will saw off your leg and later your arm in the real world if you die in the simulation.
- Belly Mouth: The game's main enemy type is an armless torso whose entire upper half is split in half and turned into a giant gapping mouth.
- Bio-Augmentation: The Doctor's notes indicate he's replaced 30% of his body with bio-augmented body parts, which may account for why he's a credible physical threat, and bio-augmentation technology is also how he created Oxide.
- Branch-and-Bottleneck Plot Structure: The game has multiple paths that you can take to reach your goal. There are 3 different paths that will get you onto the 3rd floor, and on the 3rd floor you have 2 different rooms you can solve to get inside the motel and reach the endgame. Several of the puzzles have multiple solutions as well.
- Bullet Sparks: One room is filled with flammable gas. Firing your gun inside this room causes an explosion that kills you instantly. This forces you to sneak around the enemy in the room instead of killing it.
- Cutscene Boss: The two times in the game you get chased by Evil (once at the beginning and once at the end) are cutscenes with quicktime events.
- Cutting the Knot: Played with. Several puzzles can be solved by doing this, but the game usually punishes you for using brute force rather than your wits.
- Enemy Without: Evil, the Body of Bodies manniquin monster haunting the motel and controlling the other creatures, is indicated to be an externalization of Eva's pain and rage created by the torture of being used as Oxide's central processor.
- Evil Old Folks: The Doctor is apparently in his 60s or 70s at minimum and definitely looks it, though he's apparently still quite a physical threat due to augmenting his body with modified organs.
- Faking the Dead: Eva ultimately helps you escape Oxide by booting you out in a way that makes it seem to the Doctor that your heart has stopped, causing him to leave the room to look for a body bag. You then recover and escape while he's gone.
- Hell Hotel: The Night Soul Motel appears abandoned, and the rooms are filled with Saw-style puzzles and deathtraps, not to mention infested with bizarre supernatural monsters.
- Inventory Management Puzzle: You can only carry 6 items (9 after finding a backpack), and those inventory slots will quickly fill up with your revolver, your flashlight, bullets, bandages, keys, and puzzle items. There will likely be times you'll have to free up space by leaving your bandages and/or antidote in the storage box, but if you do you'll be dead if you get injured or poisoned.
- Mad Doctor: The Big Bad of the game is the Doctor, who's conducting gruesome experiments on you and others inside the motel.
- Mental Story: Most of the game is revealed to have taken place inside Oxide, a simulated reality of the motel created by the Doctor using Eva's brain as a central processor, which explains the creatures and crazy elaborate deathtraps. The scenes of the Doctor mutilating you whenever you die are brief glimpses of the real world that occur when you wake from Oxide after dying there.
- Most Writers Are Writers: This video game made by 2 programmers has a programmer as the protagonist.
- Multiple Endings: The game has 4 different endings depending on how many times you die. The only "good" ending comes from making it through the game without dying (to prevent Save Scumming, the game autosaves your every action).
- Never My Fault: Matt refuses to take moral responsibility for his shady job, which includes peddling NFTs and also acquiring and transporting girls for his partner Josh to film porn films with at the motel, reasoning that as far as he knows the girls are consenting to it (not that he ever bothered to check). In a later note Matt even admits that yeah, the girls were probably being trafficked, but he still refuses to take any responsibility for it.
- Non-Standard Game Over: Dying more than 3 times causes the Doctor to get bored with you and set you on fire alive.
- 1-Up: You can find a photo of the mysterious girl Eva with a +1 heart written on the back. Carrying it will protect you from 1 death without resetting the loop or affecting the ending.
- Optional Stealth: The monsters are blind, so you don't need to kill them and can just sneak around them. However, this means solving assorted escape room puzzles while in a cramp room with a roaming monster, so it's not ideal.
- Pacifist Run: There's an achievement for managing to get through the game without firing the revolver, which requires you to stealth around the enemies.
- Resources Management Gameplay: There's a limited number of bullets, bandages, and antidote around the motel. You need bullets to kill enemies, bandages to stop you from bleeding out if you take damage, and antidote to save yourself if you get poisoned. That said, the game doesn't have a big action climax or anything like that, so you don't need to save up a big stockpile of resources.
- Revenge: You can hack off the Doctor's hand with an axe while making your escape in the good ending, just like the Doctor hacked off your own limbs in the bad endings.
- Revolvers Are Just Better: You find a magnum revolver fairly early on, and it serves as your only weapon in the game. It usually requires a full 5 or 6 shots to kill an enemy.
- Save Scumming: The game prevents this from autosaving your every action and preventing you from deleting a save file until you either complete the game or run out of lives.
- Shout-Out: The bathroom of the biohazard motel room has the Umbrella Corporation logo on the back of the door.
- Unique Enemy: Besides the Belly Mouth creature, the only other non-cutscene enemy in the game is a single two-headed creature merged into a wall that spits acid and only appears once in the final area. You don't even really need to fight it and can just go around it.
- Vague Hit Points: Instead of a standard health meter, taking damage instead causes you to start bleeding out. If you don't treat your bleeding with a bandage, you'll die of blood loss after several seconds.
- You Have Failed Me:
- The Doctor will cut off one of your limbs every time you die in order to "change up the variables", then force you to run through the game again. You still have all your limbs in the game, but once you wake back up in the real world at the end of the game, missing just one limb will prevent you from successfully escaping.
- The whole reason Matt is being tortured by the Doctor turns out to be because one of the girls he and Josh brought him turned out to be an undercover cop, and now the Doctor is using Oxide to scan Matt's mind to figure out what else he knows.
- Your Mind Makes It Real: Averted. Dying inside Oxide just boots your mind out and causes you to wake up, but the Doctor punishes you for each death by hacking off a limb and forcing you to start again.
