Sometimes you need to play horror games like Oxide: Room 104 for perspective. A certifiably rough and ready release from WildSphere, Oxide: Room 104 clearly doesn’t quite have the manpower or budget to compete with some of horror’s biggest hitters, but there’s undeniable charm and inventiveness here that makes it more than worth than a look. That’s not just because you can watch on as the main character explicitly uses the toilet, either, dong and all.
You play as Matt, who may well be related to Jackie from The Darkness, after he wakes up in a strange motel bathroom and keeps flitting between being tortured in a bathtub and able to move around and try to escape the motel. Oxide: Room 104 feels very much like your modern indie horror game from the word go, with you tasked with hunting down seemingly all sorts of keys and MacGuffins to escape. You could be forgiven for thinking that Room 104 makes its bed very early, though it’s not long before the game’s unique twist comes in to play.
After getting bitten by a centipede (don’t ask), I couldn’t find an antidote and ended up dying on a kitchen floor. However, rather than simply returning to a checkpoint, I was instead transported to a different, grimmer bathtub for some condescending words from the big bad before he started lopping off one of my legs in grisly fashion. When I came to again in the same, less grim bathtub that I started off in, the bathroom had changed — and not for the better.
Oxide’s main gambit to separate itself from so many of its peers is in the fact that the world around you changes each time you die. It might be something small, like the key you need being in a different place, or it could something pretty game-changing, like a weird demon arm coming out of a wall. Each time you return to the tub, the world around you gets more and more twisted, so much so that it’s almost worth dying just to see what shifts. Oxide: Room 104 is one of a few games I can think of where dying isn’t a major frustration, though the repetition may wear on you if you’re attempting multiple endings.
What may also wear on you is just how crude Oxide: Room 104 can feel in places, especially when it comes to the voice performances. It does honestly seem as if the developer plugged in their Blue Yeti and gave it their best shot, but the voiceover work is unfortunately just so drastically bad that it’s distracting. Matt sounds like a lad who’s wandered out of the pub at 1 in the morning and been told to read off a piece of paper. Then there’s the very basic animations, ropey combat, and severe lack of options when playing on PS5. Add the fact that you can suffer some extremely random deaths and have to do things in a very specific order, and Oxide: Room 104 can sometimes feel like a bit of a slog.
However, despite the drawbacks that are more to do with budget than anything, Oxide: Room 104 is an easy recommendation with some caveats for any horror fans, who really shouldn’t be approaching this with any comparisons to its much bigger peers in mind. Any game that tries its best to be different is to be celebrated, and Oxide: Room 104 is worth making a reservation for, even if only for one night.
A PS5 key was provided by PR for the purposes of this coverage.
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