quarantine 'em

The Room is solidly worth the pound it's currently discounted to. I got a solid three hours of entertainment out of it. That's fine value for money

The Room doesn't overreach. Its controls are dismayingly tablet-centric, its graphics are clear, its puzzles untaxing, its soundtrack minimal. It executes exactly what it intended

The weakest part, I felt, with The Room was its plot and atmosphere. The plot was very thin, not very engrossing, and barely factored at all into the puzzles. It could have been entirely removed and very little would have been lost. I wasn't hugely drawn in

Cube Escape: Seasons (that link again: http://www.cubeescape.com/game/cube-escape-seasons.html …), by comparison, is FREE, and is NUTS, and has atmosphere dripping from the CEILING. (DON'T LOOK UP.)

Cube Escape: Seasons starts like a fairly typical locked-room point-and-click Flash game but turns extremely David Lynch. Not to mince words, it's a horror game. It's strange and effective and unpleasant

Its plot is calculatedly surreal. From any given viewpoint, all but one or two of the supplied pieces can be made to fit, and it's a different one or two each way. It's tense and it also has a very solid payoff

And its puzzles are equally surreal. A note on a board says "Can I eat Harvey's egg?" In another part of the room is a parrot. Elsewhere, a kitchen sink, stove and pan

So anyway: both of these games will stick in my mind because of the intense contrast between them. But if only one was going to stick, it would be the cheap, free, 2D, Flash-based one, for obvious reasons