Oxide Room 104 puts you in the role of Matt, who returns to a motel after some sort of crime, only to get ambushed by a weirdo and wake up naked in a tub. The bathroom door is locked, his name scrawled on it.
So you have to find your clothes, and figure out how to unlock the door. Search the cabinet over the sink. Search the dresser. Search the toilet. Once you find your way out, you learn the door out of the room is locked. So are the windows (as far as I can tell, you don't need to bother with the windows. While the game will always let you check them, they never open.) The key is on a plate, a giant centipede coiled around it.
If you make it out of the room, you find yourself in the inner courtyard of the motel. And there's a strange woman whose face is shrouded by her ink-black hair! And she vanished, in her place some creature with a human's lower body, but the upper body is just a set of jaws.
At this point, what has been a sort of horror puzzle game, with you searching your (creepy) surroundings for items you need to escape the room, becomes a quick-time event, as you hit buttons when prompted to help Matt avoid other monsters. You make it to another room, and the item hunt/puzzle aspect resumes. That's what dominates the game. The quick-time stuff is sporadic, saved for when, I guess, the game designers decided they needed to shake you up a bit.
If you die, from blood loss or poisoning or stupidity - like firing a gun at a monster in a room filled with gas, whoops - you wake up shackled in a different tub, Orange Jumpsuit standing over you. He tells you what a useless idiot you are - in a profane and British voice that nonetheless has a breathy aspect that reminds me of the Abominable Snowman character from Looney Tunes - and cuts off one of your limbs with a saw. Then you wake up again in the tub where you started, all limbs present and accounted for, and start your attempt to escape from square 1.
You get up to 3 "deaths" before he decides you're not worth the hassle. Four if you find a picture of the girl, which somehow acts as an extra life. My impression is the subsequent attempts will take a different route, in terms of which rooms you visit and search. The puzzles may be simpler, but there are a lot more monsters, including roaming the courtyard. At least the game doesn't skimp on bullets for your handgun.
I don't entirely understand what's going on. Something about Orange Jumpsuit using Mysterious Girl's mind as sort of a computer in a bio-engineering experiment. A way to rifle through people's thoughts and memories? You find a lot of documents as you search the rooms, some signed as "Eva", some as "Evil", some as "Matt", and some as "Doc", which is Orange Jumpsuit. Those didn't really tell me much other than someone in here is suffering a break in their mind, darker impulses taking over. Whether Evil is Eva or Matt, I don't know. Maybe one, then the other? Some of Matt's writing you find later suggests his worst impulses are getting stronger, so maybe he's getting infected while he's here?
The game ends rather abruptly. You wake up in the tub where you usually lose limbs, but Doc's not there. You can see someone strapped in a chair under a tarp, but can't do anything to help. You stumble into the hall, and then Doc is chasing you as you try to reach an elevator. Apparently that turns out differently, depending on how many times you died, but none of the endings seem to tell you much. I gather there's a sequel, Oxide Room 208, which may be set concurrently with this game and tells another side of it, but I'm not buying it.
I got the "too many deaths" ending, and the "no deaths" ending. The latter at least gives you a fun option, once you make it to the elevator. Doc keeps futilely trying to reach through the gate, and the game lets you click a button like he's an object to interact with. Normally when you do that, the button options are things like "Examine", or "Inventory." This time, the only option was "Revenge." Well, you know I love me a good revenge opportunity, so at least the playthrough ended on a high note (even if there's a phone call between Doc and his benefactor afterwards where he states he doesn't think Matt will make it through the forest.)
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