End Of Room

Arcade platformers are designed to put your precision and patience to the test, given the fact that most of them are fairly challenging. In essence, they are all about jumping and running from one end of the level to the other, while trying not to die or get hurt along the way. Sometimes, enemies are added as well, making the whole thing that much more difficult.

End Of Room is about as basic as it gets in the genre, since your only goal is to jump and avoid the nasty obstacles in your way. The obstacles are actually pits and spikes, which are fairly simple to avoid if you time your jumps correctly. Naturally, the game can get pretty boring and repetitive after a while, but it can be a decent first contact with the genre for beginners.

The mechanics are very simple as well, given the fact that you can only walk and jump. The physics are also imprecise and rather laggy, making it difficult to predict sometimes. Thankfully, the levels are never very complex, even if the jumps you have to make require a bit of coordination sometimes. Thus, it should be fairly easy to overlook the annoying physics.

Your character appears to slide around the level instead of walk, which makes it a bit difficult to control sometimes. It doesn’t help that the controls are not very accurate either, nor that they have a bit of delay as well. All of these problems can force you to quit early, but you can persevere in spite of them, at least if you do not have high expectations of the game.

The black and white graphics are about as simple as they can get, and so is the level design. In fact, there’s nothing but lines and spikes, since you are not even provided with some kind of background artwork or anything of the sort. Lastly, there’s music to keep you company throughout the levels, but it obviously gets repetitive after a few minutes.

In the end, End Of Room has nothing to show to experienced platformer fans, since there are Atari and NES games more complex than this. However, it may be good enough to serve as a learning experience for new players.