The Desolate Room

The Desolate Room is a game by Scott cawton that was released on August 27, 2007.

Gameplay
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On a remote desert island, a small robot named Coffee is slowing discovering the details about something strange that took place there more than a century ago. There are broken robots here and there, as well as a mysterious signal coming from under the ground. Coffee has befriended these old broken parts, and is determined to uncover the mystery of a strange virus that seems to have killed them those many years ago. After finding a working console station that can access and replay their memory chips, Coffee wonders if maybe it isn't too late to save them.

Controls: Arrow keys control movement for every navigation element in the game, including the avatar when you are in the console. These keys are also the only keys used for the different minigames you will play during battle.

Enter- Use this key to scroll text to the next page, or leave a menu screen.

Mouse Click- The mouse is used to do most functions during combat. The mouse button is also used to fire your weapon while in avatar form.

On the island: On the island, you will navigate "coffee" around the small island of debris and rocks. There are small quests to do to progress the story, as well as collect eggs in between console missions. Collecting eggs will give you battle advantages as well as bonus tokens for upgrading attacks. The more eggs you find, the higher your egg collecting skill. The higher your skill, the better types of eggs you can find. Charge eggs will give you a better charge advantage at the start of the next battle. Speed eggs will give you a better speed advantage at the start of the next fight. Bonus eggs will give you bonus tokens.

In the console: While in the console you will control a blue avatar and navigate him through a virtual maze to the next boss. There will be two types of enemies along the way. Green enemies can simply be detroyed by shooting them (hold mouse click). Touching these will take away one life bar, but nothing more. Lose all of your life, and you begin at the start of that console area. The other type of enemies are red enemies. Normal red enemies can also be killed by shooting them in the console, but if they touch you, you will be drawn into the virtual arena to fight a larger version. Large red enemies cannot be shot with your avatars weapon, they can only be killed by touching them, then defeating them in a virtual arena battle.

There are different types of power-ups that normal enemies can drop while in the console. Large red pellets give you an additional life container. Small red pellets fill a life container. Green and yellow pellets both give you a better advantage in your next virtual arena fight. Green pellets give your party an additional charge point at the start of battle. Yellow pellets give your party an additional speed advantage at the start of the battle. If you enter a battle with both your charge and speed bonus bars full, all four of your characters will get an immediate turn at full charge. You can also always logoff the console using F12 to find eggs that will give you speed and charge bonuses as well.

Killing enemies in the console also awards you small token bonuses. They aren't much, but they can add up!

In battle: When you are in battle, each of your four characters will have two meters. A charge meter, and a speed meter. When a characters speed meters is full, it is their turn in battle. The rate at which the speed meter fills can be changed during battle. The charge meter determines which attacks will be available to you when it is a characters turn. The charge meter goes up to ten, one charge point for each attack. Each character has ten unique attacks available. If a character has all ten charge points, all ten attacks will be available when it is that characters turn. Attacks farther down the list require more charge points to use. If you use the 3rd attack in the list, it will use 3 charge points from your meter. If you use the 10th attack, it will use 10 charge points. You may also use the "charge" button when it is a characters turn, this will give that character an additional 3-7 charge points for their next turn.

Enemies also have a speed bar and charge bar. There are also attacks that you can use to alter an enemies speed and charge.

After each battle, you will be awarded tokens. You will get token bonuses for the difficulty of the enemy, the variety of attacks you used (skill), and for combos you performed. A combo counts as any extra hits scored in one attack turn. You can use all of these tokens to upgrade any attack you like. In this game, you cannot level up your characters, only their attacks. However, the more attacks you level up for a specific character, the higher their hp will be. So every time a character has one of his attacks upgraded, they get a life upgrade as well.

Critical hits: Every once in a while, you or your enemy may score a critical strike. This counts as a combo, and also deal triple the damage of a normal attack. There are attack options to increase your critical chance, as well as lowering an enemies.

Strategy: As I mentioned before, you'll save tokens to upgrade the individual attacks that you feel are most effective. There's no telling what combinations people will come up with. As I was testing the game, there were certain attacks that I liked and upgraded. Then I let a friend play it, and he picked completely different attacks but his strategy was just as effective!

A note on upgrades: Upgrading some commands will increase their effectiveness, while upgrading others will increase their duration. The answer usually just makes sense. If the command doubles damage, then upgrading it will increase the duration of the effect, and not upgrade it to triple damage. If the effect it healing, then upgrading it will increase it's effectiveness. If you are upgrading an instant kill attack, it will increase it's probability. In the case of Doom Claw (a timed instant kill) upgrading will decrease the amount of seconds the timer begins with. Upgrading anything that is a timed effect usually simply increases it's duration. Upgrading an effect that last's for the entire battle (such as Static Touch, Scramble Hit, or Adv Targetting) will increase effectiveness.

SAVING: The game saves your progress automatically every time you leave one screen to go to another. For instance- everytime you enter or exit battle, or enter or exit the console, the game saves your progress. Your game will load by itself when you start the game again.