Love Room 301

I'm try­ing a new cat­e­go­ry, "mi­ni re­view", when I just want to say a few words about a game, with­out spend­ing months writ­ing a prop­er, full re­view. Don't ex­pect me to fit with­in VNDB's 200 char­ac­ter lim­it for mi­ni re­views, though.

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To­day's game is "Love Room 301", made by the world-fa­mous (not) cir­cle called "Bronze 5 Box". The sto­ry goes some­what like this: you and your girl­friend sexfriend goes to a love ho­tel that was mak­ing news late­ly, you some­how man­age to lock your­self in­to the room (not out), and you have to get out. Ba­si­cal­ly a room es­cape game with R18+ con­tent. The sto­ry doesn't make any sense, the H scenes are meh in my opin­ion. You get Live2D lev­el an­i­ma­tions (even though I don't think this game us­es Live2D un­der­neath), no voice act­ing (not nec­es­sar­i­ly a bad thing), but as a bonus it has video-play­er like con­trols, so you can jump around in the scene. Con­tent wise, it's com­plete­ly het­ero vanil­la. You get some ex­hi­bi­tion­ism, a bor­der­line three­some, but that's about it, if you don't count that none of the char­ac­ters in the game have any morals, they'll fuck who­ev­er they see. No feel­ings ei­ther, just sex-crazed peo­ple. The on­ly thing I don't un­der­stand is what's up with those elec­tric sparks? Al­so, your girl­friend or what­ev­er starts every sen­tence with "やっば！", which be­comes fuck­ing an­noy­ing very fast.

But enough of this, let's go to the part where this game ac­tu­al­ly shines: the es­cape game. True, I didn't have any ex­pec­ta­tions when I start­ed the game, but play­ing the game I re­al­ized that the puz­zles are re­al. They'll make you think. They're not easy, but still solv­able, even if you're not used to those old point-and-click mind­fuck ad­ven­ture games. The game comes with a walk­through if you get stuck, but I strong­ly rec­om­mend not us­ing it. You'll spoil the on­ly good as­pect of the game. In­stead close the game and go for a walk, or go back to the game next day, or some­thing. For­tu­nate­ly most of the puz­zles are pure­ly log­i­cal, so even if you're shit in Nip it's most­ly man­age­able. I think you on­ly need to un­der­stand the text in 2 or 3 places (con­ver­sa­tion on the tablet, nin­ja minigame, and maybe the girl on the bal­cony).

Al­so, the game has 4 end­ings, but it's more like 2 end­ings + vari­a­tions. All things con­sid­ered, it's not a bad game to pass time.

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Technical shit#

A.k.a. the part where the "mi­ni" part of the "mi­ni re­view" falls apart. I've tried it on Lin­ux with wine, as usu­al. On my desk­top with an AMD card, it im­me­di­ate­ly crashed with a BadWindow in X_ConfigureWindow, but worked with proton-wine. In­ter­est­ing­ly, on my note­book with In­tel crap, it works with plain wine too. Any­way, it was work­ing with pro­ton's wine, so I stopped car­ing about this is­sue, be­cause I had the next prob­lem lined up: no fonts. Tried to in­stall every Japan­ese font from winetricks, but still noth­ing. WINEDEBUG to the res­cue, and I found out it tries to load a font called ????. Yes, four ques­tion marks. Or maybe it's just wine's de­bug out­put is borked, but adding ???? to the font re­place­ment list worked:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Fonts\Replacements]
"????"="M+ 2p"

Re­place M+ 2p with your fa­vorite font, and make sure to save the reg file with DOS line end­ings.

Start­ing the game opens a 960x540 win­dow. What weird res­o­lu­tion is that? Well, 1920x1080 with width and height halved. There is some scal­ing op­tion in the game, but no 2x, on­ly some ex­treme­ly blur­ry frac­tion­al scal­ing. I've tried my Xe­phyr patch, but it was even worse (first, you need to set Xe­phyr's res­o­lu­tion to slight­ly larg­er than 960x540, be­cause if it's ex­act­ly 960x540, it won't al­low to se­lect 1:1 size (?!!), near­est scal­ing didn't work so good, and it us­es HW ac­cel­er­a­tion which trans­lat­ed to very high CPU us­age with soft­ware ren­der­ing). In­stead I ac­ci­den­tal­ly re­al­ized that if you ac­tu­al­ly re­size the win­dow (ig­nor­ing the no re­size flag), the game will ac­tu­al­ly re­size the win­dow. So in­to awe­some hack­ing I went. First some rules:

{ rule = { class = "steam_proton", name = "Love Room 301" },
  properties = { floating = true, border_width = 0, size_hints_honor = false },
  callback = function(c) c:geometry{ width = 1920, height = 1080 } end,
},

But that wasn't enough, as the game likes to re­size it­self, so al­so over­ride the request::geometry event (this is not ex­act­ly the func­tion I was us­ing, my rc.lua has some ex­tra shit, but this should work):

local function client_geometry_requests(c, context, hints)
  if context == "ewmh" and hints then
    if c.name == "Love Room 301" then return end
    c:geometry(hints)
  end
end

if awful.ewmh.client_geometry_requests then
  client.disconnect_signal("request::geometry", awful.ewmh.client_geometry_requests)
end
client.connect_signal("request::geometry", client_geometry_requests)

And you have a nor­mal sized win­dow! I have no idea how to re­pro­duce it on Win­dows or with a worse WM. Al­so, it's a bit bug­gy, for ex­am­ple the game freezes if you try to re­turn to the ti­tle screen. Or just as you fi­nal­ly man­age to es­cape the room. The first is a bit an­noy­ing but can be lived with, the sec­ond... well, I had to dis­able this workaround and play the last part of the game in a tiny win­dow. (The screen­shots above were made with­out this hack.)