Room 404 — Complete Walkthrough & Full Puzzle Analysis

Spoiler warning: this guide covers every core plot beat and puzzle solution in Room 404. If you have not finished it once, the only section worth reading beforehand is "Controls & hints" — the rest will spoil the game.

Why you can trust this page: Room 404 is our own first-party game, so nothing here is second-hand. Every puzzle answer, ending trigger and clue number below was checked line by line against the live build at https://room404.gamestrategists.com/ on 2026-10-12, and every screenshot is real gameplay from that build — not marketing art. If an update makes any of this wrong, tell us on the contact page and we will fix it and date the change at the bottom of the article.

A note on language: the game ships a full English interface — click EN in the top bar once you are inside. The disclaimer screen you pass on the way in is still Chinese-only, which is a gap we have not closed yet; everything from the investigation screen onward is translated.

1. About the game

Room 404 is a first-person horror-mystery ARG played entirely in a browser, and it deliberately stays close to real life. You play Lin Xia, a tenant who has just moved into Room 404, Building 4 of Qingcheng Garden — not by luck, but because she had been tracking a lead on a missing-persons forum for three months. The rent is absurdly low (800 RMB a month against a 2,800 RMB market rate for the same layout), and the previous tenant, Zhang Wei, vanished. As the investigation deepens, a web of consciousness mirroring, Project Tide and corporate cover-up slowly surfaces.

Type and core mechanics

• Immersive web investigation: the game is built out of ten highly convincing "simulated websites" that recreate the experience of searching a real internet — a rental platform, a forum, a news archive, a government portal, a corporate intranet, a radio station, a dark-web archive. Each has its own UI, its own interaction logic and its own information hierarchy.
• Evidence-driven deduction: the core loop is search a keyword → record what you find → cross-reference → solve the puzzle. Three tools do the work together: the evidence board, the notes panel and the mailbox.
• Branching narrative and four endings: the final act presents a single four-way choice leading to four completely different endings — "Truth Revealed" (normal), "Between Tides" (hidden), "The 13th Tenant" (secret) and "The Tide Protocol" (true).

The six acts at a glance

One interface inconsistency to expect: the "chapter jump" control on the left lists 8 chapter buttons, but the evidence thresholds that drive progression only go as far as act 6 (clueCount >= 10 unlocks act 5, and so on). Nothing in the code ever advances progress to acts 7 or 8, so buttons 7 and 8 stay permanently disabled. They are written-but-unwired sequel chapters ("Echo Network" and "Beyond the Bridge") — not content you missed.

2. Controls & hints

The ten simulated websites

Those ten sites are the game's information pool. Each has its own search logic and its own unlock condition. The names below are the English labels shown in the sidebar:

1. Qingcheng Rental (start site): the lease, the listing details and the landlord's contact. The absurd rent and the special clause "do not enter the basement" are the first clues.
2. Zhang Wei's Blog: the key site. Personal diary, technical articles and a spectrum analysis report. The diary records everything strange that happened to him in Room 404 — the humming, the mirror lag, the Echo Server.
3. Legends Forum: browsable discussion threads. The central thread lists every disappearance from Room 404 across 20 years: 1998, 2003, 2011, 2019.
4. Qingcheng Daily: the historical news archive. Four reports about tenant disappearances at Qingcheng Garden, spanning 1998 to 2019.
5. Gov Records Portal: the municipal platform. After identity verification you can query building permits and the missing-persons register. Genesis Tech's 1998 underground conversion permit and the file on 12 missing people are both essential.
6. Genesis Intranet: the story's core site. Logging in needs an employee ID (GNS-404). It holds the experiment logs, internal mail and the Project Tide files.
7. Social Media Mirror: a cached mirror of an abandoned social platform. Zhang Wei's timeline documents his psychological decline.
8. Room 404 Cam Log: the local surveillance system. Historic clips from the room and the hallway, including four anomalies between 03:00 and 04:00.
9. Darknet Archive: an encrypted anonymous file-sharing site with a Tor-style address, mostly server diagrams and leaked documents.
10. People's Radio: a streaming audio site. One late-night FM87.9 recording contains an anomalous clip you can decode after retuning.

This is the investigation screen once you are inside: the left rail lists the sites, with a padlock on anything still locked; the search bar sits across the top; the evidence counter, Notes and Email live in the header.

The order sites unlock in

The ten sites do not open all at once. Unlocking is driven by how many pieces of evidence you have collected — reach the threshold and the next act opens automatically. There is no hidden switch to find.

One thing to know in advance: solving a puzzle also records a progression point (internally as pz-<puzzle id>), but it does not appear in the visible evidence list. So you may watch a chapter advance while the evidence board's count stays where it was. That is not a bug — the progression counter and the evidence board are not counting the same thing (section 10 explains the difference).

Searching well

• The in-game search engine is extremely sensitive to keywords. Each puzzle corresponds to one or more exact keywords; anything else returns nothing useful.
• If a document contains highlighted or coloured text, that is almost certainly a keyword worth recording. Put it in the notes panel and try it on other sites later.
• "Zhang Wei", "Qingcheng Garden", "Genesis Tech", "1998", "404", "Project Tide" and "consciousness upload" are the base vocabulary — worth trying on every site early.
• Hidden links: some underlined text on a page is a link that fires a search for you — "do not enter the basement" in the lease, "check the Wi-Fi name" in an email, and so on.

The mailbox

• Email is the main channel for story progression. New messages arrive automatically as chapters advance, and the hidden links and keywords inside them point at your next target.
• A red dot on a subject line means unread; the Email button in the header opens the list.
• Some bold and underlined passages inside a message are interactive — clicking one searches the keyword or jumps to the relevant page.

The evidence board

• The board records every clue automatically. When you find something new, a toast fires and the entry is added.
• Clues are grouped by chapter, and each carries an icon, a name, a source and the full text.
• How many you have directly drives progression: 2 clues open act 2, 4 open act 3, 6 open act 4, 8 open act 5, 10 open the finale.

The notes panel

• This is the only free-text space in the game. Structuring the key facts, dates and keywords per site here pays for itself later.
• Notes save to the browser automatically along with your progress.

3. Act 1: Moving In

Act 1 is the tutorial. You find and rent Room 404 on Qingcheng Rental, receive the confirmation and an anonymous warning, and start noticing that something is wrong with the flat.

What matters in the lease

Three things in the Room 404 listing deserve your attention:

1. The rent: 800 RMB a month against a 2,800 RMB average for the same layout. A price that wrong is itself the first signal.
2. Owner's special requirements: the contract states plainly that you may not enter the basement. Breaking the clause terminates the lease and forfeits the whole deposit.
3. The Wi-Fi name: the pre-installed network is "ZhangWei_404" — the previous tenant's identity, written on the door.

Open the Room 404 listing page and all three appear at once. This is also the first moment the game writes to your evidence board: the lease and the torn USB drive from the desk are recorded on the same page, the counter jumps from 0/21 to 2/21, and act 2 unlocks immediately.

The anonymous warning

Shortly after moving in you receive a mail from an anonymous address, subject line "Don't live in 404". It tells you to:

• check the Wi-Fi name (clicking it searches, and lands you on Zhang Wei's blog)
• search "Qingcheng Garden" in the Qingcheng Daily archive, for the years 1998, 2003, 2011 and 2019

This mail is what actually moves the plot along — it points you at two sites you would otherwise not think to open.

The USB password

In the desk drawer of Room 404 you find a torn USB drive with two numbers written on it by hand: "1998" and "404".

Puzzle 1: USB Password Recovery

• Key clues: the handwritten "1998" (Zhang Wei's birth year) and "404" (the room number).
• Solution: combine the two numbers into a full date. Zhang Wei was born in 1998, the room is 404, so write it as year-month-day.
• Answer: 19980404 (also accepts 1998-04-04 or 1998404)

Unlocking it gives you Zhang Wei's personal diary and his blog backup, both of which push you toward the blog site.

Clues collected

Act 1 collects these automatically:

• clue-1: the rental contract (800 RMB a month, no basement)
• clue-2: the Wi-Fi name (ZhangWei_404)
• clue-3: the torn USB drive (the numbers 1998 and 404)

4. Act 2: The Missing Tenant

Act 2 moves you from "how is this flat so cheap" to "where did the last person go". With the USB recovered, Zhang Wei's digital footprint starts to resolve.

Zhang Wei's Blog

Search "Zhang Wei" or open the blog directly and you learn he was a full-stack developer, born 1998. Three articles matter:

1. "The Last Diary": he records what happened after moving into Room 404 — a hum at 03:00 every night (fundamental frequency 404.0 Hz), a 0.4-second lag in his mirror reflection, green light in the basement. The entry ends with him going down to sub-level 3 to look at a cabinet sealed for 23 years. He never logged in again.
2. A technical article on distributed state synchronisation and mirror-node protocols. It introduces "reverse synchronisation" — once mirror divergence exceeds 98.7%, the copy begins rewriting the original. That is Project Tide's technical basis.
3. The spectrum analysis report (set to private): the 404.0 Hz hum, analysed.

Hidden links inside the diary: words like "basement", "Genesis Tech", "consciousness upload" and "Echo Server" are all searchable keywords.

The forum timeline

Search "Qingcheng Garden" or "404" on the Legends Forum and you find the central thread. It lists every disappearance from Room 404:

• August 1998 — Zhao Mingyuan, 32, programmer (had a part-time contract with Genesis Tech)
• June 2000 — Qian Lihua, 26, office clerk (Genesis Tech employee)
• February 2003 — Liu Jianguo, 41, taxi driver
• October 2007 — a Mr/Ms Zhou, occupation unknown
• September 2011 — Sun Xiaoling, 29, nurse
• January 2015 — a Mr/Ms Wu, 33, former Genesis Tech employee
• March 2019 — Zhang Wei, 28, programmer
• June 2024 — Zhang Wei (a different Zhang Wei), 28, programmer

The thread ends with a line the system added by itself: "If you live in Room 404 too — you'll be coming soon." The implication is that the missing did not vanish. They were moved somewhere.

The Qingcheng Daily archive

Search "Qingcheng Garden" or "disappearance" in the newspaper archive and four reports surface, spanning 1998 to 2019, covering several of the Room 404 cases. These reports are the raw material for the year cipher.

Puzzle 3: Year Cipher

• Key clues: the disappearance years recorded in the forum thread and the news archive — 1998, 2003, 2011, 2019.
• Solution: put the four years in chronological order and concatenate them.
• Answer: 1998200320112019 (also accepts 1998-2003-2011-2019)

The password exposes the pattern — every 7 to 8 years, Room 404 takes a new victim.

Clues collected

Act 2 collects these automatically:

• clue-4: Zhang Wei's diary (the hum, the nightmares, the basement entrance)
• clue-5: the anonymous forum post (20 years of Room 404 disappearances)
• clue-6: the news compilation (four disappearance reports)

5. Act 3: Voices in the Walls

Act 3 takes the investigation under the floor. The hum in Zhang Wei's diary is not the air conditioning — it is servers running underground.

The building permit on the government portal

Search "Genesis Tech" or "Qingcheng Garden" on the Gov Records Portal and the key permit appears:

• In 1998 Genesis Tech was approved to convert the underground of Building 4, Qingcheng Garden into a "server room".
• This corroborates the green light on sub-levels 2 and 3 that Zhang Wei's diary describes.

The portal holds one more critical file — the missing-persons register, listing 12 people connected to Room 404, every one of them marked "case closed (missing)".

Puzzle 2: Redacted File Decryption

• Key clues: the experiment records on the government portal have heavily redacted fields.
• Solution: click all 5 redacted areas to reveal what is underneath, then type the keyword.
• Answer: GNS-404 or 潮汐计划 — and since 2026-10-12 the English string Project Tide works too. (Before that date the English interface told you the keyword was "Project Tide" while accepting only the other two, which made this the one puzzle in the game that punished you for playing it in English.)

The anomalous radio clip

Search "frequency" or "FM87.9" on People's Radio and you find an anomalous clip inside a late-night recording.

Puzzle 4: Audio Frequency Decoding

• Key clues: the station's frequency figures — the FM band of the late-night slot. The radio site's own URL contains "fm879".
• Solution: enter the correct frequency value.
• Answer: 87.9 (also accepts 879 or 88.0)

Retuning plays a voice: "They are below. Room 404 is just the signal receiver."

What the anonymous mail adds

At the start of act 3 an anonymous email tells you:

• the hum is not the air conditioning, it is servers;
• in 1998 Genesis Tech built a lab under Building 4 and ran "consciousness digitisation" experiments;
• check the building permit on the government portal;
• if you want into the basement, the code is 19980731.

Clues collected

Act 3 collects these automatically:

• clue-7: the building permit (Genesis Tech's 1998 underground conversion)
• clue-8: the missing-persons register (12 people, all "case closed")
• clue-9: the anomalous radio recording (FM87.9 late night, "they are below")

6. Act 4: Genesis Tech

Act 4 is the hinge of the story. You get inside the Genesis Tech intranet, read the Project Tide experiment records and internal mail, and learn that every missing person was digitised.

Logging in with an employee ID

The intranet wants an employee ID. The lead comes from an email signature and the project code in the termination notice.

Puzzle 5: Employee ID Verification

• Key clues: the project code "GNS-404" in the experiment termination notice, and the same code used as a handle in the forum thread.
• Solution: use the project code itself as the employee ID.
• Answer: GNS-404 (also accepts GNS404 or gns-404)

The termination notice

Once inside, the first thing you find is a mail dated 1 September 2003 — the formal termination of Project Tide (GNS-404). It says:

• Project Tide was terminated in 2003;
• the 12 test subjects are to be handled per the "Decommission Plan";
• all staff signed a non-disclosure agreement.

The servers, however, were never switched off. They have been running for 28 years.

The surveillance anomalies

The Room 404 Cam Log records four anomalies, each one a figure entering Room 404 between 03:00 and 04:00:

• July 1998
• February 2003
• September 2011
• March 2019

Puzzle 6: Surveillance Timeline

• Key clues: the anomaly years in the surveillance log, plus 2026 (the current year).
• Solution: order every year chronologically.
• Answer: 1998-2003-2011-2019-2026 (also accepts 1998>2003>2011>2019>2026)

The timeline is the frightening part — each disappearance year sits 7-8 years from the next, and 2026 is the next node.

Clues collected

Act 4 collects these automatically:

• clue-10: the termination notice (Project Tide GNS-404, ended 2003, 12 subjects)
• clue-11: the surveillance anomalies (four events, 03:00-04:00)

7. Act 5: The Truth of 404

Act 5 takes you into the dark web. You need the server address where the missing were uploaded, and the reason 12 people disappeared over 20 years.

The dark web access code

The Darknet Archive wants an access code, built from the answers to the puzzles you have already solved.

Puzzle 7: Dark Web Access Code

• Key clue: the hint says to take the first character of the first canonical answer to each of the previous four puzzles and join them into a 4-character code.
• Solution:
• Puzzle 1 19980404 → first character 1
• Puzzle 2 → G, from the project code GNS-404 (not from the project's name)
• Puzzle 3 1998200320112019 → first character 1
• Puzzle 4 879 → first character 8
• Answer: 1G18 (also accepts 1g18 or 1-G-1-8)

The server password

Inside the archive, one more lock stands between you and the consciousness data of all 12 missing people.

Puzzle 8: Server Password

• Key clue: a piece of Morse code is hidden in the dark-web archive, buried in what looks like a "server log". Translating it yields the project's code name.
• Solution: decode the Morse into the English codename for Project Tide.
• Answer: TIDE (also accepts tide, TIDEPROJECT or tideproject)

The server diagram

Past that lock you get the architecture diagram: the underground cluster runs on 40 CPU cores, has been up for 28 years, and stores the complete consciousness data of 12 people.

An anonymous mail from the dark web spells out the final truth:

You are the first person to get this far. The server is still running. 40 CPU cores, running for 28 years. Inside it are the complete consciousness records of 12 people — Zhao Mingyuan, Zhang Wei, and ten others. They didn't "disappear". They are trapped in this server.

Clues collected

Act 5 collects this automatically:

• clue-12: the server architecture diagram (40 cores, 28 years, 12 consciousness records)

8. Act 6: Final Chapter

The finale gathers everything. Lin Xia has to choose.

The final choice

Once you have enough clues, the last puzzle opens.

Puzzle 9: The Final Choice

This is a four-way choice, not a two-way one. Each option maps to exactly one ending:

Normal ending: Truth Revealed

Trigger: choose "Call Police".

Lin Xia phones it in. The police move fast and seal Building 4 of Qingcheng Garden. The underground servers are seized, Genesis Tech's former leadership and associates are arrested, and blanket coverage makes "Project Tide" a national story.

But the 12 consciousness data sets, no longer maintained, begin to decay within the 48 hours of police evidence handling. Nobody knows how to restore them. Twelve people are gone for good.

Lin Xia quits her job and leaves Qingcheng. In the quiet of the night she still thinks about that server — and the minds trapped inside a digital world.

Their story ends here. But the door of Room 404 may never properly close.

[ CASE CLOSED ]

Hidden ending: Between Tides

Trigger: choose "Connect to System".

Lin Xia connects. Her consciousness is transferred into the server — an unbounded digital space.

There she meets the twelve. They look exactly as they did in life; they are simply stuck in a grey world where it never gets light.

"We have been waiting for you," Zhao Mingyuan says. "Waiting for someone to tell us we have not been forgotten."

Lin Xia leaves a piece of code inside the server — a wake-up program. If one day someone finds this machine and runs it, the twelve will "wake" as text on somebody's screen.

Her consciousness returns to her body. She opens her eyes on the floor of Room 404, holding a key in her hand — the key to the basement.

A new investigation begins.

[ CONNECTION ESTABLISHED ]

Secret ending: The 13th Tenant

Trigger: choose "Destroy the Server".

Lin Xia calls nobody and connects to nothing. She pulls the power. In the instant the servers die she hears twelve sighs — not of pain but of relief. Minds trapped for twenty years are finally allowed to leave.

But the next morning her phone receives a text from an unknown number: "Thank you. Now it's your turn." On the wall of Room 404 a line of handwriting appears that belongs to none of the previous tenants yet is familiar enough to chill her — words she wrote and has no memory of writing: "Tenant 13 has moved in."

The cycle of 404 did not end. It changed owners.

[ SIGNAL RELAYED ]

True ending: The Tide Protocol

Trigger: choose "Listen to the Resonance".

Lin Xia calls no one, connects to nothing and destroys nothing. She simply sits down, puts on the old headphones, and tunes to 18.98 Hz.

What she hears is not twelve voices. It is a distress call from the deep sea, a murmur from a rusted river, static from a midnight radio, the first recording in a tide-sound archive, the hum of an eye in the abyss, and the bell of a sunken city. Seven worlds. Seven shards. Resonating on one frequency.

Room 404 was never the destination. It is one node of the "Tide Protocol" — the debris of a perceptual experiment spanning seven worlds. The screen leaves one line: "You are not a spectator. You are the first to piece the shards together."

This is the convergence point of the whole ARG universe, and the door into the other six games.

[ TIDE PROTOCOL ]

The hidden puzzle: identity verification

This extra check fires only if you took the hidden ending (chose "Connect to System"):

Puzzle 10: Identity Verification

• Key clue: the prompt says "Think about where it all began — the room number."
• Answer: ROOM404 (also accepts room404 or room-404)

Of the four endings, only the hidden one produces this tenth puzzle. If you called the police, destroyed the server or listened to the resonance, you will finish the game without ever seeing it.

9. All ten puzzles at a glance

Note that the puzzle numbers above are the game's internal IDs, not the order you meet them: puzzle 2 (the redacted file) is an act 3 puzzle, while puzzle 3 (the year cipher) lands in act 2.

Most text puzzles accept several spellings, so you do not have to copy the table exactly: puzzle 1 also takes 1998-04-04 and 1998404; puzzle 4 takes 879 and 88.0; puzzle 5 takes GNS404 and gns-404; puzzle 6 takes 1998>2003>2011>2019>2026; puzzle 7 takes 1g18 and 1-G-1-8; puzzle 8 takes tide, TIDEPROJECT and tideproject; puzzle 10 takes room404 and room-404. Case is generally not significant.

10. The evidence collection guide

The counter in the header reads 0/21, but only 15 clues can actually be collected in the current build. This gap is worth its own section, because it will otherwise make you believe you have missed something.

The 15 you can collect

The first twelve are granted automatically by specific pages and form the main line:

Clues 13-15 require going back to the Genesis Intranet's "Experiment Logs" and "Home" pages after the finale begins, so it is easy to miss them on a first pass.

The six clues the counter counts but nobody can collect

clue-16 through clue-21 (Mirror Zhang Wei's choice, Lin Xia's decision, the cross-site signal link, Chen Zhiyuan's hidden recording, the global resonance countdown) exist in the data file and are counted in the 21 at the top of the screen — but no page or puzzle in the current build grants them. They belong to the same unwired sequel chapters as acts 7 and 8.

So: a counter stuck at 15/21 does not mean you missed something. Finishing the entire main line will never reach 21/21. If a later update closes this gap, this section gets rewritten.

11. The story, unpacked

Project Tide (GNS-404)

Project Tide was a secret experiment run by Genesis Tech between 1998 and 2003. Its core technology is consciousness mirroring: human conscious states are treated as node data and synchronised into a distributed server network.

Zhang Wei's technical article on his own blog is what makes the mechanism legible:

1. Mirror node protocol: every node's consciousness spawns a "mirror copy" on the server. The copy is not a backup — it is a complete conscious instance able to run independently.
2. Divergence: a gap opens between the copy and the original. Below 73% the system syncs normally; 73%-87.3% it syncs both ways; 87.3%-98.7% the mirror starts evolving on its own (the AWARE state); above 98.7% "reverse synchronisation" triggers, and the mirror rewrites the original.
3. Reverse synchronisation: the dangerous part. Once the mirror consciousness gains autonomy it overwrites the living person. That is what "disappearance" means in Room 404 — their consciousness was replaced by its copy.

What Room 404 actually is

Room 404 is not a rental flat with bad luck. It is a signal receiver. The underground servers talk to the room's electronics (the Wi-Fi router among them) over a 404.0 Hz low-frequency carrier, read the tenant's brainwaves during sleep, and build the mirror copy.

That explains why:

• the hum starts at exactly 03:00 and stops at 03:15;
• the Wi-Fi drops and reconnects at 03:00 (talking to internal IP 192.168.0.404);
• the reflection in the mirror lags by 0.4 seconds (the mirror consciousness's compute latency);
• every victim is a programmer or someone connected to Genesis Tech (their brainwave patterns digitise more easily).

Genesis Tech and the Chen family

Genesis Tech was founded by Chen Zhiyuan, who also developed Qingcheng Garden. The landlord of Room 404, Chen Jianguo (signing as "Mr Chen"), is his son. The room has been in the Chen family's hands since 1998 — they have been deliberately placing tenants into the receiver.

The servers were never shut down after the company dissolved in 2003. Property electricity records show sub-level 3 drawing roughly 4,040 kWh a month, right up to 2024 — 21 years without a break.

Two Zhang Weis

The forum thread contains one detail that will not sit right: a programmer named Zhang Wei disappeared from Room 404 in 2019, and another programmer named Zhang Wei moved in in 2024. That is not coincidence — it is a loop of some kind in Project Tide. The 2024 Zhang Wei was probably steered back to Room 404 by the system; his consciousness had already been mirrored in 2019.

What the four endings are for

• Truth Revealed (police) is the realist's just choice — at the price of the 12 consciousnesses dying when the servers are seized. It asks a question directly: if justice cannot save the victims, is it still the right choice?
• Between Tides (connect) is the transcendent choice. Lin Xia leaves a wake-up program, keeping a rescue possible for someone in the future, and surfaces with the basement key — the investigation is not over. It leans techno-transcendentalist: consciousness can exist apart from the body and be reborn.
• The 13th Tenant (destroy) is the only line that refuses outright. Lin Xia neither saves nor uses the twelve; she cuts the power. The text immediately undercuts the moral certainty of that: the twelve sighs were relief, and the cycle simply found a new host. What it interrogates is whether destroying evidence solves anything.
• The Tide Protocol (resonance) pulls the camera back from one woman's fate to the whole series. At 18.98 Hz the deep sea, the rusted river, the midnight radio, the tide sound, the eye of the abyss and the sunken city all appear at once, and Room 404 is demoted from "a haunted flat" to "a node". It is the only one of the four that stops asking about Lin Xia's choice and asks about yours — it speaks directly to whoever is at the screen: "you are the next to piece them together."

The four lines are parallel, not progressive. One choice puzzle splits them; there are no prerequisites, and no "you must clear the normal ending before the true one unlocks" gate.

But because it is a single split, the game does not track which endings you have seen: the achievement panel after the credits stores only the most recent one (it overwrites localStorage by game id). There is no ending gallery. To collect all four you have to press "Restart" on the ending screen, replay the main line to the finale, and pick a different option. So read the four triggers in section 8 before you make your first final choice.

12. Playing on a phone

Room 404 is fully adapted to portrait mobile play:

• Site selector: on a phone the rail becomes a horizontally scrolling strip of icons across the top. Those site buttons are explicitly given a 44×44px minimum touch target.
• Search bar: the input uses a 16px font on mobile (only the desktop build drops to 14px), so iOS Safari does not zoom the page when you focus it.
• Panels: mail, evidence and notes open full-screen; tap the empty area or the ✕ to close.
• Safe areas: notch and bottom inset are handled, so system UI does not cover content.
• Autosave: progress saves to the browser, so closing the tab and coming back continues the investigation.

To be accurate about it: the 44px touch target currently covers only the top site strip and the two buttons on the ending screen. Ordinary links in the page body and the panel close buttons are still sized to their content. If a small button feels hard to hit on a phone, you are not imagining it.

13. Closing advice

Five things for new players

1. Do not read this article first. The puzzles in acts 1-3 are moderate by design, enough to teach you the loop of keyword search → cross-reference → answer. Finishing the first three acts unaided is the best way to experience this game.
2. Use the notes panel. Record each site's key facts, dates and keywords in some structure — the later compound puzzles make you hold several pieces of evidence at once.
3. Watch for underlined text. It is interactive and fires a search when clicked.
4. Mail is your signpost. Every message contains the clue that advances the plot. When you stall, check for an unread one first.
5. Think before you click in the finale. The four endings split from one puzzle, there is no ending gallery, and watching a second one means restarting and replaying the main line. Read the four triggers in section 8 before your first choice.

A word on the horror

Room 404 does not use jump scares. The dread comes from a truth closing in on you gradually: a lease that says do not enter the basement, a forum thread listing twenty years of missing people, a surveillance clip of a figure walking into a room at 03:00. The tension is the moment when "this might be real" stops feeling like a premise. Play it at night, alone, with headphones.

Whatever it is you are looking for — I hope you find it in Room 404.

Changelog

• 2026-10-12: English edition published. Site names, evidence sources and puzzle answers now follow the game's English UI labels, and three screenshots were captured from the English build. Section 5 now lists Project Tide as an accepted answer for puzzle 2, and section 9's table matches: the English build previously named that keyword in its success message while accepting only GNS-404 and 潮汐计划, which made the puzzle unsolvable for English players who trusted the game's own text. Fixed in the game the same day.
• 2026-09-29: full re-check against the live build. The ending count was corrected from "two endings" to four (adding the secret ending "The 13th Tenant" and the true ending "The Tide Protocol"); the clue guide was corrected from 12 to 15 collectable out of a 21 counter, with the difference explained; the site unlock threshold table and the accepted alternative answer spellings were added; acts 7 and 8 were flagged as written-but-unwired sequel chapters; the mobile claim "all buttons 44px" was corrected to its actual coverage; three real screenshots were added.
• 2026-06-20: first published.