Room 404 — Complete Walkthrough and How to Unlock All Four Endings

This guide breaks down the core puzzle solution for every one of Room 404's six chapters, then explains how each of the four endings is triggered. If you are stuck on a single puzzle, jump straight to that chapter.

Overview

Room 404 is a horror-mystery ARG that plays close to real life. You are Lin Xia, and you have rented room 404 in Qingcheng for a price that makes no sense — but this is not luck. Your brother Lin Yuan disappeared three years ago, and his last location ping vanished somewhere near this building. Once you move in, you gather clues and solve puzzles through ten simulated websites (a blog, a forum, news, a government portal, social media, surveillance, the dark web, radio, the rental listing, and Genesis Tech), and eventually uncover the truth behind 12 disappearances over 20 years.

The game has 6 chapters, 10 puzzles and 4 endings. Progress saves automatically to your browser's local storage.

Chapter 1: Moving In (Act 0)

Puzzle 1: Recovering the USB password

On your first night you find a torn USB drive with two numbers written on it by hand: "1998" and "404".

Solution: combine the year and the room number. The password is 19980404 (or 1998-04-04).

The reasoning is simple — 1998 is a date (check the construction year on your rental contract) and 404 is your room number. Zhang Wei, the previous tenant, used the two pieces of information that mattered most to him as his USB password. Unlocking it gives you his personal diary and a backup of his blog, which record what he found after moving into 404.

Common mistakes: people try 1998404 (dropping a zero) or 4041998 (digits reversed). The first is on the accept list and will pass; the second will not — validation is an exact, case-insensitive match, and 4041998 is not in the accepted list. The canonical answer remains 19980404.

Chapter 2: The Missing Tenant (Act 1)

After recovering the USB you have Zhang Wei's digital footprint — his blog, his social accounts and a post he made on an anonymous forum. This chapter holds two puzzles.

Puzzle 2: Decrypting the redacted file

The government portal carries a Genesis Tech experiment record with most fields blacked out. You have to click every redacted area to reveal them one by one, then enter the hidden keyword.

Solution: after clicking all 5 redacted fields, the keyword is GNS-404 (or the Chinese 潮汐计划, or Project Tide).

What the last redacted passage reveals is a project number — GNS-404, the codename of the secret project Genesis Tech ran beneath room 404. In the Chinese version it is called "潮汐计划" (the Tide Project).

Puzzle 3: The year password

Local news reports record several disappearances at this address before room 404 was ever let. Putting the disappearance years in chronological order gives you the password.

Solution: 1998200320112019 (or 1998-2003-2011-2019).

The four years correspond to four cases: the first victim in 1998, the second in 2003, the third in 2011, and Zhang Wei in 2019. Note the spacing — one every 7 to 8 years — and 2026, the year you moved in, is the next node.

Chapter 3: Voices in the Walls (Act 2)

Zhang Wei's blog mentions hearing a low-frequency hum late at night. Using the government portal and the radio archives, you have to find the laboratory Genesis Tech built under the building.

Puzzle 4: Decoding the audio frequency

The radio archives contain an abnormal recording. You have to tune to the right frequency to hear the hidden message.

Solution: tune to 87.9 (or 879, or 88.0).

It sits in the late-night FM band and is easy to walk past. Tune in correctly and you hear a voice: "They're below. Room 404 is just a receiver." That line tells you outright — the Genesis Tech lab under room 404 is the core of it.

Tip: if you get stuck here, look at the frequency scale on the radio panel — late-night transmissions usually hide somewhere unusual in the FM band. 87.9 FM is not a standard broadcast frequency, which means it is not a normal station but an experimental signal.

Chapter 4: Genesis Tech (Act 3)

In this chapter you break into Genesis Tech's internal systems and read the experiment records and internal email. Two puzzles.

Puzzle 5: Employee ID verification

Logging into the Genesis Tech intranet requires an employee ID. You have to extract it from an email you have already read.

Solution: enter GNS-404.

Look at the signature block of the "experiment termination notice" email — it contains an ID in project-number format. That ID is the same keyword the redacted file revealed: GNS-404. The check is case-insensitive, so gns-404 works too.

Puzzle 6: The surveillance timeline

The surveillance log records a series of abnormal events that must be ordered chronologically.

Solution: 1998-2003-2011-2019-2026.

Similar to the year sequence in puzzle 3, except this time 2026 is included — the year you moved in. Each disappearance is 7 to 8 years apart, and 2026 is the next "node". Which means if you do nothing, you are probably the 13th disappearance.

Chapter 5: The Truth of 404 (Act 4)

Enter the dark web archive and find the server address where every missing person was uploaded. Over 20 years, 12 people vanished into room 404's "signal" — their consciousness was digitised.

Puzzle 7: The dark web access code

The dark web archive needs an access code. You have to combine keywords from all the puzzles before it.

Solution: 1G18.

Take the first character of each earlier answer and join them: 1 (from puzzle 1's 19980404) → G (from GNS-404; take the project code, not the project's name) → 1 (from puzzle 3's 1998200320112019) → 8 (from puzzle 4's 87.9). The more intuitive way to put it: every step you took left a mark, and the code is the first character of each mark, in order.

The system also accepts 1g18 and 1-G-1-8.

Puzzle 8: The server password

Something in the dark web archive is hidden as Morse code; decoded, it is the server password.

Solution: TIDE (or tide, TIDEPROJECT, tideproject).

The Morse is buried in a "server log" audio clip — it sounds like short ticking. Transcribed, it reads TIDE, which is the Tide Project's name. Entering it lets you see the consciousness data of all 12 missing people.

Tip: if you are not fluent in Morse, find an online Morse translator and write down the rhythm of that audio (long tone = dash, short tone = dot). You will get TIDE.

Chapter 6: Final Chapter (Act 5)

Lin Xia has to choose. This is the game's critical branch point — your choice decides which ending you see.

Puzzle 9: The final choice

Four options:

Puzzle 10: Identity verification (triggers only after the hidden ending)

If you chose "Connect to System" and reached the hidden ending, the system asks you for an identity verification code.

Solution: ROOM404 (or room404, room-404).

The answer is where all of this started — the room number.

The four endings in detail

Normal Ending: Truth Revealed

Once you call the police they move fast: Building 4 of Qingcheng Garden is sealed off, the underground server is seized, and Genesis Tech's former head is arrested. Wall-to-wall coverage makes the Tide Project a national story. But the 12 consciousness records in the server begin to decay while police handle the evidence, and are gone entirely within 48 hours. Twelve people are lost for good. Lin Xia leaves Qingcheng, but late at night she still thinks about that server.

Take: the most "reasonable" ending, and also the most powerless. The law cannot rescue people who have already been digitised.

Hidden Ending: Between Tides

Lin Xia chooses to connect. Her consciousness is transferred into the server — a grey digital space with no edges. There she meets the 12, who look exactly as they did when alive except that they are trapped in a world where dawn never comes. Lin Xia leaves behind a "wake-up program": if one day someone finds this server and runs that code, the 12 will "wake up" on someone's screen, as text. When her consciousness returns to her body, there is a key in her hand — the key to the basement.

Take: the most hopeful ending. It does not save everyone, but it leaves a seed.

Secret Ending: The 13th Tenant

Lin Xia pulls the server's power. In the moment it dies she hears twelve sighs — not of pain, but of relief. But the next morning she gets a text from an unknown number: "Thank you. Now it's your turn." On the wall of room 404 surfaces a line in her own handwriting that she has no memory of writing: "13th tenant, checked in."

Take: the most frightening ending. The cycle of 404 does not end; it only changes owner.

True Ending: The Tide Protocol

Lin Xia calls nobody, connects to nothing and destroys nothing. She sits down, puts on the old headphones and tunes to 18.98 Hz. What she hears is not just twelve voices — she hears a cry for help from the deep sea, a murmur from the rusted river, static from a midnight radio, the first recording in the tide-sound archive, a hum from the eye of the abyss, and the tolling of a bell in a sunken city. Seven worlds, seven shards, resonating on one frequency. Room 404 was never the destination; it is only one node of the Tide Protocol.

Take: this ending is what links the whole GameStrategists ARG universe — Room 404, Rust River, Sunken City, Midnight Frequency, Tide Sound Archives, Eye of the Abyss and Abyss Messenger share a single world.

Completion tips

1. Progress saves automatically: the game stores its data in browser localStorage, so clearing browser data loses your progress
2. Ten simulated websites: blog, forum, news, government, social, surveillance, dark web, radio, rental listing, Genesis Tech — every one of them holds clues
3. Morse code: used by the dark web archive; if you do not read it, an online translator is enough
4. True ending trigger: simply choose "Listen to the Resonance" — there is no prerequisite
5. New game plus: after finishing you can restart from the title screen to see what other choices lead to

Change log

• 2026-10-13: First English version, translated from the Chinese original. Two figures were checked against the game source while translating and the Chinese article corrected at the same time: the overview says 10 puzzles (the source defines p1-usb through p10-hidden), and 4041998 is not an accepted answer to puzzle 1 — validatePuzzle() in room404/src/data/puzzles.js matches case-insensitively against 19980404, 1998-04-04 and 1998404 only.
• 2026-09-08: Original Chinese publication.