Oxide Room 208 Review

Oxide Room 208 tells the story of eight people who are trapped by the ruthless Doc as he used them for his twisted experiment called Oxide. The doc is manipulating a lady named Eva to play around and torture his victims. As one would expect, Eva’s sanity has reached its limited and is turning into a worst nightmare. If you want to make it out alive, find door 208 and run.

Oxide Room 208 is a survival third person horror game where players have to go through each level with a vast cast of characters and reach door 208 in order to survive and take out the doc. The game features a Mega Man-like level selector where you choose the order in which you want to attempt each level. Once you complete all levels, a new final level unlocks with another character.

If all goes well, most levels are pretty short and straight forward, where it can take an average of 20 minutes, however some levels are easy to get lost in and having to backtrack constantly trying to find the right path to door 208. It relies heavily on exploration as you’ll need to find keys (so many fucking keys) and codes to open locked doors blocking your way to progression.

Thankfully, you can defend yourself against the army of skinless monstrosities. You’ll come across a myriad of melee weapons (from knives to plungers) and firearms. However, you are limited in what you can carry i.e. you can carry one melee and one firearm at a time. Melee weapons break over time so you’ll have to punch your way through. You can use firearms as melee weapons and they never break. You also have a default kick that can be used to cause damage to enemies and give you some room. Protagonists can also run and dodge.

The game looks pretty…. dated. It looks like a late PS2 or very early PS3/Xbox 360 game. The character models are pretty generic and facials designs are borderline terrifying. They remind me a bit of the character expressions from the Friday the 13th game. The environment is dark, creepy and brooding. Enemy design is very limited and always encounter the same 3-4 things over and over. It’s also glitchy to the point where you can kill enemies through door. You can glitch into environments. The soundtrack does feel appropriately unnerving. The limited voice over sounds as phony you’d expect. There’s also this annoying high pitch noise every time the doc wants to talk to you over the speakers.

The game is far from perfect. Melee combat is incredibly clunky and the targeting system, if it was made for that, clearly doesn’t work. Pressing LT with a firearm allows you to aim down before shooting, but with a melee weapon, it brings the camera closer to the shoulder and semi targets the enemy in front of you. For some reason, you can only dodge/roll forward. Also the annoying ear-bleeding screech when the doc is about to talk over the speak. And you can’t disable the controller vibration and they clearly configured it to be 200%. There’s also no map, so while some scenarios are pretty straight forwards, others are not and you can waste a lot of time trying to figure out to get through an area.

While I didn’t have high hopes, Oxide Room 208 is a mildly enjoyable experience. The Mega Man like level selection to unlock the final file gives players the flexibility to play the levels in any order; the combat allows you to survive and the variety of weapons is quite surprising, but it feels dated and clunky as a whole. A few months of additional polish could’ve made this a hidden gem of 2025. But at £30, it’s kinda hard to recommend. If you can tolerate its quirks, Oxide Room 208 can be surprisingly enjoyable but if you’re looking for a polish experience with scares, you might want to look for something else.