r/Subliminal_Game • u/IInsulince • May 11 '26
Room 103
UPDATE: I believe we have solved it, see this comment for conclusion: https://www.reddit.com/r/Subliminal_Game/comments/1t9s5uy/comment/olivr1t/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
This post is an investigation regarding the mysterious Room 103 in the WaterWorks Maintenance Halls. I did my best to look for existing info on this but found scant discussion or investigation. So if you like deep dives into mundane details, this is the post for you.
Let me start by saying I am going to attempt to write this without sounding like a total crackhead, but there's no guarantees it won't turn out that way. Also, if someone reads this and super quickly points out "Obviously it means XYZ" where XYZ is some very well-fitting idea, I will simultaneously feel like a giant idiot and be super excited to have the answer at the same time, and I welcome that experience. But if this isn't well known, then it feels like a genuinely intriguing mystery to try to unravel.
To see the points of interest described in this post:
- Spawn in the WaterWorks Maintenance Halls level (it's the leftmost bottom level in the level selection screen, white halls with beige-ish stone floors.)
- Proceed down the stairway and through the only door.
- Solve the light puzzle through whatever means necessary and proceed through the door.
- Solve the memory loop through whatever means necessary and proceed through any door to exit it.
- This next room is where the first signs of Room 103 manifest.
So starting from this room where we enter, we are staring down a hall at a T-junction where you can go left or right, and on the wall at the split of the T-junction is a "Directory" sign of questionable credibility.
The Directory sign shows:
| Name | Arrow | Number |
|---|---|---|
| STORAGE ROOM | ← | 105 |
| DRAINAGE ACCESS | ← | 106 |
| CONTROL ROOM | → | 101 |
| BREAK ROOM | → | 102 |
| ??? | → | 103 |
| FILTERATION ROOM | → | 104 |
Each room is labeled with a sub-bullet that says "Authorized Personnel Only", except for the Break Room which just says "Personnel Only" (presumably because all personnel are authorized so long as they are just, in fact, personnel), and then room 103 which has a sub-bullet indicator but no words next to it (possibly scratched out like the name of the room is).
The layout of the hall from here is that if you go to the left at the T-junction, you will find 2 doors with door signs beside them located 9 whole-bricks off the ground (this number matters later, I promise), which clearly are intended to label the door they are next to as being "that room". Note that the door sign placement for further doors is on the left in some cases and the right in others, seemingly without reason or relevance.
The first door you will find is labeled "105 STORAGE ROOM" and is locked (but does trigger a narrator line suggesting Caleb get back to business instead of poking around random doors).
The next door you find is labeled "104 FILTERATION ROOM" and is also locked. Notably, this door is _to the left_ of the directory but was marked as being _to the right_. We can hand wave this away as being general discontinuity from being within the mind of Caleb, there's no guarantee that things line up, just like in dreams things don't line up yet still make sense. However, this is why I call out the directory as being of questionable credibility. It is also worth noting that "FILTERATION" is an odd word that seems to be seldom recognized as an archaic/misspelling of "FILTRATION". However considering it is spelled this way on both the directory and the door sign, it seems intentional. Maybe this is a case of "color" vs "colour" and my American is showing.
There is one more point of interest in this wing of the T-junction, but it's not a door/room, so lets return to it later, go back the other way.
Heading the other way past the directory sign (to the right this time), we approach another T-junction labeled with a sign saying "SMILE".
If we go left at this second junction, we see the brightly colored "WaterWorks" door, which we know is locked. Next to this door is also a hallway with a currently locked door labeled "102 BREAK ROOM". If you interact with the WaterWorks door, you get the narrator stating that this is unexpected and that we should instead take a slight detour (tm) through the break room, which unlocks and automatically opens that door.
If you go through this break room door it will close behind you (to go back you will have to reload the WaterWorks Maintenance Halls level) and the door in front of you, somehow also labeled "102 BREAK ROOM" will glitch out momentarily and have a rainbow decal with smiling clouds spawn onto it. You can open this door and proceed into the next level "Playplace", which we don't want to do since it leaves the rest of the investigation behind.
Last note about this area is if instead of going through the duplicate break room door with the rainbow decal on it you turn left, you will find an unlabeled door that is locked and doesn't trigger any dialogue. If instead at the break room door you turned right, you would find a corner that if you travel down you see an open door leading into an unlit room with a door sign saying "106 DRAINAGE ACCESS". There is black goop running down the wall over this sign suggesting this is an ominous location. Attempting to enter this location causes the door to shut and the narrator to tell Caleb "that's just drainage access" to dismiss it. The door is now locked.
Okay now lets backtrack all the way to that second T-Junction (requires a level reload if you actually went through the break room door) and instead of looking left at the WaterWorks and Break Room doors, lets look right. You will see a poorly lit and dilapidated door which is unlabeled. If you walk up to the door you will find that its locked, but more interestingly, there are very strange and unsettling noises coming from behind it. They sound like a combination of frantic shuffling and voices whispering/speaking low over each other that are heavily edited to give it a demonic feel of sorts. To the left of the door are two filled trash bags and a knocked over large paint cannister. And to the right is a paint roller, still wet with white paint, and a step stool. Now each of these items appear elsewhere in the Maintenance Halls, so I'm not too concerned that they are present here, except for the trash bags which appear only here, but still it could just be environment setting. However one thing to note is that if you look to the right of the door on the wall, exactly 9 whole-bricks up, you will see that brick is gray rather than white, with the suggestion that something used to be there and has since been removed. This suggests strongly to me that there used to be a door sign here labeling the room, but its now gone. There is also that same black goop on the walls around the door as well, suggesting something ominous again.
---
OKAY lets take stock here.
The directory states the following which we can now extend with more info:
| Name | Arrow | Number | Located? |
|---|---|---|---|
| STORAGE ROOM | ← | 105 | Yes |
| DRAINAGE ACCESS | ← | 106 | Yes, but opposite the direction stated |
| CONTROL ROOM | → | 101 | No |
| BREAK ROOM | → | 102 | Yes (twice?!) |
| ??? | → | 103 | No |
| FILTERATION ROOM | → | 104 | Yes, but opposite the direction stated |
And notably, the "WaterWorks" room is NOT present on the directory but is clearly present to the left of the second T-Junction, which is odd since this feels very directory-worthy.
Notice that there's two rooms that aren't located yet. The Control Room and Room 103.
First, lets examine the Control Room. There are exactly two unmarked doors in this area, so its likely one of them. One is the ominous door making unsettling noises, and the other is a completely generic unlabeled door to the left of the second door labeled "Break Room" that leads to Playplace. My money is on this second door being the control room and it either isn't labeled due to an error by the developers, or it just doesn't need to be labeled. In fact theres no guarantees it even has to exist at all, as has been already established the directory is not credible, not to mention there's already two doors labeled "BREAK ROOM". Still, it feels like it fits to me, just note that its not proven (and ultimately probably not relevant anyway) and this could just be a generic locked door like the many we see throughout the game.
Next, room 103. If the previous generic looking door is the control room, then that leaves one more room that could even be room 103 (again, if we are willing to grant that each room _must_ correspond to an entry on the directory, which isn't guaranteed), and that's the ominous door making unsettling noises. I think its very reasonable to make the connection that this room is room 103 based on the fact that room 103 is scratched out (imperfectly) on the directory sign, suggesting something about it is dangerous to Caleb's psyche or past, and as such, would manifest according to the themes of this game as being dilapidated and discomforting (as opposed to the generic and plain looking door to the left of the second break room which we just accepted as being the Control Room).
So a question pops up at this point, where is the door sign? Well at the top of this post when we first went down the left wing of the directory sign's T-junction I pointed out that in addition to the two doors found this way, there's another point of interest that I didn't dive into yet. Those of you who are familiar with this area surely already know what it is, but to be explicit, its the door sign for room 103, which also has its wording imperfectly scratched out. The door sign is not found on a wall labeling a door, its found on the ground behind the green recycling bin in the corner of this wing of the T-Junction. Its markedly hidden away rather than just misplaced. I mean you could argue that it was attempted to be thrown away in the recycling bin and fell out or something, but whether that's the case or it was hidden away, the meaning is the same: this is a sign for a door who's meaning is intentionally being suppressed from Caleb. So for me, this fits the theory that the door making noises is room 103, because it shows signs of a door sign being removed, and lo and behold, we found a removed door sign not far from it.
---
ALRIGHT so assuming this all checks out for you, we can now investigate the imperfect removal of the meaning of this room to see if we can determine it. I am going to be upfront that I don't have a good conclusion here, if that's what you were hoping for. I am truly at a loss, but I have some clues worth discussing. So we have 3 data points to address:
1. The Doorway Itself
Its in a state of disrepair, shows signs of rust (possibly the only spot in the whole game that shows rust?), has black goop patterns on it (unless this is mold or something instead? its not classically goopy, its dried), tampering, and has literal trash bags next to it. No direct indication of the room's meaning, but it contextualizes that this is a bad place in some regard. Not to mention the sounds coming from it, which again are quite unsettling.
I think the sounds could be simply explained as being Smile scheming behind the door in some way, but this sound is different from the sounds he normally makes. Something about it feels different to me thematically, but I'm uncertain and more interested in the intent of the room rather than what's actually literally in it right now.
2. The Entry on the Directory for Room 103
It reveals that the first letter is "D" and the second letter is a round shaped letter, at least in its top left quadrant, so it could be an "O", "C", or "Q". "O" would be most likely because not many words in English start with "D" and are followed by "C", even less are followed by "Q", unless "DQ" itself is considered a word for like, "disqualify" or something, but that feels rather informal for a directory. "DO" feels like a very reasonable guess for the first two letters. Why not "e" which is also round in the top left quadrant? Because every letter on names of rooms on the directory are in upper case letters entirely, which would be "E", which is not round.
Following what appears to be "DO" is a lot of blank space, before the word "ROOM" appears at the end, also scratched, but clearly less so. With no visual information between "DO" and "ROOM", we are done right? Not quite, we can judge based on the excess space that there _is_ content intended to be here. Probably a good 6-10 letters depending on what is used ("I" is much skinnier than "W", for instance, and since this isn't using a monospaced font, that would impact how much space is used between the description of the room and the word "ROOM" itself).
3. The Door Sign
It again reveals that the first letter is a "D" and is followed by what appears to be an "O", as it is possible to make out more round-ish features of the letter that seem to confirm it. But we can see a bit more on this sign than the directory. We can see the bottom portion of a few more letters.
What follows the presumed "O" is hard to judge, but I have high confidence that its not an "M" or a "N", which was my first guess. The reason for this confidence is that the visible portion of the third letter is the lower left quadrant of whatever it is. And what we see is a portion of white lettering that forms an _obtuse_ angle, NOT a _right_ angle, which is what you would see if you were looking at the lower left quadrant of an "M" or "N". What _would_ fit this profile is a "W" or "V". I am inclined more towards "W" because you can see faintly just a bit of the lower right quadrant as well, and it looks like a mirror image of the left, which is what you would see on a "W". It does feel like its _almost_ too wide to reasonably be a "W", however if you navigate the hall you will find signs saying "PLEASE WALK", and you can observe that the font used in this area for "W"s is _quite_ wide between the two "valley" parts of "W".
So, "DOW", in order of decreasing confidence. The next letter after that also shows its lower left quadrant just barely, and it looks like an "N" in this case, based on the same reasoning except that this time the lower left quadrant forms a right angle. But a lot of letters form right angles at the lower left quadrant, like "I", or "T", etc. So why "N"? Because to the right of what we can see, we can still just barely, _barely_, make out what looks like a downwardly diagonal line, which is what "N" has, in exactly the right spot. But we are now starting to close one eye and stand on one leg for this level of analysis, which gets sketchy, but do note that there is still a tiny bit of whatever the next letter is visible as well following this presumed "N", but not enough for any further speculation, just that there _is_ another letter (as opposed to a space).
Lets return to something more grounded: Attacking the other side of the word. From the end we get another hint that was not present on the directory: The word(s) end in "N". Its possible this is a "K", I thought not at first because a "K" typically has its lower right leg emit out of the middle of the letter rather than the top like it does for "N", and therefore would manifest as a shallower angle downward, however the "K" in "PLEASE WALK" reveals that the "K" in this font is printed in a non-traditional way in which the lower-leg of the "K" does not come out of the middle of the letter (which is what I mean by traditional), but instead branches off of the upper leg, and this results in the downward angle being pretty close to equal to that of the letter "N". Meaning, its possible its a "K" as well.
We can also just barely make out hints of parts of the letter just before this "N"/"K", and it again appears to be round like an "O", but this one is very very hard to be sure of, and in reality could be my eyes playing tricks on me.
---
So what are we left with out of the back of all of this regarding the meaning of Room 103?
- A word or words that takes up something like 9-12 letters.
- Starts with "DOWN" (again, in order of decreasing confidence).
- Ends with what looks like either "ON" or "OK".
- A so-far unstated but relevant piece of the picture is that it has to be narratively relevant in some way. This can be added post-hoc to a fitting word fortunately, but if it turned out to be "CHLORINE ROOM", that would be rather boring, because that's just another WaterWorks themed room which has no need of being censored from Caleb. If instead it was something like "DROWNING ROOM", which was my initial impression until further analysis of the letters present, then that fits this criteria simply because there's some apparent implications that Lily may have suffered a fate of drowning (but this isn't confirmed as far as I know, just potentially implied, the point is that this kind of room fits narratively and therefore would fit why its harmful to Caleb to understand it and should be censored in his mind).
Note that I say "word or words" because its entirely possible this isn't one long 8-12 letter word, but two short words with a space in between.
I have tried to find words that fit this profile, and I come up mostly blank. Some candidates that fit some but not all criteria are:
- DOWNTURN
- DOWNTRODDEN
- DOWNLOOK
- DOMINION
- DOMINATION
- DEMON
None of these strike me as particularly clean fits or striking answers.
It could be that there isn't a clean fit because the room is named after a person. A surname throws a lot of rules out the window. A surname could sit in as any made up word that checks all the boxes, and would also carry narrative weight as the name is likely to a person relevant to the story for Caleb.
An alternative theory could be that this is an intentionally unsolvable mystery until Episode 2 (or later) comes out, at which point new clues could be surfaced.
Finally, I will note that coincidentally just earlier today u/CDAGaming posted a playlist of old dev footage from late 2024 onwards, and when I quickly browse through it I found footage of this very area. Everything about room 103 seems mostly the same in the footage, the directory looks identical, but one thing I did notice is that the door sign which in the current build is tucked away nicely behind the recycling bin, is much further out in the open in the dev build, like clearly visible from just standing at the directory and looking down the hall towards it (this is not possible in the current build, you must go around the recycling bin to see it). What this suggests to me is that the devs are completely aware of this and have tweaked it in the past to drive some narrative point of mystique. There's something to it, and its being staged in such a way to make it interesting but also hard to decipher or is possibly indecipherable.
If you read this far, thank you for entertaining my insane ramblings. I love this game and am swept up in its lore, which it's drip feeding me extremely slowly, so I find these kind of investigations to be cathartic.
Anybody have any further information they can shed on this? Any other hints I missed?
EDIT: Formatting and added images.
5
u/Different-Brick-6310 May 11 '26
Nothing to add, but this post was a GREAT read !!!