Rule of Rose
Moody, atmospheric and -- sadly -- all too frustrating.
Published: September 18, 2006
See, Jen's not a bald-headed armor-clad space Marine. When an enemy (or, as is often the case, multiple enemies) converge in some claustrophobic room, the game's utter lack of competent combat becomes apparent. Jen's first weapon is -- I kid you not -- a fork. She has to fight Edward Munchian eyeless, noseless prune-faced screamers and barnyard-headed baddies with fairly ridiculous objects (there is a gun, if you can hunt for it, but the only way to find bullets is to have your keen-nosed friend sniff things out), and actually lining up an attack is a complete joke. I didn't mind that it took holding R1 and then pressing X to attack, but I did hate that it was fairly hard to connect, though enemies didn't seem to share the same lack of coordination.
There's also the issue of using the four-legged friend to move you along to the next storyline bit or cutscene. Solving puzzles by item fetching is a staple of the genre, but most of the time you have an idea of where to use said items. Your companion can only smell the next game-progressing object if he's in range, which means exploration for more items (like hidden restoratives) will eventually move you beyond the scope of where you're supposed to go next. It's meant to be open-ended, I'm sure, but after running around and accidentally running into enemies or a boss fight five minutes from a save point, it just felt frustrating.
Maybe it was because the game never really felt like it got into a proper spook groove. Though the game is dirty, it doesn't feel grimy or alien in any way, just unique enough to be compelling to see what kind of increasingly surreal turns the story will take. A simple visual filter throws noise all over the screen to grime things up a little, and the menus are all constructed from wiggling characters as if scrawled on a blackboard. All these things give the game some character, but they weren't ever used in a way that really built tension -- at least not for me.
It's not as if there weren't moments, they just didn't feel orchestrated all the time. The voice acting in the game is absolutely fantastic, and when the heavy string-led, somber, almost overly morose notes of the soundtrack mix with the children speaking or the things they do, it can be absolutely riveting. It's just a shame, then that with all the fake Brit accents and moaning violins that the game didn't suck me in more; I'd get all psyched up and then slowly have that tension whittled away by a bunch of clumsy room-tripping and backtracking.
And see, this is why I'm so torn. I keep mentioning the atmosphere and the storyline, and the game delivers both wonderfully when it's on, it's just that it's not always on. You'll have to make your own pacing -- which for me was largely dependant on how often I wanted to look at the walkthrough just to get to that next juicy tidbit of cutscene. Though it's interactive, that's not really a game, it's a bunch of clutzy, unnecessary combat (and yes, the fact that we're talking about a young girl and not a muscle-bound meathead, plus the fact that it's often more prudent to run than fight isn't lost on me) some moderately fun puzzles, and lots of gruesome-yet-I-can't-look-away moments all strung together.
If you've got the dozen or so hours to spare, a lot of patience, and maybe a friend or two to puzzle your way through the game with, Rule of Rose can be entertaining. Unfortunately, more often it's a frustrating experience that often muddies what would have been an atmospheric, wildly imaginative peek into the darker side of misguided children.
