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Now here is a game that is not fun. Which would be a problem were the genre of unfun games not bankrolling the industry for the past decade. But you don't need Rule of Rose to tell you that survival horror is not a fun genre, likewise you don't need me to say why we play the games within it. Atmosphere, plot, crisp dialogue, a few cheap thrills – Rule of Rose has what it takes to compel genre fans, but the non-converted who have never seen the payoff in fighting identical ghouls in badly lit hallways with a spork and a bad camera angle will never find it here either.
Rule of Rose's designers are adamant in closing the gap between the game world and the player. Art-wise that translates to making the protagonist as young as possible before it gets a little weird, and design-wise that means making locations to scale and appropriately enormous. So you have these gorgeous, extravagant locations with the appropriate amount of furnished rooms and dead ends, breaking survival horror's recent pattern of increased linearity. (Resident Evil 4, for example, while a far superior game, is essentially a string of violent set pieces.) Rule of Rose wants you to settle in, look around, and the end result is pure atmosphere: it's only the times where I'm utterly lost that I feel absorbed into the game.
The problem is that if you're a hound for secrets and side quests like me, you'll spend a majority of the game wandering through useless rooms and corridors, seeking secret items, and text like newspapers and letter which are actually critical to understanding what's going on. But then there's a balance issue: as you draw out the game, it ceases to be tense and frightening.
Early on, Jennifer, the young and shy protagonist, meets Brown, whose blessed nose becomes the gameplay's key mechanic. Each item in the game has several other items associated with it, and by having Brown sniff an item, he can lead you to associated items buried in the ground if they're nearby. Some associated items occur only once in the game, so if you don't happen to have the item that goes with it and have Brown sniff it within the area, they're gone forever. Other items are extremely common, showing up frequently and randomly, and can be traded in for something more useful.
Since the environments are so large and all characters vague in their intentions, most of the time you're left not knowing what to do or where to go next. By having Brown sniff a key item, he'll lead you directly to the next story event. You can spend over a dozen hours looking for secret items buried in the ground and still not find everything, or the game can be completed in a just a few hours by going directly to story events. The game is split in two: it wants the big beautiful sets and have them explored by your own volition (thus fulfilling the video game's potential of granting uninhibited freedom), but in order for the game to be playable, you have to be guided around like a lost child. Whether you think this is the right balance is a glass half full/glass half empty thing.
Dog AI is almost always terrible so it's a relief that Brown never does any real fighting, though there are times you'd wish he try to tackle an imp or something and help out Jennifer. We'll probably never see a video game heroine wimpier than her. Everything makes her cower, she has no range, and her first weapon is a fork. Thus most combat is spent trying to avoid it, so when you're engaged in a boss battle, they feel even more frustrating. With each fight revolving around trying to shuffle Jennifer away from some hulk or trading hits until something bleeds enough, they're all clunky and annoying and probably among the genre's worst.
Like how Silent Hill took the science fiction out of survival horror, Rule of Rose leeches out the visceral matter. In an interview, Atlus's PR called the game 75 percent psychological horror and 25 percent gross out horror. An accurate assessment and I'll add that Jennifer takes it all in 100% docility. Throughout the game, she's subjected to the machinations and torture of an aristocracy of demented children and she does it mostly silent, her level of submission bordering on S&M. You feel dirty watching. Jennifer moves from one sadistic scene to another but always without question, and because of this lack of strong moral center, the action frequently feels groundless. It's psychological horror without a brain to carry it.
Ultimately, it's a question of faith. With Jennifer like a walking mannequin and the game layering with increasingly bizarre situations, do you believe it can all come together in the end? You're clued in pretty early that reality is not what it seems so how far are they going to stretch their explanation? In fact, it's a sumptuous finale, edifying but not tidy and no betrayal to the 10 surreal hours preceding it. It ends as it starts – strange, grotesque, beautiful. |
