Rosewater, the name of the game and the starting location, is situated in the alternative history world of Vespuccia. We are quite closely in the 19th century United States with cowboys, gun-slingers, and natives, while having some steam-punkish effects sprinkled on top. It is the same world featured in Lamplight City, the previous game by Grundislav Games. The game starts pretty much like a western game, but at some point you find yourself wondering if there really were computers or aether studies in the actual wild west.
The protagonist of the story is Harley Leger, a journalist coming to work for Rosewater Post & Publishing. The strong suit, and something that sets is apart from many other adventure games, is the fact that most of the game Harley is accompanied with a group of fellow travelers. The majority of the second act we follow their travel through the wilds, and get to know the different characters in deep. Although the puzzles are quite linear and simple during the travel, it works more as the way to tie the characters to each other. The choices you make during the game really shape up the group. Heck, you might even arrive to El Presidio with fewer members than was leaving from Rosewater. This is really interesting aspect and I can only imagine the amount of testing and staring at logic trees to make the story work as good as it is with all the different options. Kieron discussed about this with Francisco in the interview about Rosewater.
A group of characters and a lot of different scenarios, some of that you don't even encounter on the first run, means a lot of dialogue. Add to that the sheer amount of hotspots, just for looking at, means the writers have done massive job. But that's not all. Every line has a voice. The sound design really is the crown jewel of this game.
The voice acting and the world that truly reacts to the choices the player makes are good building blocks for immersion. Background graphics are fine, too, albeit too straight and clean in points to give out a wild west imagery. And now we come to one of the pain points in the game. The characters and their movement are done with a technique called rotoscoping. In it, an actual human has done the movements on camera and then the character animations are drawn from those capturing key frames. I was interested how this will play out and have to say it left me a little disappointed. You would expect using real humans would result in more natural movement, but to me it looks like the opposite happened. Character movement is jerky and quite stiff, and more than once I was left wondering if anyone really takes the poses, or movements, the characters do. Maybe it is that cartoonish characters could have had more dynamicity in their movement animation resulting it being more easy on eyes, too.
Puzzle-wise the game varies a lot. Most of the time the puzzles are quite linear and easy, especially in the road trip part of the game. Every now and then there is a larger scenario that has more in-depth puzzle to solve, but as a player you don't get to traditional point and click game depth having multiple intervening puzzles going on at the same time. You can also solve some of the puzzles multiple ways which makes solving them easier. Naturally, our website provides hints for this game, too.
One jaw-dropping moment in puzzles was that I actually failed one major puzzle, and the game went forward. This is something I haven't seen in point and click games. On the other hand I was baffled, as I failed it to see what happens, but it also felt fresh. This "fail-forward" style just adds more immersion into the game, which is good, in the end. Especially, as this game has a lot of replay value just to experience all the different scenarios, you can then also try different outcomes in the parts you encounter on each playthrough.
Review copy of the game was provided by the publisher