vomitingly beautiful. rule of rose is a fragmented tale for fragmented girls.
silent hill 3 might be the more important game to me (my name is heather, not jennifer), but this surpasses sh3 in so many ways. the greatest of these is the story. in 8 hours, RoR accomplishes a frankly shocking feat of accessible allegorical and abstract storytelling. i walked out of the game totally clueless as to what it was "doing" and it STILL managed resonate through its surface level alone. the gorgeous imagery and writing and music bombarding your emotions makes you want to comb through the clues and figure out what the fuck happened. then again, maybe my favorite thing is just that it's about childhood. and i mean all of childhood. sure, other games approach the topic, but none quite nail all the ways that it is frustrating, tragic, and confusing, especially as a queer girl. hell, i can't think of another game that handles childhood sexuality at all, much less with this much tact. i'll come out and say it: this is my favorite story from any game.
it would be silly of me to ignore that surface level in my little write-up, though. my thoughts can be roughly summed up as "it's perfect". when the simple act of walking around is steeped in sheer victorian misery, you know you're in for an unforgettable time. there's no "fun" to be had here. such an odd choice for a video game and yet... it works??? like so well?? nearly any praise thrown the way of pathologic's intentional unpleasantness applies here. is rule of rose pathologic for girls? you'll be unsurprised, dear reader, to know that my favorite element is the music. much ink has been splorched over the fraught and taut violins of yutaka minobe and got dammit, i am here for a resplorching. this bitch worked on the shadow the hedgehog soundtrack. she knows a thing or ten about melodrama and it shows. in the same way that i am unable to not feel happy while listening to tatsuro yamashita's ride on time, listening to this ost subjects me to a mindstate that's at best wistful and at worst utterly crushing. never has there been a mightier leitmotif than "a love suicide". i mean, the title alone... do you not get it yet?! RoR is on ANOTHER LEVEL.
on the other hand, the moment-to-moment gameplay of rule of rose is something that tends to be written off by a lot of people. and i get it. the combat is clunky and most of your time is spent following your dog around, which doesn't scream fun. however, i have come with two arguments.
1. the combat is almost non-existent. if you're struggling with it, you're likely doing something wrong. this is not a silent hill game and you should be fighting very rarely. there are boss fights and a couple of brief enemy gauntlets, but the boss fights should be easy if you pay attention (tip for the mermaid fight: use headphones). i find it so odd that people expect jennifer, this scrawny little girl, to be a viable fighter. nah man. just run away. it'd be way less scary (and ludonarratively dissonant) if you were capable anyway.
2. almost all of RoR's substance is in its environmental design and storytelling. if the non-combat gameplay was any less mindless than following the cute dog around, it'd likely take away from the attention you're supposed to be giving to everything else. i love exploring the airship and the "walk forward and press button" shit goes hand-in-hand with that. i think this might be an attention span issue with some people, not sure.
if you have any love for survival horror, you owe it to yourself to play rule of rose. this kind of masterpiece shit is the reason we crate-diggers dedicate ourselves to a lifetime of the hunt. "cuz love itself is just as brief as a candle in the wind; it is pure white, just like sin".
edit: i forgot to add that this is probably the scariest thing i've ever played? i real-life screamed during That One Rat Scene. insane.