Rosewater is a treasure-hunting adventure in a Wild West inspired land, set in the same universe as the detective game Lamplight City. With a great presentation, interesting puzzles, and a good cast of characters, it’s worth taking a look at despite the narrative lacking the strong focus of its predecessor.
Rosewater
Developer: Grundislav Games
Price: $20
Platforms: PC
MonsterVine was provided with a PC code for review.
Rosewater is the newest adventure game from Grundislav Games, set in the same universe as Lamplight City, which I reviewed back in 2018. Two years later, I previewed the start of Rosewater, but enough time had passed since then that I’d nearly forgotten everything except its Wild West inspired setting. It’s a lovely game, with beautiful animation and full voice acting, and there are a lot of minor details that serve to flesh out the world and make it feel real.
Engaging Puzzle Design with Multiple Solutions
You play as Harley Leger, a former fighter turned writer who arrives in the small town of Rosewater to work for the local newspaper. Her first job tasks her with interviewing Gentleman Jake, a heroic figure who comes to town to put on a show about his adventures. When her meeting with Jake results in her intervening in a fight, however, he recruits her to join him in his mission to locate the lost fortune of a missing scientist. As they pursue various clues to learn about the money’s whereabouts, they gather together a team of characters with various skills to help them on their treasure hunt.
It’s a point-and-click adventure game with traditional inventory-based puzzles, albeit with several features that streamline the process. You can press a key to show all available hotspots, and you can double-click a hotspot to move there instantly. While the puzzles can be challenging, it’s usually possible to ask your companions for advice to receive a clue, and there are often multiple puzzle solutions. This last point is what makes Rosewater stand out the most. On several occasions, the game presented me with multiple paths I could take to reach my goal. For example, at one point I needed to get into a guarded room. I opted to solve a puzzle to find an artifact that would draw the guard away, but one of my companions suggested starting a fire as a distraction instead, and let me know what items he’d need.
Side Stories and Mini-Games Add Variety
While it wouldn’t have changed the main storyline, taking the alternate path would have changed the immediate consequences and how different characters felt about Harley, potentially leading to different conversations later on. The choices you make during puzzles and event dialogue are also reflected in the in-game diary that summarizes plot events, which is a nice touch. One part recorded an action I hadn’t actually done, but this was presumably a bug.
Once the treasure hunt gets underway, the game takes on a journey format as the team travels to their destination. Each day, you have a limited number of actions you can use to either talk to your companions or simply pass time, after which an event occurs. These events are like little side stories and range from helping an archaeologist with her dig to investigating a post office supposedly inhabited by the Devil. Events occur randomly on your first playthrough, but New Game+ gives you the option of manually setting which ones you’ll encounter. Several parts of the game also involve mini-games, from shooting bottles out of the sky to fishing for the night’s dinner. While these are a minor part of the experience, they make for a nice change of pace.
Through it all, I grew to enjoy the cast and their interactions. They’re a good group of characters. At the same time, however, I found that the journey format made the overall narrative start to lose steam. The treasure hunt felt like more of an excuse to see these smaller stories along the way, and while they were entertaining enough, I wished I’d had greater investment in the main narrative to feel more emotional payoff from the ending.
The Final Word
I enjoyed my time with Rosewater and its characters, although the narrative lacked the strong drive that would have really made it click. The presentation is great, the puzzles are challenging, and the multiple solutions add noteworthy replay value, but I didn’t find myself as invested in the story as I had hoped I would be after playing Lamplight City.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
