Glass Rose is weird. There’s very little documentation for this PS2 exclusive that never released in the US, and I’m honestly left with more questions upon finishing it than when I first started a week ago. The only definite conclusion I can come to is that this is a sad example of an ambitious title that ultimately misses the forest for the trees.

On the surface, Glass Rose is described as a point-and-click psychological horror game with detective/investigation elements. It’s the first title ever developed by Cing (in conjunction with Capcom’s Production Studio 3), who you might know for DS titles such as Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk that cleverly utilized every feature of the DS as part of their adventure game puzzles. Meanwhile, Glass Rose is a standard point-and-click adventure game… on the PS2 (which you can play with a plugged-in USB mouse) and thus seems like a bit of an anomaly in the library, considering that it doesn’t really push the PS2’s controller functionality or hardware limitations whatsoever. You play as Takashi Kagetani, a newspaper reporter who is suddenly transported back in time to 1929 while exploring an abandoned mansion with his girlfriend, Emi Katagiri, finding himself in the midst of the “Cinema Mansion Serial Murders.” In order to free his girlfriend and get back to his own time, Takashi must get to the bottom of the mansion’s many mysteries while being mistaken as Kazuya Nanase, the long-lost son of the recently deceased Denemon Yoshinodou, constantly conversing with the many denizens of Denemon’s family and staff.

At the core of Glass Rose is its dialogue system, which the game’s back cover boasts of as follows: “Dynamic pacing, innovative clue and free-speech systems make Glass Rose an adventure game like no other.” This essentially boils down to Cing’s spin on constructing dialogue trees: when conversing with others, the player is taken to a screen of the last relevant NPC blurb where they must highlight specific words/phrases to follow up on key tidbits and cause NPCs to react differently in response to the intended question. By correctly highlighting the right words and phrases, Takashi can progress through conversations to learn more about the subjects at hand. While it sounds like a great idea in theory, the execution ends up being a bit shallow and clunky. The game is very picky about exactly what must be highlighted to provoke a response, even if the highlighted subject(s) are practically identical in meaning (i.e. highlighting “Denemon” will often do nothing, but highlighting “Denemon Yoshinodou” will almost always work) and accidentally highlighting punctuation or spaces will also confuse NPCs. Additionally, the intuition of what may sound interesting to highlight often does not overlap with exactly what has to be highlighted to progress (so not every distinct noun or verb will do the trick), and sometimes highlighting longer phrases will just create flavor text while highlighting a specific word within that phrase results in the actual trigger (i.e. highlighting “such a racket” will create flavor text, while highlighting just "racket" will allow you to progress). This means that navigating the dialogue generally devolves into trial and error (especially since many of the things that can be highlighted will only result in single-sentence flavor text/confirmations of the subject at hand), which I’d say detracts from the game’s premise of translating natural conversation flow into gameplay mechanics.

This dialogue system ends up becoming a sort of window-dressing for the rest of the game’s elements due to its linearity: most conversations only have one ending trigger to progress, and in the rare circumstances where more than one trigger exists, it still does not matter which is picked because they have no impact upon how the rest of the game plays out. Unfortunately, the moment-to-moment gameplay surrounding the dialogue is even more underwhelming. Between talking to characters, Takashi must walk around the mansion to examine other objects and stumble upon other rooms where he can progress the plot by talking to more characters. Sometimes it’s made fairly obvious where Takashi must go next with inserted cutscenes or relevant tidbits from the previous character’s dialogue, but a good chunk of the time, this necessary information is never presented to the player. Occasionally, the information is conveyed via a series of quick flashbacks as images/locations of interest, but this also isn’t very helpful because the player generally will not have the context of the image/location in the flashback to find their way forward. In addition, many of the hallways look very similar and objects of interest are often in new rooms (so not already present on the map) or are not distinctly outlined/colored to stand out. Thus, much of the player’s time is spent bumbling about the mansion, which is already extremely inconvenient, but made far more punishing due to the built-in time limit that will sap your strength and send you back to the beginning of a given hour to repeat all of the hour’s tasks if you fail to progress far enough during that time.

Glass Rose’s gameplay feels very undercooked as a result, made even more flagrant due to all the other mechanics that seem barely explored and rarely intersect with one another in any meaningful way. For example, the game’s built-in health is referred to as “Mind Points,” which serve as a safety check against game-overs when failing to complete enough tasks in a given hour or missing a QTE. Mind Points are also utilized when performing “Divine Judgement” (a mind-reading technique that must be used to progress certain conversations when NPCs become reluctant to elaborate, but only sometimes and again not always aligning with intuition), which in-itself becomes a liability since using it outside of dialogue just provides flavor text at the expense of health and using it on the wrong highlighted word/phrase in conversation will still sap health. The only way to restore Mind Points is to click on magical butterflies randomly flying around the mansion (a tougher task than you’d expect, if you’re playing on a gamepad and accidentally double click on a door/camera angle shift and lose the butterfly altogether), complete an optional tangram, or make it to the start of the next chapter. Also rarely inserted throughout the game are QTEs in the form of “Suspense Events,” where sometimes during cutscenes, Takashi will find himself in danger and the player must scroll and click on the correct response to avoid taking damage. Again, they’re not exactly difficult, but the process is made more annoying because scrolling over with a joystick is considerably slower than just scrolling over with a mouse, and later QTEs feature more than one possible (and often ambiguous) response, which can again result in more trial-and-error and excess damage. Finally, Glass Rose features collectibles in the form of “Heart Fragments,” of which a certain threshold must be met in order to potentially unlock the best ending. This system is extremely vague however: there’s no exact counter to show how many you’ve collected (only a picture of Emi used as a visualization of how many you’ve collected; the more fragments you’ve collected, the less her hands are visible in the picture), and no one is certain of the exact threshold for how many are required to achieve the best ending. There are apparently “tainted fragments” that can be collected as well which can skew your ending, but for what it’s worth, I never appeared to collect any and it’s once again unclear under what circumstances it would be “safe” and “unsafe” to collect fragments. Regardless, the best way to collect heart fragments is to solve optional riddles from Denemon’s Notes (read: probably necessary for the best ending) in each chapter, which are pretty simple affairs that require you to travel between some more rooms clicking on furnishings, but are often far more tedious in execution because there are no hints given on where the notes will spawn each chapter to even start the quest.

What is particularly damning, even looking past my gripes with gameplay, is that the game lacks any sort of glue to hold everything together. While my first impression was that this is a classic murder mystery, you’re not so much solving mysteries or deducing clues so much as you are following the obvious signal dropped by the last flashback/piece of dialogue to progress the plot, and clicking wildly around the mansion as a fallback when you’re given nothing to work with. Not once did I have to make any meaningful decisions that would have any impact upon the plot. The result is that the player feels like an observer whom has things happen to them rather than actively making things happen, and I couldn’t help but feel emotionally disconnected throughout the entire runtime. The narrative itself is extremely convoluted thanks to the various flashbacks further obfuscating any meaning, and having to dig through layers of flavor text and non-sequiturs to get to any key plot points while also switching between multiple character dialogues one right after another was exhausting. There is a player journal of Takashi’s notes that can be accessed at any time, but there’s no incentive to ever refer to it because the game refuses to hold the player accountable for any knowledge regarding the plot, as there are no knowledge checks that would ever preclude the player from progressing future character dialogues. I’m at least aware that Cing did learn their lesson here, since Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk contain end-of-chapter quizzes that force the player to recall recent highlights and thus adequately prepare the player for the next segment.

Glass Rose is a conundrum. At no point did I think the game was so horrid as to where I felt compelled to put it down, but not a single quality stands out as particularly noteworthy or even structurally solid. It fails as a detective/investigation game because you never have to rely upon inference/deduction, it fails as a psychological horror game because it never lets the player linger in its space undistracted to become truly unnerved, it falls flat as an adventure game because it never strikes the perfect difficulty with its clues (instead alternating between blatant telegraphs and vague/lack of messaging), and it even pales as a simple point-and-click because the basic act of clicking on objects is often frustrating due to unclear overlap between the cursor hitbox and background object hurtboxes. I so desperately wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt, but it really dropped the ball in the last couple of hours, when the game decided to abruptly rush every underdeveloped character arc to a conclusion (as opposed to Hotel Dusk, which has the restraint to focus and more thoroughly develop one or two characters per chapter), and finish the tale off with a last-minute introduction to a comic book villain. As such, I cannot recommend this to anyone but the most fervent of Cing fans looking to scan their library as a historical relic. I should feel more disappointed that so much of the game was left on an unsatisfying note, but frankly, I’m just glad it’s finally over. Glass Rose may not be bad, but I’d argue that it’s worse as it is certainly boring. Cing absolutely deserved better considering the quality of their later work; still, maybe some games were meant to be forgotten after all.