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"Sometimes he would startle people in public places. He flew out in anger against all that was petty, dull, or greedy in men. Often, however, his scorn would turn to high hilarity and humorous jests."

Still rating, but no longer reviewing. You swine don't deserve my pearls. This site is a nuthouse filled whackos having wall-of-text freakouts over nothing. Get out while you can. Touch grass. Find IRL friends.
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"A D3D11-compatible GPU (Feature Level 11.0, Shader Model 5.0) is required to run the engine."


This review contains spoilers

The Unlucky Girl

While other survival horror games feature zombies, ghosts, and red pyramid thingies, Rule of Rose makes the player face the most terrifying thing of all--being an adolescent girl.

And I'm only half-joking here.

Back when I was in college I took a class where I had to read this awful, boring book called Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood. As best I remember it, the plot of it was something like "young girl gets bullied by her friends in middle school, then grows up and uses this as a reason to leave her boyfriend or something." It made no impression on me--it was an absolute slog. And every woman in the class loved the book, because they all related to that adolescent experience.
Teenage boys [1] are mean and terrible, but they are usually mean and terrible in a straightforward way. The other boys might bully you, but at least you kind of always know where you stand. Adolescent girls, on the other hand, seem to play this 5-dimensional chess game of pettiness and backstabbing. Guys, at least in the genteel settings that I frequent, tend to age out of the chest-thumping machismo if they don't want to go to prison, women can, if they want, continue larping Mean Girls for the rest of their lives (not to say that all of them do). And girl's bullying just doesn't make sense to me, as a dude. A teenage boy would bully another boy by pointing out that he has a small pp--cruel, but I can see the logic behind it. But a teenage girl will not only bully another teenage girl by pointing out that she has small boobs, but will just as easily bully her by pointing out that she has big boobs, which does not really make sense to a guy.
All of this is not to say that women are bad or that all women continue to carry on their worst behavior from their teenage years or anything of that nature. What it is to say is that there's a distinctive and very negative sort of adolescent female experience that women can really relate to and men find kind of alien. And it's this sort of experience that Rule of Rose is capturing.
Rule of Rose is about the horrors of being a young teenage or preadolescent girl trapped in a hierarchy of other petty and vindictive teenage girls. And its quite literally a hierarchy--there's a poster in the game of a crudely drawn chart showing where every girl stands, from the "Princesses" and "Duchesses" up at the top to the main character, Jennifer, being classified as a "Beggar" at the bottom. The main character's goal near the beginning is to get into the room of the "Aristocrats" (all the other girls--this is clearly a metaphor for joining a clique). Once she gets there, at the end of chapter 2, she gets tormented by the other girls--and then at the beginning of chapter 3, we're back to trying to get into the Aristocrats' room to join the cool kids table. Definitely not the way a teenage boy would handle things. [2]
All of this is to say that, in a way, Rule of Rose is the only feminist game I've ever played. Other games may have female action heroes doing the same things that male action heroes do, but this one seems designed around specifically female experience, of the kinds that I mentioned above. Like Cat's Eye, it's not really for me, but I can appreciate the artistic boldness and creativity in making a video game about women's experiences instead of just "girl with gun go boom" [3].

Unfortunately, the game just sucks.

Rule of Snooze

Gameplay-wise, Rule of Rose is essentially the poor man's Silent Hill. The classic Silent Hill trilogy doesn't have great gameplay, but what it lacks in gameplay it makes up in atmosphere and storyline. Rule of Rose not only lacks the Silent Hill stylishness, but makes the gameplay worse.
The game has free movement rather than tank controls, but somehow the devs ended up with the worst camera scheme of all time. The camera is semi-fixed, but depending on where you enter a room from it will be angled in a different direction. This means that you will be constantly disoriented as you go from room to room, never knowing which way is up or down, so to speak. "Use the map," you say. Ah, but Dear Reader, the map isn't easily called up by pressing the triangle button--you have to press pause, navigate to the space on the menu where your map is, select the map, then select "Use" from your list of options, and only then can you pull up the map, which does not, by the way, tell you where save rooms are or which doors are locked the way that the map in Silent Hill did. And since so many of the areas (at least in the first 2-3 hours of the game) are so dull and samey, you will be going back and forth through the entire game area trying to find what you are looking for, getting disoriented by the ever-revolving camera--and make no mistake, you will backtrack through this game quite a bit.
While the game tackles some interesting themes, the way the story is told is just terrible. It's meant to be surreal, but is just incoherent. Silent Hill 2, for all its weirdness, sets out the ground rules of the story pretty quickly. James wants to find out why he got a letter from his dead wife asking him to come to Silent Hill, so he comes to Silent Hill, only to be met by the first twist--the town is filled with monsters and weird people. There are further twists in the story, but they are all based on the foundation of our main character having a realistic motivation and background. The groundedness of the main character helps contextualize the twists in the narrative and the surreal environment. Rule of Rose just feels like a bunch of "twists" thrown together because "ooh spooky." I always knew in Silent Hill 2 why James was doing what he was doing. I never figured out what was motivating Jennifer in Rule of Rose, or why she even bothered finding the next MacGuffin. This approach might work in an adrenaline-fueled action game, but in a story-driven horror game, it's just frustrating. The first chapter begins with Jennifer deciding to run after this random little boy (whom she meets in the first five minutes of the game) to a spooky orphanage. Then she gets buried alive and wakes up in an airship filled with weird children, with no explanation. Is this normal in the Rule of Rose universe? I don't know because Jennifer has been acting like a lunatic this entire time. Silent Hill 2 gave us a good 20-30 minutes of James acting like a normal person with normal motivations in a relatively normal place with no monsters or surreal events in order to set up the fact that the town of Silent Hill was not normal. Rule of Rose gives us 20-30 minutes of Jennifer acting like the world's dumbest slasher movie victim before then transitioning to something completely unrelated. The game seems like it's trying to go for a mystery, but just throwing together random, illogical occurrences does not itself make a mystery.
Even though the Silent Hills are graphically "out of date," they still have impressive and spooky monster designs, like Pyramid Head. About an hour or so into Rule of Rose we see the first monster and I almost laughed, because this thing not only did not look scary, but was also even smaller than our protagonist, who is a very slight teenage girl. "Big scary dude monster chases girl" is a recipe for instant horror; "hobbit-sized monster chases girl" is just funny. After your first encounter with this monster, one where the camera swings so that a stack of crates stands between you, the player, and the character on the screen, you don't see any more of these dweebs until you are suddenly ganked by 8 of them at a time attacking you...with brooms. This game gives Silent Hill 4 a run for its money when it comes to bad monster designs. As if this wasn't funny enough, you get to the end of the chapter only to witness Jennifer get tortured with the Rat Tied To A Stick...sorry, I know this is supposed to be a serious game, but there is no way that a rat tied to a stick isn't hilarious [4]. Horror games often aren't particularly scary to me, but they should at least make an attempt. 90% of the time this game isn't even trying to be scary, and when it is it's unintentionally funny.
To be fair, I will mention a few good things the game does. The art style for the menus and chapter headings has a whimsical, British children's book/Tim Burton vibe to it. There is also a dog in the game [5], who acts as a diegetic quest marker--for example, you can let the dog sniff an item that belonged to someone and then he will lead you in their direction. It's an interesting idea, but I feel like the execution here is not only bare-bones, but also stuck in a boring game.
In short, this game is just a bad Silent Hill clone with a few interesting ideas that don't outweigh its flaws. Maybe there is some mid-game twist that would totally blow my mind, but I highly doubt it. Life is too short to continue playing this.
And oh yea, the "controversy"--this game was banned in several countries due to a misleading review that claimed all sorts of scurrilous and false things about the game. "Every frame is dripping with sadism and perversion" wrote the reviewer, evidently confusing Rule of Rose with Rumble Roses. The scarcity of this game due to the bans + overall poor sales made it a cult classic, but the rumors of its sordid nature are happily untrue.
On the other hand, if you die in the game, you die in real life.

[1] Before I get crucified by the Terminally Online Wall-of-Text posters--yes, I realize that statements about sex and gender are always generalizations, they do not accurately describe every single person, and if they don't describe you, that doesn't mean that you are somehow invalidated. My intention is to describe some large-scale trends, not set a normative framework for "Every person of each gender ever." Now fuck off.
[2] Not that a teenage boy would handle things rationally either.
[3] Although personally I'd rather play "girl with gun go boom."
[4] Apparently, according to the IGN review there is also an "Onion Sack" later in the game, which just sounds funny to me.
[5] This is always a plus--dogs are on my short list of animals that I don't want to see tied to a stick.

"This cannot possibly be trashier than Dead or Alive," he thought to himself.

It was.