User Reviews (11 - 21 of 26)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

Clunky to handle but still arouses interest

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: January 02, 2008
Author: Amazon User

"Rule of Rose" is an adventure game that I suppose falls into the survival horror genre, but on a very gentle scale. It plays a bit like a sanitized "Silent Hill" crossed with "Haunting Ground", with notable visual comparisons with the former, especially in the game's locations, enemies and general bewildering ambience. That's not to say it's as good as "Silent Hill", in fact in some respects it's quite a let down, but you could have some fun playing it if the story intrigues you. Hopefully it will, because the gameplay is a bit lacking

The plot involves a young girl named Jennifer who finds herself stranded at a spooky orphanage where a group of children who have named themselves The Aristocrats seem to be in charge. These children set Jennifer a series of trials and it's these that form the main stages of game play. Working almost entirely without explanation or motive, you must carry out the children's requests to find missing toys or dead birds to complete each level. Along the way you meet creepy enemies and occasionally the children play tricks on you just for the fun of it. That's about it for the plot, you'll have to play the game yourself to try and make sense of the situation and see if you can get Jennifer out of it. Playing "Rule of Rose" is not that difficult but you'll find out early on that there is little explanation about what is happening to you. As the game starts, Jennifer wanders around the orphanage being generally menaced for a while and then at an allotted moment she falls unconscious and wakes up on board a giant flying airship (!) with the same band of children once again in control of everything. She finds a dog called Brown cruelly tied up and hanging from the ceiling, which she frees, and then girl and dog form a team for the rest of the game, searching for various clues and objects (by getting Brown to find them with his sense of smell) and dodging or fighting with an assortment of bizarre enemies. All the time, the children of the Aristocrat club will tease, trick and punish you whenever they feel like it.

The game does a good job at creating an unsettling landscape for you to play in, with creepy children's scrawls covering many walls of the orphanage and airship, and lots of torn up toys, caged animals and general dereliction everywhere. Had the gameplay been more involving, "Rule of Rose" could have been a reasonable success, but sadly the experience is let down by several major factors. Firstly, the action is dull, dull, DULL! There are only two things you have to do for the majority of the game. By far the least involving is the "Find" feature in which Jennifer let's Brown have a sniff of an item in her inventory and then follows him as he picks up the scent of something and trots off to follow the trail to it's end. Now this feature is used A LOT, which is a real drawback as it's pretty boring to do, just following a dog around through room after room and picking up items that he discovers is the way to finish nearly all of the trials that Jennifer is set, and some of the Find quests become chains, as one found item leads to another, and then another, with nothing else going on in between. Brown is quite cute but he takes no effort to control and he always finds what you set him to find and never misbehaves, so he's a lot less interesting than Hewie the dog in "Haunting Ground" (which this game resembles a lot) was.

The other thing you spend time doing is dealing with the game's enemies. Now let me say that the monsters in "Rule of Rose" are pretty good. Starting off as short, impish mannikin type things (very "Silent Hill"), they progress into wearing animal masks (getting fatter when wearing pig heads), and even donning huge conical head-dresses as pecking birds. The game also gives you a fun collection of weapons such as cutlery and hardware tools, which get better and sharper as the game progresses. Now this would all be great if only you had a playable character who knew what to do with them. But in this game I'm afraid you don't, and this is the other major pitfall of the entire experience. The main character of Jennifer has to be one of the soppiest, weakest, most irritatingly feeble creations I have ever played. She spends the entirety of the game whimpering and crying at everything, whether in cut scenes or actual gameplay, and it gets old REALLY fast. Any normal person would tire pretty quickly of the ridiculous ordeals the Aristocrat Club dish out, yet Jennifer never once challenges any of the children who torment her (she looks older than all of them put together, for crying out loud, and she's certainly a lot taller and bigger than all of them, yet she meekly submits to every demand they make). The game goes to some lengths to impress on us that Jennifer is timid and weak by design, but where's the fun in that for the player? And when it comes to facing monsters you'll need to move all breakable objects out of harms way as the controls for combat are awful and you are liable to want to smash something in frustration. The response time for pressing the commands is way too slow to accurately plan your blows or dodge, and the recovery time when Jennifer is knocked to the floor (which she is nearly all the time) is horrendous, seemingly set so that the time it takes for her to stand up is the time it takes the enemy to have another swing at her, which often left me in an endless loop of being floored, sloo-oowly getting up, only to be straight down again before the command to be able to make her run out of the way of the next blow could kick in. The camera angles and general directional controls are also flawed. The camera is automatic and will revolve to suit itself as Jennifer runs, which means that you have to change the direction of the analogue stick even if Jennifer is running in a straight line, just because the camera angle has changed from facing one way to another. So imagine what that's like in a small room where the camera waves around wildly as Jennifer runs to dodge the various monsters ...you'll be running in circles or hitting walls - or dead - in no time.

Now I will relent slightly here and say that the hard combat in the game does at least give you some challenge to stick your teeth into, but it seems poorly balanced. A fight between a slick and agile character and a strong and lightning fast enemy is a much more exciting challenge than a weak and hard to control character fighting against a weak and not very threatening enemy, so I still think it's poorly designed. Which is a shame, as throwing Jennifer into a room with upwards of 6 or 7 enemies, plus some quite old school bosses (the mermaid princess was fun) could have been much more entertaining than it currently is.

Apart from the combat though, the game is pretty easy and therefore, it can get boring especially when all you are doing is running through rooms after Brown while he sniffs out key items. There are only two locations in the game, and the environments are pretty repetitive The orphanage looks pretty similar throughout and although it's small I still got lost all the time, but the airship is huge and has endless passageways and gantries, including several remotely situated engine rooms that you never need to go for anything so I wondered what the point of them was - and some infuriating cabin areas filled with multiple doors that are never unlocked. Oh yes and on that topic, the game arbitrarily locks and unlocks various doors as levels progress, which is very annoying, because you can never commit to memory which areas are accessible and which are off limits if they change all the time. What I also found annoying was the miserable maps which were very hard to decypher, and the game's annoying habit of glitching frequently between game-play and cutscenes, flashing up incorrect subtitles on several occasions and dropping music and audio in all the wrong places - this is something that should have been tested more thoroughly.

The game's strengths are its twisted take on childish pranks, with some quite sinister overtones in places ( a small number of scenes verge on being pretty sadistic), and an overall sense of the bizarre. Don't expect to understand the plot too clearly, even at the end of the game I was still a bit confused. And there are some great illustrations in the books that Jennifer in each stage, all done in childlike scrawl but showing highly violent scenes like goats being disembowelled or people getting buried alive, which adds to the atmosphere! And if you like chasing Brown, you can spend an awful lot of your time just searching for rare items that he can sniff out, with a few bonus treasures to be found for subsequent playthroughs. But as general gameplay goes, all this dog-following gets very tiresome, and adding that to the sappiest main character I have ever played makes "Rule of Rose" a game that you might go off playing after a few hours.

Creepy but gripping

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: October 09, 2007
Author: Amazon User

First off, this game is NOT for those looking for something specializing in fighting. This game is great not for the combat (because I assure you, the combat is incredibly flawed) but for the beautiful artistic direction and the whole mystery behind it.
This game is not for the easily affected for it shows scenes of underage lesbianism.
The game is for those who appreciate the artfulness of creating video games and piecing together the disturbing backstory of the game.
The bosses and overall combat in the game is horrible. Although there are only three bosses in the entire game their difficulty level and overall method of defeating enemies is flawed.
The first boss is fairly simple to beat although inredibly annoying, the camera angles make playing difficult as well as Jeniffers wussy way of fighting.
The second boss is fairly simple, but takes an extraordinary amount of patience.
Oddly enough, the third boss is so easy it's almost a joke.

Rule of Rose is a beautifully designed game with much more to do and explore other than pounding on the X button for hours at a time.

There are many better survival horror/adventures out there...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: April 23, 2008
Author: Amazon User

First of all, I don't see the controversy in this game that everyone was talking about. It's disgusting yes, it may make you cringe, but not in a way other survival horror games do since all the freaky moments in this game involve being poked in the face by rats tied to sticks. Oh boy! Sign me up!

Just kidding. While that's reason enough to move on to many of the better survival horror games out there (Silent Hill and Siren are great), the controls in this game are utterly useless, since there is no gameplay whatsoever. You spend half of each level encountering no monsters, just running around telling a dog to find stuff, and that's worse than you think. You'll find an item that has no use but so that the dog will smell it and find another item that has no use, and so on and so on, until you finally find a healing item that will heal about 3% of your health bar. Oh happy day when you find that reclusive item.

And you'll need it because the boss battles are out of hand. And any of the monsters basically. This is one where you fight only if necessary, because if you want to stand in a room and fight the main character just closes her eyes and blindly stabs while 10 monsters overtake her. The boss battles are incredibly one sided, as they require you to dole out 50+ hits while dodging. attacks that will take huge chunks out of your life bar, and are almost unavoidable.

I'm not going to say that Rule of Rose is one of the worst games I've ever played, but it is slow, boring, and has a difficulty that will drive even the most hardened adventure and survival horror players like myself away from it. If you can keep from breaking your controller in disgust of the game over screen, and keep from falling asleep during the cutscenes (I literally did so twice), then you might be able to withstand Rule of Rose. I just hope you don't pay $30 like I did.

New Rules

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: September 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Rule of Rose is a game that definitely shows promise but for some odd reason can't live up to all that promise. The game, in terms of being a survival horror has the components down really well. It's got its creepy hair raising moments, complete with a creepy and disturbing look to most of it. The problem with Rule of Rose isn't in it's interesting story, or in it's interesting look; it's in the gameplay itself. Rule of Rose would instantly be better if it was simply fun to play.

Jennifer is a timid unlucky girl, who gets stuck at an orphanage in 1930's. It's a strange orphanage which consist of cult like rituals. She explores this orphanage only to discover that it's not what it seems. She later discovers that there's a secret society called the Aristocrat of the Red Crayon. This society captivates her interest, and so does a dog named Brown which she rescues. There's actually kind of a neat thing going for this game. For one, the story is interesting. It also manages to be really creepy and strange. It'll also make you think too. From there, though, the game doesn't have very many places to go.

For starters, the game is overall pretty boring. You'll find yourself exploring your surroundings, finding items, avoiding enemies and solving puzzles. Pretty standard and run of the mill for a survival horror game. A lot of the time Brown is with you, and he's quite a companion to have around. He can lead you through some of the game as well. You can have him sniff items in your inventory and he'll go off to discover similar items. If you're ever unsure of where to go you could probably just turn to Brown and he'll help you out. Exploration, however, somehow feels empty. Especially because there's not much combat involved in exploring, and at the tims when there is an enemy around, you won't really have to fight, you can easily just pass on by... which actually is a good thing.

There isn't a lot of combat or anything like that to be done in Rule of Rose. When there is it's a little unsatisfying. This is because Jennifer isn't really a confident fighter. When the games tells you she's timid they're not joking. Combat isn't difficult but it is frustrating. You'll have to hope beyond hope that her attacks hit their mark with your enemies. Brown can distract some of them, but it still boils down to Jennifer having to be accurate. You'll get by in the game, but there are moments when the gameplay is just frustrating.

Even worse for the combat is when you take damage. You don't know how much damage you're taking from an enemy. You might be dead before you know it simply because you don't know how much damage your taking. This can sometimes be frustrating. It wouldn't be nearly as frustrating if save points weren't few and far between in this game. You might be playing through long segments over and over again simply because you didn't know you were moments away from death.

Part of the gameplay issues also come with how repetative the game is. You'll find yourself going down several hallways and corridors that look just like other ones you've gone through. It's really easy to get turned around in this game. The game does have some good visuals, but they won't be found in the environment. They'll be found in the characters and cutscenes which are absolutely breath taking. The soundtrack is even better, being fairly creepy all together and being able to give you an uneasy feeling. The music is just fantastic overall.

The storyline to Rule of Rose will probably be enough to keep you going in this game, but the repetative nature of the gameplay and environments make the game more frustrating than it has to be. It's actually not a bad game, it's just a game that didn't live up to potential. For fans of the survivial horror genre, you might want to give it a try. For others, it's probably not your cup of tea.

The Good

+Interesting storyline
+The game has great character models and cutscenes
+Fantastic sound

The Bad

-The environments are repetative, and so is the task of exploring all the rooms throughout the game
-Combat is unsatisfying and frustrating
-The game is just boring to play
-The control scheme isn't all that great (not mentioned above)
-Because of the repetative environments, it's easy to get lost

it's more of a half/half thing

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: February 06, 2007
Author: Amazon User

yeah by most this game is NOT FOR EVERYONE, though this game does have a diffrent thing for anyone. it's like playing through a horror british novel. the thing that will take down most of the game is it's combat system, simple puzzles, a fuzzy look (CAN BE ADJUSTED), and it's SHORT. though a little adjusment with the options window and practice will make this game quite enjoyable ^_^ the most greatest pros of the game is RICH STORYLINE, BEAUTIFUL CUT SCENES, and creepy atmosphere. so this is recommended to fans of SILENT HILL, FATAL FRAME, AND HORROR RPG FANS.

So bad, so very bad

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 26
Date: September 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is slow moving (no run ability?), there is no onscreen life meter (WTF?), no ability to target enemies, imprecise controls, terrible combat system, yet extremely well done strange & bizarre cutscenes with beautiful graphics. I can understand people loving the trailer for this game, the cutscenes really are some of the best graphics I've seen in the PS2, but this is a game, not a movie. The control & combat sections (random guys each level and boss battles) are why this is so bad and many of the combat parts you cannot avoid.
This is the equivalent of a "dumb blonde" videogame - it looks really nice, but when you interact with it you realize it is borderline retarded.

If Only The Story Made More Sense...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: February 21, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Gist Of The Game: A young woman by the name of Jennifer rides a bus through the eerie night. Then, an unkwown child hands her a written story book and asks Jennifer to finish it. Before the girl knew it, the bus stops and the child runs off into the darkened woods. Stupidly though, Jennifer gets off and goes after the child. Little does she know that she just took her first steps into the growing nightmare. Now she must follow the rules of the misguided children to get out of it.
Horrible monsters, devilish children with cruel intentions, and even a mysterious man that seems to be stalking Jennifer... One question lingers in her mind: what did she do to deserve such torture?

Gameplay: You assume the role of Jennifer, who uses the loyal dog Brown for support. Even though you acquire many different weapon types as the game goes by, both Jennifer and Brown are fairly weak in battles, and it is best to just run away at times (unless forced to fight; you'll know by the "notifications" you get). While Jennifer is mostly good for just attacking when needed to, Brown is best for sniffing out any items or clues that you get throughout the story.

My Opinion On Game: I have to admit the creepy atmosphere and music really flow with each other, which does make the game "horrific" I guess the word is, but the game does lack in many other things though. For starters, the main character can really annoy you alot. It makes you wonder why she won't stand up for herself when it comes to the children. How can she let them push her around like that? Also, Brown is no good, except for sniffing out the items you need, otherwise, he sucks in battles -- I mean, barking? It doesn't really do much for you.
I think the biggest of the "lackings" would have to be the storyline; it doesn't make much sense at all. Why is Jennifer there, why is there a creepy man who seems to keep calling Jennifer "Joshua", and the monsters...just what does it all mean?
Oh yes, the battle system could be redone. Attacking the monsters is quite hard, and even avoiding/running from them can be extremely tricky! The game would be a bit easier if they toned down the number of monsters just a tad; and besides that, a better aiming system for Jennifer: she's rather slow swinging/shooting.

One Last Note: If you still intend on buying this game, I just have to let you know that there is ABSOLUTELY NO PLAYERS GUIDE FOR THIS GAME! If you need help/hints/advice, then you better start browsing game websites and see what you can find.
Even though there is no player's guide, I'll still give a little advice/hints that you won't be able to find in the instruction booklet:
1. Always Expect The Unexpected: you never know where/when those monsters will show up, so be on the lookout (you can usually tell they're in the same room as you by the whispers, grunts, etc.).
2. Try To Find As Many Health Items As Possible: I have mentioned before that Jennifer and Brown are weak and can take quite a beating from the monsters/bosses that they encounter, so (before you assume you'll see a monster/boss) try to make Brown find as many health items as possible. You'll regret it if you dont'!
3. Be Aware Of What You Do In The Game: What you do in the game can affect the outcome of how the story will end. I can't tell you what you should or should not do, but just becarful at what you do.

Even though this isn't the best horror game I've seen, but it's unique/original story does make you want to play more and see how it ends. Although I really do suggest you think it over before buying this game, it's best just to rent it first and see how you like it. If you DO like this game, then the other games I suggest playing also (and much better and make more sense) are the Clock Tower series, Haunting Ground, and the Fatal Frame series.

Should Have Been a Movie...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: April 19, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I admit, I haven't played a lot of survival horror. I rented this game because I thought it would be a good intro to the genre without the need to worry about twitch shooting and ammo counts. Plus, the story sounded interesting.

Things didn't turn out that way. The game is SLOOOOWWWW. Action? What action? You spend your time running around through the same areas, looking for items. Sometimes you end up in combat. Mostly you run around.

I use the word "run" loosely, since Jennifer does not seem capable of fast movement. Imagine running with your legs tied together - that's her speed. (To add insult to injury, if you make her move too much, she bends over and pants once you stop her...)

On the other hand, graphics and audio are very well done.

Great Game for Horror Fantics

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 30, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game is a great game... Especially if you like twisty storylines and freaky horror.
The movies are awesome, i totally palyed this game for the storyline, which is confusing, but amazing if you look up every detail.
The fights are a little bit hard to control, but you don't have to fight all of the enemies, only boss fights.

Creepy fun

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: February 11, 2008
Author: Amazon User

The game is enjoyable in a fun/creepy way. The combination of masochistic children and a deeper chilling backstory makes for an engaging if sometimes puzzling time. Actually I found there were quite a few humorous moments as well.

The one major drawback, I felt, was that as the game progresses, so do combat sequences, in which the game does not excel. The controls are for combat are clunky and imprecise. This tended to get frustrating more than challenging.

Overall, I enjoyed the odd game for its idiocyncracies- I've never played another like it, but I admit it did drag on a bit and required lots of hunting each chapter/quest for items and clues over the same ground as previous ones.

Review Page: 1 2 3 Next 

Actions