Six years in the making, the new point-and-click adventure by Lamplight City developer Grundislav Games is finally out. While taking place in the same shared universe, Rosewater will leave players with quite a different taste from its Gabriel Knight-inspired predecessor. Is it worth your time, or is this caravan really headed to nowhere? Let’s take a look at it in our Rosewater review.
A train heading nowhere
Rosewater opens with our protagonist, Harley Leger, heading to a new city in the hopes of starting a new life. Her arrival in Rosewater is met with an encounter with a few dubious fellas, not to mention another one thrown out of a window, but Leger wants to be a journalist and won’t be stopped. Her first task? Interviewing a unique individual who is putting on a Wild West show.
Indeed, if you are smelling the coal and manure of a Back to the Future 3 reference, you are on the right train, buddy. Rosewater takes place in its version of the Wild West, which isn’t incredibly different from the actual thing, complete with gunslingers, strange communities, and people just trying to make a living. Just, y’know, with more aether and airships. The writing shines right from the beginning, with a strong-willed protagonist and many interesting characters, some of whom will be part of our group.
Harley’s arrival in Rosewater is just to get the plot going and a team of hunters together, since the major part of the story will take place on the road. Once gathered your party in the first two hours of the game, Rosewater switches up. Developer Francisco Gonzalez decided that Rosewater would be constructed of a collection of events, while your party is headed towards El Presidio in search of a supposedly huge treasure.
You keep your freedom of choice in most of these events, such as helping people or just heading to sleep instead. At the end, it is possible to play back Rosewater only to experience the events you haven’t seen in your first playthrough. The randomized events throughout the game are a nifty idea, but a design choice that also leads to what I felt was the one drawback of Rosewater.
Connecting the dots
As opposed to the classic design of Lamplight City, all about visiting several locations and going back and forth between them, Rosewater opens up the game after Harvey and her posse leave the town in search of treasure. But, at the same time, it constricts the player into small narratives that seem to vary in quality and interest.
While many stories will stay with you, such as the captain haunted by nightmares of his gone crew, others seem to simply be there, like having to lure away a wildcat from a postal office. They vary a bit too much in tone and quality. Also, having events randomized will, unfortunately, make some of them a bit “superfluous”, which might lead to the player wanting to simply continue the journey, rather than being forced to track down another knife or a stick of wood.
Of course, Rosewater is not about the destination (especially since the final act is not the strongest send-off to the story), but all about the journey. If, during these continuous pauses on our journey, we were getting to know our strange lil’ group better or experiencing significant Wild West stories, then that design choice would gel perfectly with the narrative, like beans and tomato. Thus, I would not be complaining. Which is a new one for me.
Your crew also seems not to have learned much from previous encounters and will often walk into suspicious places and people without much thought. This leads to many clear cases of “main character syndrome”, since it will be down to Harvey to find a way out of several problems and messes. The game often won’t explain why our crew is not interested in helping. Also, the freedom of choice sometimes does not really make a whole lot of difference, and, other times, it just isn’t there (why can’t Danny find items by himself? Why can’t Miss Lola track down a piece of chalk without help?).
More than the sum of its parts
Still, that doesn’t mean I didn’t experience many beautiful things in my journey through Rosewater. Little conversations between the characters, snippets of memorable music, virtual interactions that seem more human than most stuff I’ve seen on social media these past three years. Not to mention, the incredible hand-drawn art that, while I played on the Steam Deck, I still felt I had to go back to a monitor again and again just to see how gorgeous it looked.
Also, let’s not forget the high-quality voice acting that does wonders in making the world of Rosewater come to life. It feels like every character was chosen perfectly for its voice actor, something I haven’t seen in a game for a long time. Those six years were not spent in vain; the constant attention to detail and the painstaking quality choices that the developer decided to take shine through from beginning to end.
Still, I wish all those beautiful things were connected by a strong enough thread to make me consider recommending Rosewater to everyone. Naturally, adventure gamers and lovers of point-and-click games are going to eat this up, and for good reason. I am confident that Rosewater will find its audience and keep it glued to their seats until the end.
Still, I wished there was something more, perhaps a way of making me believe I was part of a group, rather than the leader and player. I wasn’t a fan of this constant reminder that, without me, this journey wouldn’t exist or matter. Something that would make me think that there was a good reason for our long trek to El Presidio to be constantly interrupted, rather than the necessity of having to track down new items and puzzles for me to solve.
Sometimes, you want the adventure gameplay to take a backseat and let the real narrative shine through, like other games have done before, such as Kentucky Route Zero. As it is, Rosewater prefers to keep things traditional, much like a good can of beans warmed on an open fire in the desert. It will fill you up, but perhaps also leave you with a full belly dreaming of sweet dessert.
This review was made possible with a key provided by Application Systems Heidelberg. Rosewater is available on PC.
Rosewater: Rosewater is a beautiful hand-drawn trek through the Wild West. While at times not as engaging as some of its parts, this is an adventure that genre fans won't want to miss out on. – Damiano Gerli
