Rule of Rose (PlayStation 2) review "A Rose among weeds, but mainly a thorn in my side"

I couldn't play Rule of Rose back when. Though initially due for release in my native England, an Italian game magazine published an overblown and borderline fictitious article about horrific contents that didn't actually exist, and a small scale moral outrage was born. In the midst of this, the UK publisher pulled out, leaving it without a distributor. 2006 Gary knew nothing about the political posturing and the rage-baiting dishonest journalism behind the storm; all he knew was that there was a horror game so twisted it had effectively been banned from sale. For decades, it remained a game I've desperately wanted to play - just not desperately enough to shell out the £500 or so copies sell for on EBay.

It's placed Rule of Rose on a pedestal of sorts - it's become the forbidden PS2 horror game for a lot of people whose access was stolen away at the last moment. I never forgot it; it stuck in my mind like a rotting synapsis so I was always going to find a way to circle back. Now that I have, I can tell you that Rule is a triumph of subtle explanation, of placing faith in the player to piece together lines of horrific secrets hidden both in and out of plain sight. It's peerless in visual storytelling, showing and not telling sudden bouts of crippling fear or having sobbing panic attacks unnervingly morph into sadistic glee. Carried by understated voice acting and intricately plotted music, Rule of Rose is an atmospheric marvel. Unfortunately, all that delicious atmosphere has been transported into a bloody awful video game.

Some of this can kind of be explained - for example, it moves away from the founding survival horror titles by abandoning tank controls. This seems like a surefire win, but Rule somehow screws even this up. There's no dedicated run button, so movement speed is mapped to the analogue stick, except it doesn't break out of the walk animation unless you're moving in a straight line. No diagonal sprints! The game also makes heavy use of fixed camera angles, which is artistically excellent. It ensures the grimy fairytale world is always perfectly framed. It's a shame the sudden change of perspective will often mean your character's direction will randomly change between screens, sometimes having you run back and forth between them before you're able to get your bearings.



This sucks, because Jennifer has a lot of exploring to do. You initially meet your timid protagonist aboard a bus, before she’s approached by a weird boy who presents her with a homemade story book and asks her to read to him from it. But she can't because all the pages are blank and the boy exits the vehicle while she searches for content. She follows, but he vanishes into the night, prompting the bus to abandon her in the middle of nowhere. Many of the game's chapters will start in somewhat similar fashion; you gain possession of a seemingly empty story book, and the pages will fill as you discover more of the chapter's story. The first book is called "The Little Princess", and the once blank pages are now filled with rudimentary children's drawings and the beginnings of a tale. The tale of a little girl who lost their parents in an airship accident and was sent away to live in a strange house.

Without a line of dialogue or an ounce of exposition, you instantly know that something's broken Jennifer. She's terrified all the time; her hands clasped under her chin and her shoulders hunched defensively. She spends the entire game looking like she's constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown. So following the boy towards a dilapidated mansion where children with bags over their heads gleefully bash a bloody sack with sticks probably doesn't help her. In a brilliantly unnerving sequence, she circles the mansion's walls looking for a way in while children's laughter mocks her from the courtyard. Their impish little heads peeking over the tops of the wall to glare at her, only to scatter away when she draws near. She eventually finds a way in. Things get drastically worse, very quickly.

The mansion is one of the two structures Rule of Rose takes place in. Both full of horrific secrets and, in adherence to ancient survival horror laws, locked doors you need to find a way to bypass. Each serves home to those pesky children you keep running across, and they're organised. Mainly, you'll be dealing with the spiteful ringleaders who have dubbed themselves the Aristocrats Club, and rule over the occupants - Jennifer included - with an iron fist. Aside from numerous cruel initiations and punishments, they also demand tribute, each chapter revolving around finding a gift in the hopes of pleasing them and avoiding their wrath. Ostentatiously, they're Rule's most presenting villain — but they're also just a collection of children who have clearly absorbed a lot of suffering. They're orphans for one; that's not a great start.



One of Rule of Rose's greatest strengths is how it exists outside a morality clad in blacks and whites, but is draped instead in ugly shades of red. Nothing is truly good and, in reaction, nothing can be truly evil; the world is awash with backhanded sympathy and the only consistency throughout seems to be to emotionally destroy Jennifer. Forced to shoulder this through the first few torturous hours, she'll finally find her only support. Just before she drowns in her despair, she rescues a yellow labrador who she names Brown and, all of a sudden, she's no longer alone. Brown is the goodest of boys and, as a new addition to Rule's macabre tale, he's a beacon of hope. As a mechanic in a video game, he's a detriment. From the moment he's adopted, he becomes the entire driving force behind exploration and everything follows the same pattern. You find something corresponding to an item you need to advance - Brown smells the item and then leads you directly to it.

It's not Brown's fault that this devolves the game further; his pathfinding is excellent and he'll do things like jump up against and scratch doors in an effort to point you in the right direction. But it's the absolute death of exploration because you suddenly have a canine GPS who shepherds you directly to each point of interest. And it sucks, because the environments absolutely demand exploration and deserve better than being relegated to glorified backdrops. It cries out for a more varied approach to using your dog that never happens. With precious few exceptions, this is the entire game now. But then, Jennifer stops a child stabbing a dead butterfly with a salad fork like a bloody idiot.

For all its clumsy faults, how Rule handles combat is by far the most exasperating. Now armed with cutlery, Jennifer discovers her first enemy; a creepy impish creature and you're forced into a very stiff fight. There's a lot wrong with Jennifer's fighting style, but that can be explained away by the fact that she's the furthest thing from a combatant you could possibly imagine. She's reduced to a pile of quivering anxiety whenever a child speaks to her in a harsh tone, so Chris Redfield she's not. The small upside is there's only one enemy and its weird jumping hug attack deals little in the way of damage, but it will be the last time you're faced with only a singular standard enemy. For the rest of the game, they'll travel in groups, but you can just run through them, as is befitting for your emotional wreck of a protagonist. Eventually, you'll gain better weapons than a fork, which makes fighting slightly less infuriating, but running away is always the best option. And then boss fights happen. And, for all my love of Rule's twisted aesthetics, I genuinely regret starting the game at all.

For the most part, these fights are bad, but manageable. What you need to do is circle behind your target where you can whack it in the back a few times while it displays the equivalent turning circle of a hovercraft. Brown will earn further best boy points by nipping at your foes, dealing little in the way of damage but being an MVP in distracting them, letting you wallop their spines a little more. There's very few of these encounters so you'd almost be able to write them off as something you can begrudgingly endure, then get back to the good stuff. Except the mermaid fight happens. And I hate it.



I hate it because it's narratively chilling. That it connects so many gruesome dots you've been drip fed into a perfect, awful epithet and then follows it with this broken mess of a battle is like being fed an exquisite meal and then being asked to wash it all down with sewer water. I hate it because it takes everything you've learnt to make combat tolerable and then renders it all crushingly obsolete - like how the monster constantly ascends only to reappear at random spots, making getting into a good attack position a matter of complete luck. I hate it because it has a projectile vomit attack that coats the floor, making you take constant damage if you get close, a thing you really need to do when you have nothing else to rely on but melee weapons. I hate it because it's suspended from the floor, making Brown a completely worthless ally. I hate it because it has so much health that, when coupled by your inability to land more than a couple of blows before it buggers off, it takes an age to kill. I hate it because you're far more likely to lose than win, and it's entirely down to poor design rather than player skill. I hate it because, when you do die, you realise there's no nearby save point so (for the first unfair death, at least) you will need to replay a chunk of the game to get back to where you were.

Rule of Rose is a game centred around cruelty, but its cruellest twist is also its greatest strength. Jennifer's torture is so intricate and personal that every little detail is drowning in hidden meaning. Every throwaway doodle in her storybooks, every seemingly random quest to appease her tormentors, even down to the apparent random placements of the items you collect. There's a context there you have no way of understanding the first time through; to fully grasp the awful truth, Rule needs a second playthrough, and asking someone to suffer through it again is downright barbaric. Here's the rub; talking about Rule of Rose is a hell of a lot more fun than playing through it. Sitting here, writing about the game, it's easy to remember it fondly for the things it does right, in how much care has been put into every element, in how forcing the player to put all the pieces together themselves makes it so much more involving. It makes every subtle twist of the knife so much more impactful. But to get to all the theory crafting, you have to play through the game first. And that's harder to recommend. It inspires a lot of hate in me.

Staff review by Gary Hartley (November 11, 2024) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.