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Sub Rosa v3
This is the story-file for the third release of Sub Rosa (2023).
Requires a Glulx interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
Competition Story File
IFComp 2015 release
Requires a Glulx interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
Walkthrough
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Sub Rosa

by Joey Jones profile and Melvin Rangasamy

2015

(based on 40 ratings)
7 reviews

About the Story

A puzzle game about secrets in the Age of Lead. You've spent seventeen years preparing for an infiltration. Stealing the Confessor's secrets is only the beginning: it will all be for nothing if you leave a trace.


Game Details


Awards

Nominee, Best Setting; Winner, Best Puzzles; Nominee, Best Individual Puzzle - 2015 XYZZY Awards

6th Place overall; 2nd Place, Miss Congeniality Award - 21st Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2015)

46th Place - Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2019 edition)


News

Sub Rosa has just been updated with a long overdue bug fix release. If you want to play a 'New Weird' fantasy game with challenging but fair puzzles, about infiltration, mystery, and with a library of 101 unique books implemented... then this is the game for you!

Thanks go to everyone who has played it over the years, for this third release we were able to implement more quality of life features and fix a few bugs, epistemic errors, and typos that emerged out of the Club Floyd and Seattle/Tacoma IF play sessions.

The most important fix is that some missing descriptions present in the competition version but absent in the second version have been restored. Examining your starting items now has their convoluted backstories once again.

-Joey & Melvin
Reported by Joey Jones | History | Edit | Delete
Delve into the mansion of your rival and steal the secrets that lie within!

Sub Rosa's post-comp release is now available to play. A number of minor bugs and typos have been fixed, some hints improved, and some new entries have been added to some of the exhaustive volumes in the library.
Reported by Joey Jones | History | Edit | Delete
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Member Reviews

5 star:
(22)
4 star:
(11)
3 star:
(7)
2 star:
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Number of Reviews: 7
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Most Helpful Member Reviews


6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
An espionage game that rewards attention to detail, July 20, 2017
by Cory Roush (Ohio)

This is one of the best - if you're a fan of espionage AND fantasy/sci-fi, you're going to love this too.

I want to see more of this setting. The REVEAL at the end (no, literally - if you achieve a perfect score, you have access to a command that describes the game's biggest twist and explains the "perfect" ending) left me speechless and also wanting more.

One of the game's biggest puzzles is simply leaving no trace that you were ever there to begin with. This sounds like it'd be a real chore, but it actually required me to be 100% engaged at all times so that I could remember how I had entered the mansion and what I had disturbed. It also allows the authors to completely avoid one of the tropes that is my biggest pet peeve with interactive fiction: you're not forced to be a pack rat... in fact, there are a lot of items that you conceivably could pick up and take with you but are prohibited from doing so because they'll leave traces that you could not clean up. So clever, and I appreciate it so much!

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Weird espionage, November 16, 2015
by CMG (NYC)

Confessor Destine is an unimpeachable authority. His spotless personal record ensures that he can wield great power in society by exploiting other people's indiscretions, charging them with crimes, without ever having his own position questioned.

You play as someone who has a bone to pick with him. You have been preparing for years to break into the Confessor's mansion and dig up some dirt. You begin the game wearing a pellucid llama-suit that makes you invisible, and you will enter the mansion through a spatial intersection in a giant leather cliff that cuts into another physical plane.

I want to say that this game is surreal, but I don't think that's accurate. It's set in a fantasy world with very unusual qualities, but within this world everything is consistent and makes sense. There's no dream logic. There's just strange logic. The finesse required to achieve this subtle distinction in the writing is spectacular.

I don't want to say too much about the world, because the game's primary pleasure comes from exploring that world. I do think you will have to have a certain taste for peculiarity to enjoy the game though. It made me think about Edward Gorey. Consider this organization system in the Confessor's library:

You could choose a specific book or one of the seven eternal categories: damp, forgotten, implausible, pejorative, exhaustive, unsettling and beseeching.

If you look at the "forgotten" books, some titles you'll find are Urn Dwellers, Emponderations Most Wearysome, and History of The Boundless Plains. In the "damp" category there is a book about milking called Milking.

This library is probably the game's greatest achievement. It has 101 books, and you can read them all, and they are all different and wonderful and enrich the world. At the same time, the library also illustrates the game's biggest weakness, which is that it demands an exhaustive attention to detail from the player to solve its puzzles.

Sub Rosa rewards patience and critical thought, and it does not respond well to being rushed through. Some players will be frustrated by its difficulty, and the puzzles could certainly be clued more overtly, but this is exactly what will draw other players to the game who want a challenge. Even though I personally needed hints, that didn't detract at all from my satisfaction with the game's other elements.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Old-fashioned difficulty, joyfully original world, June 3, 2018

I generally have a policy of not rating or reviewing games that I haven't played to completion (and worse yet, this game famously has a big Twist Ending of which I am totally unaware), but Sub Rosa is so difficult and yet so enjoyable that I feel compelled to break my policy, so that I don't have to wait until 2050 or whatever to express my appreciation for its writing and worldbuilding.

Because those are really this game's main strengths. When I first played Sub Rosa during the 2015 comp, and got about a room and a half in, I was practically buzzing with joy at how fun, how original this game is. A couple years later, I've calmed down a little, but it's still an absolute joy. As others have mentioned, the library is a particular highlight, but really there's great stuff all over.

However, it is an old-school hard if-puzzle game. I keep losing my save files, not because of any extraordinary technical issues but just because I'm not used to sticking this long with a game that makes you save. Normally I give up on puzzle games pretty quick, but I like the writing in Sub Rosa enough to stick around.

I do wish that the walkthrough was a little bit more comfortably spaced, or that there was a more robust in-game hint system, so that I didn't have to deploy cat-like reflexes to avoid spoiling half the game when I just wanted to get unstuck from one puzzle.

Anyway, excellent game, good enough to convince me to bend my typical preferences and practices in order to stick with it. Like For A Change, this is worth playing even if you're not really an old-school IF type. I'm certainly not, and I'm enjoying it anyway.

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See All 7 Member Reviews

Sub Rosa on IFDB

Recommended Lists

Sub Rosa appears in the following Recommended Lists:

IFDB Top 100 by Pegbiter
An automatically updated list utilizing an IMDb style Bayes estimator to calculate weighted ratings based on all IFDB ratings. Questions and comments can be placed here....

2020 Alternative Top 100 by Denk
(Created 24-Jul-2020) The purpose of this list is not to compete with the IFDB Top 100 but to provide an alternative view, which makes sense for some games. Philosophy: 1. If a game only has 5-star ratings, it is because the game hasn't...

Best fantasy games by MathBrush
These are my favorite games that include some sort of magical or fantastical element. Games with mostly horror or sci-fi elements are on other lists, as are surreal games, fairy tale/nursery games, and religious/mythological games. I've...

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Polls

The following polls include votes for Sub Rosa:

Non-human Perspectives by Rhetta_Lynnea
I'm looking for IF narrated by aliens, animals, anything.

For Your Consideration - XYZZY-eligible settings of 2015 by verityvirtue
This is for suggesting settings from games released 2015 which you think might be worth considering for Best Setting in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination. The category will still be text-entry, and games not...

For Your Consideration - XYZZY-eligible implementations of 2015 by Brendan Patrick Hennessy
This is for games released in 2015 which you think might be worth considering for Best Implementation in the XYZZY awards. This is not a zeroth-round nomination. The category will still be text-entry, and games not mentioned here will...

See all polls with votes for this game




This is version 19 of this page, edited by JTN on 3 September 2023 at 2:08pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page