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Number of Reviews: 7
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1-7 of 7 Onirica e surreale, November 1, 2022Non male, intrigante l'idea di catapultarci direttamente in un mondo onirico e surreale senza spiegazioni di sorta, lasciando che la storia ci si sveli pian piano durante l'esplorazione.
Realistica ma un po' tediosa la trovata di dover rimettere ogni cosa a posto prima di andarsene: riuscire a ricordarsi tutto č pių impegnativo degli enigmi veri e propri, che in fondo sono pochi (anche se costruiti in modo logico).
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1 people found the following review helpful:
Sshh. It's a secret., December 6, 2019First location: Leathery Cliff. I was hooked.
The concept of the game is intriguing: Political espionage to undermine the position of someone of high societal standing.
You break in to a marvelously described and well-implemented mansion to find evidence that the owner of said house has unacceptable secrets. Some of these secrets are hidden in plain sight, others take quite a bit of examining, searching, and doing rather improbable things.
The puzzles range from "Just X and search and you'll find something" to using inconspicuous objects to unusual ends.
Getting out of the house without compromising your own trustworthiness is as important as getting in in the first place. (And both are hard.)
Very good and rewarding game. Very replayable too, if you left some loose ends the first time (or didn't understand where the loose ends came from.)
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5 people found the following review helpful:
Old-fashioned difficulty, joyfully original world, June 3, 2018I 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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6 people found the following review helpful:
An espionage game that rewards attention to detail, July 20, 2017This 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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1 people found the following review helpful:
Wonderful., September 18, 2016I hadn't played any IF in over ten years when I stumbled across Sub Rosa at a local convention for independent games. I was immediately intrigued and had to keep playing at home!
The writing of this game is absolutely wonderful and so much fun to read. It had me laughing out loud and gasping in surprise.
And the puzzles! They were really fun! I can't say much more without giving things away. But A+ puzzle design - tough enough to be interesting, but I was never hopelessly stuck.
The length of the game is great, too. Short - but not too short! Highly recommend.
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1 people found the following review helpful:
A dark fantasy about stealth and finding secrets. Best to take your time., February 3, 2016I enjoyed Sub Rosa, and rank it in the top 5 of IFComp. It's world-building is marvellous; you explore a strange house in a strange world consisting of different 'planes' (in the Dungeons and Dragon's sense, and in the mathematical sense, and in the geographical sense).
The house and the backstory are weird and interesting, like a 1001 Arabian Nights written by Steven Moffat and David Eddings.
As your find out very early on, your goal is to find 7 secrets to destroy someone. Your secondary goal is not to get caught or noticed.
The game is enjoyable, and the puzzles are great, but it suffers from a bit of hunt-for-clues, like Where's Waldo. There is a library with 101 books, some of which are obviously important, and others which are necessary for winning but not clearly marked out.
As another example of the hunt-for-clues issue, there is one puzzle you solve by examining a background item not usually implemented, interacting with it in an unusual way, using that to interact with another important thing in an unusual way, and then examining two things in succession.
Thus, this game is best-suited for the meticulous. Fortunately, its rich backstory makes such meticulousness very rewarding.
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6 people found the following review helpful:
Weird espionage, November 16, 2015Confessor 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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