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Number of Ratings: 41
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Previous | << 1 2 >> | Next | Show All - Spike, May 28, 2017
- ifMUD_Olly (Montana, USA), April 21, 2017
- verityvirtue (London), January 7, 2017
- Audiart (Davis, CA), October 24, 2016
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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.
- joncgoodwin, June 3, 2016
- Denk, May 16, 2016
- Doug Orleans (Somerville, MA, USA), May 10, 2016
- Teaspoon, May 8, 2016
- Jason McIntosh (Boston), February 17, 2016
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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.
- E.K., November 19, 2015
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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.
- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 9, 2015
- Pegbiter (Malmö, Sweden), November 9, 2015
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), October 31, 2015
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