Come on down to your local saloon and let’s have a mighty fine talk about treasure hunting, failed revolutions, and nude photography. It’s been a long wait, but this March finally saw the release of Grundislav Games’ Rosewater, a Western-themed follow-up to 2018’s excellent steampunk detective game, Lamplight City. Was it worth the wait? Darn right it was!
Set in a previously-unseen part of Vespuccia (the alternate America featured in Lamplight City), Rosewater follows eager journalist Harley Leger as she arrives in the frontier town of Rosewater for an exciting work opportunity. What starts as a simple assignment to interview a traveling showman evolves into a lengthy quest to find a missing scientist’s fortune, filled with laughter, mystery, wonder, and tragedy. Thankfully, you won’t feel lost if you haven’t played the wonderful Lamplight City, as Rosewater is a standalone tale. Long-time fans, of course, will appreciate the nods to the original game, including a notable family link!
Harley isn’t alone, as she gathers up a memorable and diverse cast of companions, and befriends (or antagonizes) a wide range of eccentrics and scoundrels. Indeed, the characters are where this game really shines, and the crew quickly starts to feel like family; you even get a loyal pet! Chat with your new friends as you explore, ask them for help when you’re stuck (young Danny is a far better shot than I am), and strengthen friendships through your dialogue choices. No romance, unfortunately! Character relationships will affect how your journey progresses, including which sidequests you see and how certain story beats turn out. If you take to the characters as much as I did, you’ll definitely want to prepare some tissues or a punching bag for some later scenes!
Rosewater‘s gameplay follows a traditional point-and-click format, complete with an inventory, dialogue choices, and minigames that range from picking locks to digging up dinosaur bones. The mouse controls are smooth and responsive, with some additional quality-of-life features such as a hotspot toggle and regular autosaves on top of the genre’s traditional manual save function; heck, I had over 20 files going by the end! Meanwhile, though the game features some timing-based sections, you can generally rely on another character for help or try a different method.
While Rosewater‘s road-trip format is rather linear (perhaps to the disappointment of some players), you have plenty of choice in how the dialogue, character relations, and sidequests turn out. Some sidequests may not even appear in a single playthrough, whether by chance or due to your relationships, and even your diary entries reflect your choices; a nice little detail! Of course, your decisions impact some major plot points down the road, as well as the ending scenes. All in all, Rosewater is worth playing more than once! The game is lengthy, too; at slightly over nineteen hours for a single run, it ranks among the longest point-and-click games I’ve ever played. I never felt bored either. Except for one area, there is minimal required backtracking, and fast travel between screens makes things even easier.
Rosewater features detailed, crisp locales ranging from old-fashioned saloons to forest sanctuaries, with one of my favorites being the cozy ambiance of an old sailor’s home during a sandstorm. The graphics are a little more modern than Lamplight City‘s pixelated backdrops but no less attractive, and I quite liked the detail put into minor background objects. On a negative note, a few of the town streets in the beginning areas feel a little flat, and some of the desert backdrops seem too similar, though these are minor quibbles compared with the overall size of the world and variety of locales. The characters and animals, meanwhile, are rendered with stylish rotoscoped animation, and feature in the occasional cinematic cutscene. While a bit choppy at times, it was certainly a nice surprise to see rotoscoping appear again!
Rosewater‘s background music is generally pleasant and fitting for the Western setting, with a wagon theme that will be playing in your head for days. Of particular note are the guitar pieces (and an emotional vocal track) performed by explosives expert Phil; even the other characters would agree that his music was a wonderful addition to the journey! Meanwhile, the voice acting impressed me overall (expect to hear a diverse range of accents), though I found Harley a little flat at times, particularly in the beginning.
I should note that the game still had some minor bugs during my playthrough, including a couple of scenes with audio glitches (Harley’s voice suddenly changing in volume), a forest scene that crashed upon trying to save, and the bonus artbook (gained after completion) being mysteriously bereft of any images. Thankfully, the autosave rescued me from losing any significant progress in the second portion, and patches are still being released, which will hopefully iron out any issues. [Editor’s Note: One such patch released only a day before publication that may solve some of these items.]
As I played through the first hour of Rosewater, I was expecting the game to continue with a narrow focus on the initial town and its inhabitants, perhaps featuring more interviews with the residents and jaunts to nearby locales. This turned out not to be the case at all, and as the game opened up, I was pleasantly surprised and maybe even a bit blown away by the epic scope. It was easy to put myself in the shoes of Miss Leger, as I, too, enjoy doing a bit of writing here and there. Road trips, not so much, but I’m always up for adventure in a handy point-and-click format, safe from the grasp of hungry coyotes, bothersome religious groups, and the long arm of the law. The game’s emotional depth surprised me as well, occasionally delving into heavy themes and shocking situations, yet the overall atmosphere is lighthearted, hopeful, and even a little bit inspiring, thanks to the solid writing!
With its long journey, wonderful characters, and a plethora of choices, Rosewater is truly an impressive achievement among point-and-click games. If you have the slightest interest in graphic adventures or the Western genre, this is an experience not to be missed!
