Rosewater

This is a fantastic game in the style of the old Sierra and LucasArts point-and-click adventure games (such as King's Quest, Conquests of the Longbow, Monkey Island, etc). The artwork, animation, and music are superb. The game's story is interesting and engaging. The puzzles are interesting, and have logical solutions, and often have mutliple solutions (sometimes hilarious solutions). The game gives you plenty to explore without ever feeling tedious. It is a real joy to play, and I can't recommend it highly enough!

Wonderful classic point and click adventure - but many riddles have more than one solution, your companions can like you or not, which also changes things, and some encounters you will have are randomised so you won't see everything on one playthrough. A must play for adventure fans. Also nice music and very well done voice acting.

Of the tail of Lamplight City, Grundislav Games makes another banger. This is my third review of an adventure game after my return to the genre after half a decade feeling exhausted with the genre. This one, despite differing visuals from Lamplight City that captured the love I had for Gabriel Knight. Grundislav takes a different route. Beckoning back to game's visuals like Outlaws and The Last Express. It took a bit to get use to the style, but after an hour or so of falling in love with the characters, it started to grow on me. The rotoscoped cutscenes, the exaggerated buildings from the american frontier. It all worked together beautifully. The story/gameplay, although being as point and clicky as it gets, captured everything I loved about Gold Rush and the classic Oregon Trail games. Sure, not technical as the latter, but the aspect of making your way across the frontier of alternative universe North America. From story set pieces, to vignettes of the lives of those on the great vast land of Vespuccia. It felt like a true western adventure that was willing to not fall into US propaganda. It all worked well, while choices felt like they mattered. Even some ingenious design decisions that manipulate how the narrative unfolds. The only downside was the first half hour of the game, feeling a tad basic. It could certainly turn some away before things really get interesting, but I promise, it does get A LOT better. What a great game. I would love to see more people experience this exciting game,. I hope to see more games set in this Lamplight world. Keep at it!

[b]Base Game - 8/10[/b] Rosewater is a high-quality point & click adventure game with an interesting plot, voiced dialogs, and carefully drawn world and characters. I would say the game is more like a road movie (but a game) with a little bit of science fiction. Based on trailer featuring the non-stop action scenes with dramatic music on top, I was expecting a western full of wild west adventures. Nevertheless, I liked the game as it encourages kindness and depicts a story in which characters are ready to help people they meet. [b]Achievements - 8/10[/b] Be prepared for multiple playthroughs with a lot of saving into different slots. Luckily game provides unlimited number of save slots and allows giving a custom name for each of them. Some achievements require maintaining lower or higher relationships with your companions. Relationships are maintained by interacting with companions and making choices. This affects the plot and consequently the achievements you earn. Probably one of the hardest achievements is the Magnificent Six achievement that requires maintaining the high relationship status with every companion throughout the game. But I made things easier for you and released a guide for this achievement ;) One more thing to note is that there is a target skill-based achievement in which you need to win a shooting contest with your first try. At first, I started to play the game on the Steam Deck, but then I had to switch to mouse as it was nearly impossible to target with a controller. But frankly speaking, for me it was hard to complete it even with a mouse :D

Terrible puzzles, uninspired story and the wokeness of all the characters is annoyong and frustrating.

"Rosewater" is a point and click adventure game, fairly traditional but also pushing the envelope. You play as Harley Leger, newly arrived in the wild west, accompanying her and a colourful cast in what turns-out to be a *surprisingly* emotional and creative experience. "Rosewater" city takes a lot of what works about the classics—no dead ends, no deaths—and throws in sensible puzzles. But the structure's quite innovative: It eschews the "Three Trial" template games like "Monkey Island" innovated, instead allowing multiple solutions to problems and letting you develop your relationships to different characters; the plot itself is built more like a picaresque novel's, adding in episodic subplots while building its major storyline. The character writing is particularly good. I should say "Rosewater" isn't strictly a western; it doesn't have the tone of something like the "Red Dead" games. It mixes 19th century futurism with its western setting, feeling closer to the movie "The Prestige" than "3:10 to Yuma". I don't *usually* like that, but "Rosewater" made it work. I finished the game feeling very bittersweet; that's what you want at the end of a big journey. (I'm listening to the soundtrack as I write this.) Please try it. You could also try "Lamplight City", set in the same world; neither is necessary for the other, but they're a great pairing. EDIT: Going over the achievements list has made me realise how much stuff I've missed, too. Amazing. I'll replay it later.

Great Point & Click adventure. Fun cast of characters. Gorgeous artwork. Excellent world-building.

Seemed like it would have been a cool game conceptually. It is too slow, and it is waaay too linear. There are parts that if you don't make the right decisions, you cannot advance the game. I do not recommend at all.

Western stories are a hit-and-miss deal for me, but Rosewater certainly feels like a great game. A classic point-and-click adventure, the narrative is at the forefront here. And the story of a group of people unrelated to each other in search of the fortune of an eccentric scientist just grabbed my attention and ran with it. Francisco Gonzales did a great job here, as is pretty much every Grundislav Games titles. A definite recommendation from me.

Rosewater is an excellent point-and-click game that's easily worth the cost. UPS: - A pleasant keep-it-moving pace. Only in the coda do we have any overlong dialogues. Until then, characters speak in brief sentences, and even those can be clicked through if the gamer gets impatient. The ability to double-click to quickly transition from one location to the next is also very welcome. - Act 2 is a string of mini-plots encountered on a thousand-mile journey. The brevity of those mysteries plus the keep-it-moving pace had me playing this game well into the night, thinking "I'll finish this mini-plot and log off," and soon after, "Okay, THIS mini-plot and then I'll log off." Addicting pace of play! - Solidly good characterization. While there is a touch of the stereotypical in the characters (just a touch, not a lot), none of them came off as implausible or poorly-voiced. - In the mini-plots, choices matter. The fates of the people you encounter on your journey depend on the gamer's choices. There were a couple moments where I had to actually pause and ponder potential outcomes before making a decision, and had to consciously remind myself that its just a game. Any game that can create that feeling in the gamer is excellent! - The overarching plot is reasonably interesting. This being forthrightly alternate history, the otherwise-implausible becomes easily believable within the setting, thus enabling a genuine feeling of suspense as the gamer wonders what's really afoot. - Excellent mood created by setting. After Acts 1 and 2 are in the Old West, when the action switches to El Presidio, I did feel the pleasant touch of relief being back in civilization, very similar to the feeling one gets after a weekend spent camping in the Sierras. For a mere game to create that same feeling is absolutely extraordinary! DOWNS: - While I enjoyed the mini-plots of Act 2 for their addictive pacing, I did notice that most of them are only veeery tangentially related to the main plot. I didn't mind, but I can see how other gamers might. - The puzzles are very easy, roughly on par with Elroy and the Aliens. This makes Rosewater perfect for gamers who are new to the genre, I didn't mind, but point-and-click connoisseurs who thrive on challenging puzzles might. CONCLUSION: I had a great time with Rosewater. It gave me my money's worth and satisfied my point-and-click craving. I'm now curious to try its predecessor, Lamplight City, and if a third installment in the series arrives, I will certainly be interested!