Rule of Rose

"Dull Beyond Belief"

In Haunting ground, you played a defenseless girl and her dog struggling against one of the horrors women face: rape.

Now, Rule of Rose takes the same girl/dog premise only this time deals with the other real world female horror: the hopelessly dumb, pointless, backstabbing based social hierarchies young girls set up amongst themselves and the hazing that goes along with it.

Demonic little girls are objectively the scariest possible things in horror, so how do you mess it up and make a horror game about them so boring? The answer is to make sure that NOTHING HAPPENS, EVER. This game is an endless string of events that seem like they might lead to something, but never do. Here's the entire game:

1. Cutscene of children running down a hall.
2. Chase after them
3. Repeat steps 1 & 2 a dozen times.
4. Cutscene of your teenaged character sitting there and taking abuse from small children almost half her age.
5. Faint
6. Repeat

I figured that at some point the girls would turn into Fatal Frame-ish demonic knife wielding ghosts, which is the very first lesson they teach you in J-horror school. I managed to stick with this game for only 2 hours, and 120 minutes of that was hoping that things would get better. But no, the game really is just about regular dumb female hazing. You can watch news footage of high school powder puff football incidents and get the same amount of "shock". This game is like someone took the movie "Mean Girls" then decided to give it the painfully boring pace and setting of a James Joyce novel, all while trying to give it the atmosphere of a second rate watered down Silent Hill.

It seems funny that your character will face horrible monsters (though you actually dont run into your first enemy until a whole HOUR into the game) with no trouble, but turns to complete jelly when confronted by small girls. Maybe it's due to some other hidden dumb girl law I don't know about. So far the objective seems to be climbing your way up through the female ranks by trashing the girl directly above you even though a previous cutscene had you both sobbing about how you're both the bestest BFF ever until your reputation with the other girls is on the line and suddenly Amanda is totally a fat pig that needs to be put in her place and also I heard that Eleanor is a lying witch who's been trying to steal Diana's man.

Combat is horrible. Worse than even the original Resident Evil. It makes hitting Silent Hill dogs with pipes look like Devil May Cry.

So to sum it up: dull. Next to Echo Night: Beyond, it's the dullest survival horror game I've ever played (and I've played nearly all of them since the first Alone in the Dark). There are no terrifying enemies or good mechanics like Fatal Frame, and no "WTF?" moments like Silent Hill. Even at its "scariest" moments, the most Rule of Rose can manage is a vague sense of something being kinda sorta almost odd and mildly disturbing, kind of like running into a crazy homeless person; you see him coming your way mumbling to himself, you tense up but he just passes by and you shrug your shoulders while continuing to walk. The only thing keeping this game from getting an even lower score is that it at least feels like it has some production value and the graphics are decent, plus it's at least a little better than Echo Night: Beyond.

I'd only recommend this game if 1.) You're a girl, 2.) "Mean Girls" is your favorite movie that you watch endlessly, and 3.) you somehow enjoy the most boring of Victorian literature like James Joyce.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/02/07