It’s as if the game itself doesn’t care about you. There are only a couple tracks of music in the whole game that are looped over and over again, so you’ll hear the same out of tune violin or piano no matter what you’re doing, exploring or fighting. Feeling loneliness when you’re amongst others is more devastating than if you were actually alone. All of them are painfully indifferent to Jennifer’s existence, which actually adds to the sense of loneliness and isolation. During the long stretches of exploration, the environment is populated with several characters: girls from the club, boys that just want to fight with wooden swords, and a couple of uncaring adults. Jennifer is ostracized from the very beginning. The Aristocrat Club demands one gift every month and failure to bring a proper gift results in a nasty punishment as well as social isolation. Whereas other horror games create their scares through disturbing imagery and scenes of violence, Rule of Rose derives it’s horror from scenes of intense bullying and mental, not physical, torture. You play as Jennifer, a new arrival, and as a new arrival, you’re at the bottom of the social ladder. Rule of Rose mostly takes place in an old orphanage and a crumbling airship, and both places are ruled by a group of young girls that call themselves the Aristocrat Club. Enemy encounters are rare throughout the first half of the game, and while they do become more common during the second half, there are still long stretches of time in which you just wander the dilapidated environment with your dog, sniffing out potential gifts for the Aristocrat Club, which is the true source of horror in this game. This genre has always been slow paced and has never focused on combat, but Rule of Rose takes this to an extreme.
Rule of Rose is a unique sort of survival-horror game.
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