You can read my full review here[grungegamer.wordpress.com].


From the moment I opened up Rosewater, I was taken aback by how cinematic it is, from the movie credits-style introduction, to the immensely deep dialogue. Every single piece of the game is crafted with unbelievable care, like it’s the most effort Grundislav Games has ever put into anything (which is not to say his other games had no effort, they certainly did). It’s just that Rosewater appears to be on another level from any game he has made prior and even from many other point and click games. It feels like a step forward for the genre as a whole.

I was also impressed with the art and animations. Francisco rotoscopes all of his animations, which adds a great deal of detail and fluidity to every movement. Every time someone rises from a chair, sits on the floor, or falls out of a window, you can imagine a real person doing those exact movements because they did. While many point and clicks use pixel art (and of which I am a massive fan) for both backgrounds and character sprites, this game uses fully illustrated backgrounds in a painterly style while the sprites are more detailed pixel art. They have cartoonish flourishes which allows characters to be more expressive.

The puzzles were generally doable. Most of them weren’t very easy for those of you who complain when puzzles are too simple, and a good number of them require you to cycle through rooms wondering what you missed or could have tried. I did get stuck on two puzzles towards the end, but one was due to a bug Francisco was fixing (if you’re reading this, thank you for helping me solve the puzzle in the Discord lmao) and the other ended up not mattering because I found an alternate resolution (that may have also been the better solution?). It seems that the more narratively “good” solutions are harder to identify.

Speaking of which, it’s astonishing how many choices and paths this game can take you on. This is a game that absolutely encourages multiple playthroughs if you want to squeeze it for everything it’s got, which is something I love to see. Francisco has said that his hope is for two people to play the game and have two entirely different experiences, what a novel idea in this day and age! And while many games claim that’s what they’re doing, it’s rare to see them actually execute it as well as Rosewater. As I played every day, I kept comparing the Steam achievements between myself and my friend and saw things he got that I didn’t and vice versa which only made me more excited to replay eventually.

The voice acting was superb from beginning to end – as were the microphones, which led the quality of some recordings to be less than ideal in Grundislav Games’s predecessor Lamplight City (a game I love and recommend regardless). They got so many voice actors in this, and for the first time many of them were union actors. It was fun guessing who voiced whom (shout outs to Dave Fennoy, Roger Clark, Leilani Jones, and Ivy Dupler as the ones I was on the lookout for even before playing).

Rosewater is a wonderful cinematic journey I am eager to replay (I’m also waiting on that director’s commentary), and I wholeheartedly recommend that you do too.