Here’s where I intend to post reviews of the games I’ve played in this year’s festival.
There may be spoilers
I’m not the greatest review writer, and they seem to end up being long rambles.
I’ve only played one all the way through so far, and I’ve not seen anyone else review this particular game yet. So here goes.
The Bones of Rosalinda by Agnieszka Trzaska
As soon as I saw her name in the list, I knew this would be one I had to play as I’ve enjoyed all Agnieszka’s other games.
In this one, you play as the titular character. You are a skeleton who has recently been reanimated by a necromancer as part of his dastardly plan to raise an undead army to overthrow a city. But the spell goes wrong, causing you to explode.
This gives the game a pretty unique mechanic as since you end up in pieces, you can control bits of you independently when they’re not attached. If there’s an opening too small for your whole body to go through, you could send an arm in to have a look. There’s even puzzles where separate body parts need to work together to solve.
This all could be a pain if the game world was huge, but thankfully it’s quite small so it’s no trouble keeping track of your various extremities and putting yourself back together.
I’d say all of the puzzles are pretty easy which is perfect for me as I’m not the greatest at solving puzzles. I even worked out how to navigate the 1 maze, so that makes I think 2 games where I’ve managed to do this. I hate mazes.
There’s a hint file provided, made like Invisiclues. I don’t know if there’s any red herrings as I only needed to refer to it once.
Another thing about the game that I think is quite unique is the writing style. Rather than being in second person present, it’s written in 3rd person past. So it might say “Rosalinda reached in and picked up the cup”. It goes back to the present tense when looking at objects though. I don’t know if that’s intentional or a bug.
I enjoyed the story, but I don’t want to say too much about it in case I spoil it. So I’ll just say if you like Agnieszka’s others, you won’t be disappointed.
I only came across one bug that I can remember. To explain it using an example not in the game, if you found a ‘large dusty square thing’, then after cleaning you discover that it’s actually a ‘slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick’, both that and how it appeared originally will be in your inventory.
There’s a few spelling and rammer mistakes but I expect those will be ironed out in a future release. I’m not the best at either so who am I to criticise.
I’ve said this before, but one of the things I love about Agnieszka’s games is that they’re Twine games with puzzles. To me, they seem to be what I imagine an old point and click adventure such as The Secret of Monkey Island would be like to play if they were made accessible to me as a blind player.
So to sum it up, it’s wonderful and I highly recommend it.