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The Rosewood Masquerade's itch.io pageResults
Ranked 53rd with 4 votes
| Criteria | Rank | Votes |
| Judge's Choice | #20 | n/a |
| People's Choice Vote | #53 | 4 |
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.
Theme
Doing a heist to steal the rose diamond. Unfortunately the game is too easy to feel accomplished.
Gameplay
Mostly moving and grabbing things with three characters. This would’ve been really fun if there were more puzzles or challenges in the game.
Presentation
It’s ok for the most part. But there are huge empty maps that I feel needs to be compressed or added more decorations. For a mansion, the whole place feels sparse.
Engagement
I was excited to do a heist only to be disappointed…I expected something more from a game that required 3 characters and implied problem solving.
Total – 43/80
58/80
Short game. Full of puns. A few nice mechanics, but can be improved upon for Quality of Life such as not having your cyclops start at the beginning if you are skipping a certain event and switch in the initial map.
The game was fairly short and rather anti-climatic. That sort of works, but it felt like a lot of the game relied on the humor aspect and the ending especially felt like that was the main focus.
This was super charming and I was disappointed it ended so soon. Despite not learning a whole lot about any of them, the three characters were very nicely matched and their abilities have all sorts of potential in a longer game (you are doing that, right? Please?). I like the graphic style but there was also a lot of empty space in the environments. Puzzles were cool in the way that there were few blatant hints but you’d eventually figure things out by looking around. The music was totally on-point too. Well done all around.
Score: 60/80
PRESENTATION
Graphics were custom works and looked pretty good together. The mapping was a bit on the bland and empty side.
The writing was good, with a few spelling errors here and there. The story itself was pretty light and had no real reasoning behind it, and the characters were okay but nothing very special when it came to dialogue and characterisation.
The music was fitting and whilst nothing really jumped out as great, nothing was jarring either. The sound effects were missing a fair amount.
The menu looked nice.
GAMEPLAY
Gameplay consisted of typical adventure fare - interact with NPCs or on-map objects to find items that will allow you to continue through the story.You could find items on the map that would allow you to access new areas. You could also change your main character in order to go through various different challenges - Vampire girl couldn't be chosen if garlic was in the item pack, but could see in the dark; Cyclops dude could break weakened fences and boost allies over walls; mouse kid could turn into a mouse and access vents.
There were also button pressing to open new areas.
It was all very simple, puzzle-wise, with no real challenge.
ENGAGEMENT
It was okay. Nothing too interesting but nothing really bad either. I couldn't say I enjoyed it much but I didn't dislike it either. It was a very standard game with it's own style. I would have liked for puzzles to have been a bit more involved and layered - have the Cyclops boost the vampire to go through a dark room and open a vent for the mouse kid to open a door for Cyclops to go through and break a wall for vampire to get through... for example. It was headed that way but then I guess time ran out.THEME
The theme was thievery and they managed to get the diamond, even though it wasn't really set up that well in text or mechanics bar the odd puzzle.48/80
Team Members
Lucas Harvey and Michael Cyrenne
Engine
RPG MAKER MV
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Comments
I was glad to get this one to do a secret Santa review on as I saw that I had already downloaded it and had planned to play it either way. It's a neat game that has what appears to be custom characters and tilesets and they look really good. The music is great too and fits the theme perfectly plus it's scoped well to fit into the "under one hour" suggestion for IGMC contest.
The game play is straightforward. You run around and find items that help you progress towards your goal. The unique feature here is that you independently control three different characters who each have their own special ability or two. You have to figure out how to utilize each one in order to either find items or to help the other characters gain access to areas of the map that they normally wouldn't be able to get to. There even appears to be multiple solutions to accomplish many of the various tasks which is really nice and allows for different experiences if you play through more than once.
The game provides a lot of helpful hints if you interact with the people and objects so I didn't get stuck or have to think too hard about how to move the story along which is often the bane of games like this. Kudos for that. There's also some interesting characters you interact with but unfortunately, due to the scope of the game required for IGMC, you don't get to spend enough time with most of them to really get to know them.
There's really only two negative things I can say about The Rosewood Masquerade and they're both very minor. The first is that, for a masquerade ball, there didn't seem to be a lot of people in attendance. Perhaps your characters got there early before most of the guests arrived. More likely, because of the custom art, the time crunch of the IGMC competition required that several guests be cut. Given more time, I'd suspect that the party would seem more lively.
The other one would be that it seemed to lack a certain wow factor. This is probably a personal bias, though. I wrote a game not too long ago that had a very similar character switching mechanic and required you have your characters work together to solve puzzles so that probably desensitized me to the central game play element. If I had to guess, I'd think that anyone who hasn't played many games like this, or hasn't spent a ton of time creating, testing and debugging game play similar to this, would find that wow factor switching between the three characters and figuring out how to use them to progress through the story. It is a really cool idea which is precisely why I did something similar before.
All in all, this is a very well done and enjoyable game. It's fun, has a unique plot and setting, is bug-free as far as I can tell and is pretty much solid all around. It's definitely worth checking out. I liked it a lot. Great job!
Nice game! Sadly, too short. Are you planning to work on it in the future?
Hey there, thanks for commenting. Thankfully, "too short" is great feedback. It let's us know that the original game is good enough for players to want more and that there's at least a small audience who'd play it again if we expand the game.
Working on this game in the future is a possibility, but right now our next project is up in the air.
Hopefully, next time we'll see Malkavians as well :)
You've done a tremendously good job with this game! The writing was snappy, the puzzles were witty and the characters were a lot of fun. You hit the sweet spot of there still being challenges, without it being frustrating or confusing.
I didn't manage to find all of the secrets, but I had fun going round as each character and seeing what they had to say. It took me 25 minutes to finish. Really nice work :D
Gee whiz, it's a reply from Rhino herself! *swoons*
Speaking on behalf of the ToasterovenX-side of the team, I'm really happy to hear that you enjoyed it. This was the first time either of us had created a full-blown game, let alone one with puzzles in it, so being able to provide something that's fun overall is an amazing feeling. Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks a bunch for the review! Speaking from the side of the team has no toasters or ominous letters, we put a lot of time into this game and it is awesome to see someone really enjoy it!