Besides the vicious cruelty of the other children from the orphanage, there is also the misshapen, ghoulish creatures that often tail her throughout the game. She constantly finds herself surrounded by ruthless beings that mean her harm in this world.

It’s a disturbingly cruel place she finds herself in, and she’s relying on you to carry her through it. They taunt and pick at her from the shadows, steadily drawing her deeper into the orphanage and a world woven of childhood trauma made manifest. Jennifer, our deeply unlucky heroine, has returned to a strangely-familiar orphanage, one filled with alarmingly-cruel children. It’s frustrating and disempowering and nigh-futile because that is the battle you’re fighting as a child in danger. The combat, as enraging as you may find it, fully captures the helplessness of a child struggling to fight against the cruelty of the monstrous beings around them. It’s also a vital part in creating the mood of the game. It’s easily the game’s most frustrating element. In the state it’s in, combat is a frustrating affair where you’ll find distances difficult to parse, enemies have large invincibility windows, and you’ll often be outnumbered as you literally flail around trying to stab something with a dessert fork. Rule of Rose has a complex story that may have, arguably, been better served as a pure adventure game without combat, or as a narrative-based experience. It may also make you hurl your controller across the room in a blind rage at its clunky, unwieldly combat. It’s gut wrenching in its unflinching look at its themes, being a work that can be deeply upsetting to take in. It’s heartbreaking in its depiction of children being left forever damaged – forever reshaped into their own kinds of monsters – by the abuses of adults around them. Rule of Rose is a game about cruelty and abuse, and how these horrific behaviors feed into themselves, creating further harm in a cycle that needs to be purposely broken. Purposely Wretched – The Thematic Power of Rule of Rose’s Combat

Rule of rose remastered