Rosewater

It's been a few years coming, but Rosewater is a wonderful adventure game well worth the wait. From a technical standpoint, the game is high quality throughout. The art and animation are great; it's clear a lot of love and dedication went into it. The voice acting is on point throughout and adds a great deal to the game. And the music! It's thematic, interesting, and expansive, and really brings the game to life. I can see why the soundtrack is offered as DLC - buy it - it's great! The game design is very well done, with straightforward mechanics that complement the narrative, rather than distracting from it. The narrative structure itself has an interesting way of letting you make choices that affect the progression of the game in various ways. All through the game, the focus is on the characters though. The people you meet while progressing through the game have characters arcs that you can choose to delve into in various ways, which gives the game a lot of depth (and makes me want to replay to see what else I might have done in certain areas). Plus it's fun to see the connections to Lamplight City that are scattered throughout. All in all, the game is fantastic, exceeding my expectations - not easy to do when a game has been anticipated this long. Well done, Grundislav Games!

Great story, gameplay, voice acting, and writing.

Not done with the whole game yet, but I can safely put this at 5 stars. The writing, voice acting and music are all top tier. The gameplay loop is fantastic and I'm already planning a replay to try other choices.

The relationships and character developments keep the story moving and entertaining. Something worth keeping in mind is that the bond or the strength of your relationship with the characters can affect gameplay. Such as requiring you to make different choices to solve a particular puzzle or even offer up different story lines with good or bad consequences. A feature that my wife really enjoyed was the hotkey to highlight all interactive objects. It takes out a lot of the guesswork, but wasn't necessarily handing you the answers either. The game developer did a very good job of walking that line and still managed to keep the game challenging. This is a good game to start with if you've never played an adventure game before, but also an enjoyable one if you're already familiar with the genre.