The Trials of Rosalinda

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Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 2 Write a review

I wrapped up my review of Spring Thing 2021’s The Bones of Rosalinda with a tossed-off wish for an eventual sequel, off the strength of its winning characters and engaging gameplay. Three years later, that wish has been granted, and it’s worth pausing for a minute to note how tricky sequels can be, balancing the audience’s desire for things to stay the same while also feeling different – characters should evolve but too much, the scope should broaden but not unrecognizably so, the gameplay should stay familiar but boast new twists and turns, and the plot should raise the stakes without undermining the original. With so many balls to juggle, it’s almost inevitable that one or two will fall, right? Yet Trials is a banger of a follow-up, delivering everything a sequel ought to and making it look easy.

The core of its success is once again the characters: double act of Rosalinda, a free-willed skeleton, and Piecrust, a wizard shapechanged into a mouse, is as compelling as ever, two plucky underdogs who use all their wits and heart to look out for each other. The supporting cast is even bigger this time out, though, and every one is a winner, including some returning favorites from Trials, like Teckla the conscientious ogre and Albert, a former servant of an evil wizard trying to make good. The newcomers make a strong impression too, though, with even some initially-antagonistic characters eventually joining team Rosalinda to help save the day.

Similarly, the story is much the same in its broad contours – there’s a naughty magic-user up to no good – but this threat feels distinct from the small-time necromancer of the first game. The villain has many more henchmen, and illusion-based powers that can strike terror into the hearts of all the living characters. The setting is also more engaging than the sometimes-samey dungeon of Bones; after an action-packed prelude that quickly shuttles between environments, the meat of Trials plays out in a haunted forest that’s grown up around a ruined magical city. It’s a standard fantasy locale in some respects, I suppose, but it’s enlivened by compelling images like an atmospheric underwater sequence where you need to swim among the city’s fallen buildings to recover an artifact.

Also in the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it camp is the parser-like choice-based gameplay. Once again, there’s a linear tutorial that carefully walks the player through the key elements of puzzle-solving, which involve switching between Rosalinda and her detachable, independently-controllable skeleton-limbs and Piecrust with his ever-growing magical powers. It’s a fast-paced affair, jumping around to a few different locations and introducing a new faction of overzealous religious warriors, which winds up pushing Piecrust more to the fore, as Rosalinda’s capabilities tend to require more set-up to be useful; regardless, it’s an effective refresher that benefits from a clear UI that makes it easy for the player to navigate a suite of options that could otherwise feel overwhelming. It helps that the puzzles are well clued, and progress in the main forest area carefully constrained, so that the player usually has a clear sense of where they need to go to advance the plot, and has a manageable two or three obstacles to work on at any time.

The writing throughout is unpretentious but effective; there are occasional passages where the tendency of each noun to have exactly one adjective starts to feel awkward, and a few typos (largely places where the past-tense narration slips into present tense), but the dialogue is strong, with each character having a distinctive and appealing voice. And while this is no indie platformer screaming I AM AN ALLEGORY, there are some pleasing thematic resonances between Rosalinda’s e pluribus unum puzzle-solving body and the way the larger group of characters bring their own unique skills and personalities to bear to support each other; it’s also no coincidence, I think, that the few truly irredeemable villains are the ones bent on controlling other people for their own ends.

So yeah, another Rosalinda game, another triumph. This is about as good as this strand of IF gets; if you added graphics and told someone this was a lost LucasArts demo, they’d believe you. I’m not as unconflicted about calling for a sequel this time out, largely because of a plot development that’s satisfying here but might make future installments tricky (Spoiler - click to show)(Piecrust’s transformation back into a human, I mean – wizards are fun and all, but they’re not mice, now, are they?), but I’m more than willing to be convinced.

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Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/10-12/24
Playtime: 4.25hrs

Well, this was just delightful. I’ve not had cause to reference “Twinesformers: Parsers in Disguise” in a while, apparently saving it for now. This is a Twine work, repurposed to support a parser-like gameplay style. There are inventories, spell lists, maps to navigate, items to search out and use or combine. I don’t know that I have seen a better implementation of this. The UI was deeply intuitive and natural, including navigating among multiple POV characters and even body parts! I was rarely lost in narrative flow or paths forward (just three times, actually, of course I’ll get to those).

The case against link-based parser play is that it enables ‘lawn mowering,’ exhaustively clicking all links in all combinations, until something works. ToR is not immune to this, but it resists it better than anything I’ve seen. I think it is a combination of the permutations available and the lovely prose of its story. Most object links can be clicked by any number of characters or sub-characters, and AGAIN in conjunction with any number of inventory items and spells. It can mushroom into an untenable amount of permutations, which encourages a more thoughtful approach to the puzzles.

The prose though, hoo. The prose is the beating heart of this thing. The tone is light, a deeply optimistic, just barely-short-of-naive positivity. This is conveyed economically, matter-of-factly, and so consistently that you can’t help but be swept along by it. Yeah, even me, the guy that hates poetry! The prose is ALSO soft cluing paths forward. And of course carrying the plot. Oh, and setting geographies and settings. Character too, it’s also providing voices and agency to a wealth of characters. SO MUCH TO ACCOMPLISH, ISN’T THAT INSANE?!?!?!

Okay. I hear your snorts of derision. “Reviewer,” you snootily say, “literally EVERY WRITTEN WORK does all those things. Its kinda written-narrative’s thing.” Yeah, well do they do it so EFFORTLESSLY? So CRISPLY? So gosh-darn SWEETLY??? We are talking mostly terse paragraphs of description and dialogue that do ALL that, plus provide soft cues to keep you progressing, PLUS warm your cold cynical hearts, you ivory tower bastards. I cannot overstate what a delight the prose style was in this work, how it carried me through some tough times and created a world it sucked to leave. I don’t know why, but this line just exemplifies what I’m talking about so perfectly:

"The upper ruins were not held together by magic, but, apparently, they were supported by the lower parts."

That wry, matter-of-fact voice, ah, I’m smitten. The other thing the above blurb captures is just how well-thought out the world and plot is. Despite being a fantasy of heroic undead, magic spells and artifacts, light geopolitics, everything works together in such a satisfying way. Most especially in puzzle construction. The ability for Rosalind to disassemble to solve puzzles was endlessly varied and invariably fun. Spell usage was a little more straightforward, but no less fun. Setups and payoffs abound every step of the way but especially in endgame. This is a work where SOMEONE IS TALKED OUT OF PREJUDICE and somehow my response was NOT ‘oh c’mon.’ Would it work that way in the real world? YOU DON’T KNOW, ROSALINDA AND TEAM HAVE NOT TRIED YET.

It gives me no joy to report there are some frictions, but I’ll try to dispense with them quickly. For one, the UI had an unfortunate scroll length where some options went unnoticed below the window’s edge. This caused me to spam/lawnmower the insanely large space, made more painful than normal for its breadth. Check your scrollbar first is my advice for those stuck.

There are some unanticipated solutions I wish had been addressed in game, most notably (Spoiler - click to show)not being allowed to feed a Tinctured Piecrust to a catfish and being unable to (Spoiler - click to show)get Ormund to help with crystal grabbing or plate-standing. I didn’t need those to work, just explained. Minor quibbles to be sure.

There was one puzzle I considered unfair, which is code for hard but not in a SATISFYING way, a (Spoiler - click to show)search only one character can complete, in one specific location, with no hints I spotted that that might be necessary. There was another that was SUPER fair, and I just missed it, but chuckled in glee when I tapped the progressive hint that clicked it into place.

…aaaand I’m done with the negative. This was not a mind-blowing game changer of deep human insight. This was a frothy, pulpy fantasy lark of unremitting positivity and cleverness, buoyed by text it was a treat to read. And not for nothing, an elegantly architected Twinesformer experience that will forward be my gold standard for these kinds of things. Kudos author, I enjoyed every minute. Most minutes. All the minutes worth talking about.

Mystery, Inc: Daphne
Vibe: Plucky Fantasy
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : If it were my project, most folks in my life would question who I really was, how I deceived them so long, but could they keep this new guy anyway? For me though, I think I would plumb some of those alternate solutions into text, either with playful rejections or as alternate solutions. This is probably not a simple ask, given the large permuted space already accommodated, but since the work makes it LOOK so easy, it must BE easy, yeah?

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

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