Wine & Roses is a straightforward game that presents itself and plays rather minimally. The game holds up as stylish, challenging, and generally enjoyable, but sometimes feels that the whole experience could have been better sewn together.

The game is a dungeon walker in which the player is given control of three exorcists and left to grope around in the dark to make progress. The graphical presentation is generally solid. The mellow, yet eerie music is extremely fitting for the slow, strategic sense the battles give.

As the game sells itself mostly on its battles, the majority of this review will be an attempt at an in-depth analysis of its pros and cons, because the game's presentation otherwise is fine. The UI of battles is unobtrusive and the dialogue snippets from Lord Francisco happen without interrupting the player at all. The player's characters have a generally even distribution of HP, a Sanity percentage, and an Energy bar which goes from 0 to 7. The energy bar is the cornerstone of this game's battle system; turns are passed between the player's party and all enemies, and the player is free to use any number of skills each turn provided he can pay the Sanity and Energy costs. There are no usable items and equipment only serves to provide meager stat upgrades and negligible passive bonuses. Battles are merely the characters and their abilities. This system is intrinsically effective in keeping the player involved and allowing them complete control over the course of battle, and where the game feels challenging, it is also inviting and rewarding as the player has less of a reason to complain about RNG and more space to reconsider their actions and develop new strategies.

With that said, Wine & Roses strikes a satisfying balance between being challenging and forgiving. Though I haven't completed the game, every battle I've encountered has impressed me with a distinct taste. They all feel imaginative and deliberately designed and the player is given many chances to determine every trick an encounter will use through trial and error without punishing them for making mistakes. Battles can be escaped at any time, and losing merely prompts the player with a note to prepare and try again. This gives Wine & Roses's battles a generally inviting tone, but at the same time removes a lot of tension and sometimes causes the game to feel unnaturally static. Most encounters open the way to a new ability or a piece of equipment, which feel sometimes like middling returns for the general high difficulty of most encounters. The game handles its character progression in all forms this way, and while it wasn't a bad method, it ended up feeling a bit weak. The game's well-paced and strategic battle system automatically holds its character progression to a higher standard than most other RPG Maker games, as it should, but I feel that most of the effort in the game specifically went into the encounter design, and the extreme variety of abilities and strategies employed by the enemies made the playable characters feel significantly more bland in comparison as most of the time my strategies amounted to piling status boosts and debuffs, taking advantage of elemental weaknesses whenever possible to do at times ridiculous amounts of damage, and occasionally using a more situational ability to out myself from a bad position. While this is unquestionably a strategic and engaging method comparatively, it suffers the same problem I feel with games that demand similar strategies (Shin Megami Tensei III and IV come to mind); that the player is encouraged to experiment, but to more of a degree of preparation than of problem solving. Having the most advantageous equipment and abilities to deal with specific enemies typically makes short work of them. Thus, when dealing with an encounter the player knows how to handle, battles tend to drag on due to the staggering amount of health most enemies have, even when being pummeled for their weaknesses. It's not something to scold Wine & Roses at length for as forcing the player to prepare for encounters is generally good, but the time spent wearing away at health bars at snail's pace without any real danger of enemies recreating an advantage does become annoying after a while. The only exception I can really think of is the final battle, which is meticulously planned from the beginning to the end, constantly confronting even prepared players with new situations to work around.

For a lasting impression of the game's mechanics, I hope that future RPG Maker games can take from Wine & Roses's battles as an examplary figure, but not an ideal, and expand upon new ideas for ways to engage the player into a game's core mechanics without alienating them at all. This game isn't perfect, but is a significant step in the right direction as far as mechanics go.

There's not much to say regarding what remains of this game, as the battles are its main selling point. The game is graphically solid and its music choices are fitting, though immemorable with the one exception of the final boss theme, which I recognized from the demo of FL Studio 9. When I first heard it, I never imagined it would be used for a battle theme in any context, but Wine & Roses pulls it off.

My chief complaint about this game is that the exploration doesn't aspire to be anything and it shows. While I am all for games with a general lack of direction that leave the player to explore and discover the game on their own, I felt that the exploration in Wine & Roses was its only alienating feature. In the entire game, there is nothing more to find than equipment, skill attachments, and enemy encounters, but the game leaves the player to such an open state that the difficulty of enemies is always inconsistent. Some battles are nearly impossible without the acquisition of certain abilities, but there is generally no indication of what lies where. I feel that the game could have been greatly improved if the player knew what lied behind an encounter beforehand so that at least battles could have more motivation than "you might get something you'll like to use later." As a lot of the game is spent finding encounters too difficult and then walking away to roam for something to improve the player's situation, being able to precisely know what each victory equates to could save the player a lot of frustration, as after so many defeats it becomes clear what the team lacks (I spent the longest time trying to get my hands on so much as another healing spell), and wandering around and picking off easy encounters to get either somewhat-okay or universally-useful abilities creates an extreme downtime of slow dungeon walking as well as a sense of stunted rewards when an extremely difficult battle doesn't quite give the player something they can find useful for another encounter he was struggling with. Progression thus feels spotty and erratic, as access to a single ability can change a team's options immensely. The way it is, I eventually felt that I was wandering so aimlessly that I started to hit a point of disenchantment that prevented me from wanting to finish the game. While I don't blame the game too much for this shortcoming as a whole, I feel that improving the pace of character progression and the depth of exploration in a game with a battle system as tight and demanding as Wine & Roses's is (or at least, admirably aspires to be) holds enormous potential.

Closing comments and lasting impressions! Wine & Roses clearly doesn't aspire to be much more than its battles, though its occasional lore still manages to feel refined. The game is solid and I hope that it sets an example for future aspirations from other developers, but also that those aspirations try to fill in the gaps left by unsatisfying character progression and aimless wandering.

Ultimately, Wine & Roses is a perfect appetizer. Enjoyable for what it is, but leaves you hungry for something more.