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Save early, save often!

Initially, Memories From the Black Rose does get something of the atmosphere right. The kids were bullies, pretty much what you'd expect, and Katie was tasked with appeasing them through offerings. She ends up searching for mementos of her past, and this demo included an orphanage and school level.

I ended up spending quite a lot of time on this one, most of it exploring. There's not too much to say about either level, as you generally can't interact with stuff outside of the plot-advancing objects.


It was rather dark for most of the game, so I didn't take very many screenshots.


After enough wandering, I reset the game to see if there was something I'd maybe missed, but trying to reload my save crashed the game. I ended up reloading a previous save, which thankfully worked. This time I decided to peek at the walkthrough for some guidance, but despite following it I got stuck again. The walkthrough said to examine the lockers in the cafeteria twice, but no matter how many times I examined them nothing happened. (perhaps there's another set of lockers that I missed!)

There's combat in this game in the form of QTEs. Thankfully, the game was very kind and let me save before the first combat sequence. At first, following the QTE instructions (pressing B) didn't do anything... I manually set the keyboard controls to register the b key as "b", but that didn't help either. Eventually I realized B was "esc", so remember that for combat! After that, I was able to defeat the little kiddos and go on my way.



In the second part of the demo, the school, visibility was generally better, and I did appreciate Katie's walking speed. Something that caused problems is that you need to examine most items twice in order to trigger an effect, which I didn't know until I had looked at the walkthrough. At the end of the school is a boss battle with a mysterious man, and then you have a brief timed section at the end of the demo where you run through some sewers before your protective orb runs out.

All in all I don't have too much to say about this game. I think it's something the developer probably learned a lot from, and while it's doubtful we'll see a continuation it might have been fun to see. Rule of Rose happens to be a game I like, so it was interesting to see something that was inspired by it.

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Oh, I wanted to review this game all the way back in 2015 when it first came onto here! However, it glitched out on me very soon back then (some light effect thing during the 2nd flashback), and so I just subscribed to see if it would get updated eventually, and then promptly forgot about it since nothing else happened. Nice to see someone did beat it, though it's a pity game itself never got finished.
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