It aptly showcases the best in visual novels. It aptly showcases the worst in visual novels.
This is a true non-linear visual novel, meaning your choices wildly impact the story you'll see. You play as a princess, and eventually you'll have a choice to forsake high status and princessly life and venture on a journey to become a mercenary, or a mage, or something else entirely. Which is great, but also... isn't.
First problem here is that the author can only write so much, and with so wildly differing paths it's going to be not enough anyway. There are too many characters to flesh out, too many meaningful developments to narrate, too many events. Too many sex scenes to write. Consider this quote (some minor details edited out to make it spoiler-free but otherwise it remains faithful to the source):
“Multiple times a day, he would find and drag Sarah to his room. Once there, she would disrobe and go down on him. He expected her to swallow his cum, and with practice, Sarah managed to accommodate him. What Sarah kept hidden as best she could from the man, was how wet she got when she took him into her mouth. She feared what he would do if he believed she enjoyed it. For the next nine days, Sarah serviced the man with her mouth, several times a day.”
This small paragraph alone can, nay, should be expanded into
at least two additional sex scenes, depicting Sarah on her corruption journey. I've chosen this route to see exactly how she comes around to enjoy being an obedient little cocksucker, and all I've got was
this? It's truly sad, and a little insulting. And that's not even the most extreme example. A route adjacent to the quote above depicts an even steeper corruption path. From blowjob as payment, to sex, to anal, in the span of nine days, and no more than a page of text. And then Sarah and this man part ways and... all is good, Sarah is admiring new sights like nothing significant really happened—except she's just lost all three virginities, and in a really degrading manner at that. This single chapter of Sarah's journey could be the foundation for a solid medium sized standalone VN. Instead, it's just an episode that the game is obviously rushing to get past as soon as possible, because the game has more, way more chapters of similar or greater impact.
And I didn't even mention that there's very little art to accompany it. And realistically, properly illustrating this epic sprawling story is simply an insurmountable task. So I'm not going to hold lack of art against this game. But I am very salty about such crumpled writing (eh, eh, see what I did there?)
The second problem is that such wild changes of direction also invalidate a lot of narrative and inter-character tension. On multiple occasions Sarah can basically wipe the slate clean, and most if not all previous content goes poof! Made irrelevant with a single—fateful, yes, but still single—choice. You could say Sarah is a master of going out to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returning; she can do it more than once in a single playthrough. If that's your thing, okay, but personally I want most character arcs resolved properly in my novels.
And the third problem is that these fateful choices you are allowed to make are not telegraphing what they really entail. Yeah, I suppose that's realistic; you don't know what butterfly effect will bring you in real life too. But this is not life, it's a game that offers only a very limited amount of decision points; it has to offset it with some clarity. Luckily this can be at least in part remedied by installing a walkthrough mod, which I highly recommend. It would save you from wasting time on choices that do
nothing—at least in the current version—and focusing on choices that lead to branching, while getting some idea what those branches will hold for Sarah (and you).
All in all, because of these three problems, I couldn't help but constantly compare this
Rose to the
Sanguine one. In that game, a very limited cast of characters gets pitted against each other and locked in a fairly isolated setting. You are witnessing just
one episode of their life, but man, what an episode it turns out to be!
From a technical perspective, writing in
Sarah Rose also has its fair share of problems. For starters, it alternates between past simple and present simple during narration, which comes off as pretty amateurish. Spelling errors and typos are also present. Not too many to sour the read completely, but enough of them to be noticeable and rather grating. But to me a bigger problem is that for some reason the author doesn't trust RenPy to do the dialogue attribution in some cases. What I mean is that you'll encounter some properly tagged dialogue lines like
And then the game follows with a line by narrator "He orders them." Duh. RenPy has taken care of that, it already displayed who said it, and we already understand it's an order, so there's no need for a said bookism here, none at all. This feels like the text was initially meant to be a book, and then was hastily adapted for RenPy. Another indication of this is some instances of unfortunately frequent paragraph breaks. In RenPy this makes the prose feel too terse, even though it would be fine in plain text form. Basically, text needs an editing pass, by an editor who is cognizant of RenPy as a medium.
Okay, I feel I've written far too much, but in my defense it's a wordy game, so a wordy review it gets. Time for a summary. Bonus points for meaningful choices and the courage to make it an honest VN without any stupid grind slapped on top (can't believe I'm praising such seemingly basic thing, but here we are). No bonus points for the scale of the story, it's as much a blessing as it's a curse. Art is meh, multiple different, sometimes even clashing art styles. The overall story is not trash, but not a gripping epic fantasy masterpiece either, while being quite lengthy (~400,000 words at present). Smutty parts of the story themselves are not all that hot, or kinky, and worst of all, the story rushes to get past a lot of interesting parts. This is the main reason for my comparatively low rating. And with that said, I believe this is all you need to decide whether you'll like this game or not.
