All right, we had a fun break talking about games that weren't released in 2017 - a whole week's break, even - so here we are back in the Golden Year for a game that probably wouldn't qualify as "Indie" by most metrics, Nippon Ichi Software's A Rose in the Twilight. Most folks know NIS either from their many Disgaea strategy RPGs, or perhaps run-based RPGs like Z.H.P. Unlosing Ranger VS Darkdeath Evilman, or maybe from their (much improved) publishing duties for Falcom's most recent output. In addition, they also make the occasional small game: I covered one a while ago, the survival horror adventure game Yomawari: Night Alone (IGotW #62). A Rose in the Twilight shares a lot of stylistic similarities with Yomawari, especially aesthetically, but is structurally that of the most traditional of Indie formats: the melancholy 2D puzzle-platformer.

A Rose in the Twilight follows Rose, a young girl inflicted with "the curse of the thorn." Manifesting as a plant bulb growing out of her back, Rose is able to use the curse to drain the "blood" of any red object, rendering it grey and inert, and passing that blood onto other objects to make them active again. Inert objects are frozen in time making them impossible to interact with; this might include obstructive boulders and platforms as well as living creatures. By injecting life into them, their time resumes and that might mean moving out of the way to let you pass or, in the case of a lever, able to be activated. Rose is also soon accompanied by a silent golem-like creature called The Giant, whom the player also controls and has immense strength that it can use to pick up, carry, and throw objects (including Rose) and is immune to the deadly thorns covering much of the level (Rose, meanwhile, dies instantly if she touches them). Using the unique abilities of both characters, the player makes their way through each level to the next story-determined objective.

It's odd to play A Rose in the Twilight after completing Live Wire and Adglobe's Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights fairly recently, as both the desaturated (besides the color red) visuals of this game and its theme of a kingdom fallen to a deadly curse leaving a small heroine and her protector as the only (sane) survivors are somewhat familiar. I'm not holding that against A Rose in the Twilight or anything - it did come first, after all - but these little coincidences do make me wonder what kind of impact these smaller games have in their native Japan, where the Indie scene is a little more weighted towards freeware fangames like Touhou over the medium-sized budget offerings put out by major studios that you see elsewhere. The game's aesthetics have this sort of blurry, washed-out etherealness that doesn't quite gel with the cute anime character designs - again, they're sort of an in-house style for NIS, similar to the melon-headed characters of their strategy games and the little girl protagonist of Yomawari - but they are fairly striking and fit the game's grim fairytale theme well enough.

One storytelling aspect I liked about the game - and another Ender Lilies comparison - is how you find corpses and can absorb their blood to receive their memories. Rather than depict how they died, the memories fill in pieces of the game's plot - who Rose is, what happened to her before, during and after her curse first manifested, and how that curse managed to spread to the whole kingdom - and some are much more elusive to find than others. Most of the game's harder puzzles relate to acquiring these optional backstory scenes, but I've come to understand that you'll need all of them for the game's true ending; presumably because in doing so you'll fill in every jigsaw piece of the overarching narrative. Fortunately, the game throws you a bone here: once you reach the end of a section - the game's split into multiple zones, and there's around six puzzle areas per zone - you can absorb a special blood crystal that'll tell you which of the zone's rooms still have bloodstains for you to collect. The trick, then, becomes figuring out how to reach them with Rose. You'll also get notes written by Rose fairly regularly, often working as tutorials to explain game mechanics, and a few other story-related lore items which sit in your inventory to be perused at any time.

It's worth mentioning that, as a platformer, A Rose in the Twilight is much closer to a Braid or a The Swapper than something more dextrous like an Ori. Rose can barely manage a hop and will die if she falls more than half a screen's height, so you have to be careful when planning your next moves keeping in mind her relative frailty. The Giant is indispensable for getting around as it has total invulnerability and can also carry Rose, helping her past some but not all hazards. In addition to it being really funny just yeeting a small child around, throwing Rose can also get her across larger gaps or areas higher up, though you of course need to ensure that she'll land without falling too far. The game's platforming can feel a bit awkward sometimes, especially when it comes to visually picking up on the contours of certain platforms, and the checkpointing can be dire. Most areas have one or more of these plant buds which resurrect you at that spot once you've activated them, but they won't record progress if you pass them a second time: if you're coming and going past the bud's location while moving objects around or completing a series of levers or something, it'll still reset to the first time you passed underneath if you should die and you'll probably be dying a lot as you gradually pick up on what you need to do and in what order to solve the immediate environmental puzzles. Getting around the game world is easier, at least: every room can be fast-travelled to once you've visited them.

Dealing with the game's clumsy platforming is just about worth it for everything else the game offers. I miss those puzzle adventure games where you had a burly side-kick to help you out - shades of Fumito Ueda's The Last Guardian and Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom from Game Republic (RIP) - and A Rose in the Twilight hearkens back to that very specific era. There are times where the game feels suspiciously cheap given the size of the development studio and there's a distinct sense that maybe small projects like these are meant to put new employees through their paces before they're allowed to work on whatever the next Disgaea will be. Same feeling I had about Game Freak's so-so cyberpunk explormer Giga Wrecker (covered here), which really ought to have been better given the developer's pedigree and resources. On the other hand, I absolutely approve of major studios giving their smaller teams something to busy themselves with as valuable work experience; EA's been on a tear with the likes of Lost in Random and Sea of Solitude to balance out their monolithic sports and FPS franchises, and for as much as Ubisoft has fallen from grace as of late it was never better than when it was putting out those lower-scale Rayman reboots or imaginative games like Grow Home and Child of Light. A Rose in the Twilight's art direction and story might just grab you even if its frequently slipshod and punitive mechanics probably won't.

Rating: 3 out of 5.