Sanguine Rose can be summed up very well with the phrase “short and sweet”. I finished my first play through in an hour. It felt pretty rushedSanguine Rose can be summed up very well with the phrase “short and sweet”. I finished my first play through in an hour. It felt pretty rushed near the end trying to cram a lot into the last few minutes. The ride towards that point was fantastic though. The story itself was well done. The characters were interesting. You get to play with some interesting moral decisions. The art style is great and the detail on character faces and clothes has some good detail. The music set the mood well. You have a good amount of choices in the game and one thing I liked was that the choices themselves don’t always spell their consequences out to you. You can usually think back and figure out how you got to where you are but at the time it may have felt more inconsequential or innocent at the time. There is plenty of lewd content for those that want that and it is handled very well. Luckily that is just a good addition to the rest of the game and not the only thing worth playing for.
I played Sanguine Rose on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any glitches; bugs; or spelling errors. It uses version 7.3.5.606 of the Ren’Py engine. I played version 4.0 of the game. You can manually save whenever you want and there are 54 save slots for that. Alt-Tab didn’t work.
Game Engine: Ren’Py
Save System: Manual (any time)
Disk Space Used: 494.2 MB
VRAM Usage: 506-1190 MB
CPU Usage: 1-11 %
RAM Usage: 2.0-2.6 GB
Overall, even though the game felt a bit short, the journey was good enough to easily recommend Sanguine Rose. I paid $20.50 CAD for it but I don’t know if I can recommend it at that price however. I feel $15 CAD would have been better and $10 would have been a steal. There is a demo available so I would check it out if you enjoy visual novels and if you think the characters and choices interest you then give the full game a go keeping the length in mind.