The Survival of Sarah Rose is the latest Visual Novel made by Happydaedalus, we would like to thank the devs for providing a review copy for reviewing purposes.
Story
Castle Reinmeer is the heart of the Roosanna nation and for centuries, it’s been home to the Rose family. You follow Sarah Rose, who is part of the royal family and is with her brother awaiting the return of their father who is King.
When the king returns home, he tells Sarah that he has some news to share with her the very next morning.
Fast forward to the very next morning and the King is assassinated and found dead in his very own room. Sarah’s life has now completely changed and has to go headfirst into the unknown.
Pros and Cons
Pros
-An actually surprisingly good story
-Multiple paths for you to choose from, each with different outcomes and endings
-Beautifully drawn scenes that have a really nice art style
Cons
-Character models for most scenes appear to be copied and pasted onto the backgrounds.
Characters
You will mainly follow Sarah Rose as she journeys out into the world that she is in, it is a dark fantasy erotic visual novel. So, you will be presented with a lot of elements thrown into the story that is fitting, including some adult nsfw scenes.
There are many branching routes with unique stories that offer different experiences. Despite the visual novel being in early access, it’s quite big on what it presents.
I found that my enjoyment varied between routes. Not all were amazing, but I continued to come across new routes that both kept my interest and had me yearning for more. The magic route where Sarah can become a mage happened to be my favorite. This is a very unique take as it opens up many different paths for someone to explore, or they could simply experience all of the paths that have been offered.
There are more routes being added in, as the visual novel is still in early access, so we will have to see what the developers will be adding in next.
Since this is an erotic visual novel, you will come across adult nsfw scenes throughout the story. Currently, they only offer a few, but again, being that the game is in early access, we may see more of this type of content added in the future. Some routes will have more nsfw scenes than others.
Something to be aware of: The developer provided a mature content description on the Steam store page that states "All encounters in the game are entirely optional. Players are never confronted with content they do not explicitly select to see". There are choices in the game that will decide if an nsfw scene is shown in certain scenarios, but other times you will be forced to see the scene, so I'm not sure what I am missing if there is a way to simply ignore or skip over nsfw content completely.
There are also a lot of different characters that you will encounter throughout the story, each having their own unique personalities and some of them can even lead you to a different route. This visual novel has definitely surprised me by how much depth is included, especially knowing that there is more to come.
Artstyle and Performance
The art style for The Survival of Sarah Rose has some very nicely drawn scenes. There are also a few hand-drawn adult nsfw scenes that you can view and look at in the gallery. These are very detailed thanks to the recent update the developers have provided. I tested everything on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, AMD Ryzen 5 1500X Quad-Core Processor 3.50, and 16 GB of RAM. I experienced no issues while playing the game.
With all that said, there are a few things to point out about the art, as everything isn't perfect in this visual novel. There are a large number of scenes where the characters are pretty much just photoshopped onto the backgrounds. Now, I am aware that this visual novel is still in early access, but this issue is quite noticeable as you play. This mix of hand-drawn and photoshopped scenes can be slightly jarring when moving from one to the other. Unfortunately, most scenes consist of the pasting of characters on backgrounds instead of a complete hand-drawn scene. Let's hope that the developer comes back and fixes this at some point.
Final Verdict
I am impressed with the amount of content that was present in The Survival of Sarah Rose. There is a lot of depth and detail with the amount of story that you can access and there is a lot of replayability due to the various routes. I recommend this visual novel for those who like to explore different routes in novels and for those who enjoy erotic elements, all wrapped up in a good story.