After escaping from her music box, clockwork majorette Miss Rosen sets about travelling the world in search of people to help. This doesn’t so much involve finding lost items, retrieving cats stuck up trees, and preventing petty crimes as you may expect but rather something rather specific. See, our blonde-haired heroine is a dab hand at organising items neatly. Desks, draws, lunch boxes, handbags, holdalls – you name it, Miss Rosen can organise it.
What we have here is an easy-to-comprehend puzzler that’s elevated greatly by its outlandish presentation. To say that it’s well presented would be an understatement. Packing bright and vibrant colour schemes, it uses a mixture of FMV, CGI and wildly weird photoshopped creations. There may even be stop motion animation present too, although I can’t say for certain; it often blurs together the aforementioned animation techniques. During dialogue screens, Miss Rosen amusingly marches on the spot, twirls her baton, and cheers in celebration, changing stance every few seconds with each animation playing on brief yet seamless loops.
Miss Rosen isn’t alone in her quest to assist others, joined by Dunno, a co-presenter/sidekick character who can transform into a dinosaur. And no, that doesn’t make them dangerous. As the game points out, nobody in the universe’s history has ever been eaten by a dinosaur, let alone biten. Those are hard-to-dispute facts.
The story is spread across several cities, each with a few citizens to help; a peculiar assortment of characters including the sun (with a human face,) a race car (with a human face) and not-so-typical townsfolk (with human faces.) Evildoers show up at certain points, and you’ll need to thwart their plans for world domination by playing a short silhouette matching mini-game, often leading to Power Rangers-esque tomfoolery.
So far, so weird. And that’s kind of the point. It’s even easy to occasionally forget there’s a puzzle game lurking under the exceedingly colourful exterior. You’re provided with a handful of items and must drag them into an allocated area before aligning them neatly. Unlike A Little to the Left – which was likewise based on organisational skills – there’s a time limit in play. When the clock is counting down the final seconds, and the last object is overlapping, it can be tense.
There’s no ‘correct’ answer to any puzzle – as long as no pixels are touching and all items are inserted into the designated area, it’ll be automatically marked as complete and the next cut-scene will unfold. Some objects seem comically large at first, but once rotated to their front view become considerably smaller. Other objects may bend slightly when rotated too, allowing you to tuck another item alongside it. This can lead to a few finicky moments. One puzzle involving placing desserts on a tray took me several retries as the cherry stalk on top of an ice cream sundae was overlapping by a single pixel. At times I had to literally flick the Switch’s analogue stick to nudge an item incrementally.
In addition to the time limit there are a few random events and factors to help liven things up. I don’t want to spoil too many of these (and the same goes for the story’s later chapters) but you will have to contend with moving objects, along with hidden objects that you’ll need to jab the screen to reveal – with this Switch version thankfully supporting the touch screen.
If you fail a puzzle a few times the option is given to skip ahead. Although it’s tempting to do so, I’d advise against it. You’ll not only end up making a short experience even shorter but also miss out on the satisfaction that beating a tricky puzzle brings.
Miss Rosen’s Wowtastic! Marching Band is easy to get into, and the puzzle aspect is mostly well realised in addition to feeling tailored to the Switch, but despite only lasting a couple of hours I did become a little fatigued as the story ended. It’s so fixated on its quest to stand out that it’s guilty of overlooking a few fundamental elements that decent puzzle adventures need. The excentric presentation should make for a weirdly compelling experience, but in reality, it’s rarely both at once – it’s constantly weird but only occasionally compelling.
Meringue Interactive’s Miss Rosen’s Wowtastic! Marching Band is out 10th October on Switch.