Little Briar Rose review

Developer: Mangatar

Price: $2.99
Version: 1.1
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2

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Overall Rating:

Little Briar Rose is an eye catching adventure game due to its stained glass art style. Aside from that though, it's a very straightforward point-and-click adventure game that doesn't take to long to get through. It's still a fun enough journey, but seasoned adventure game enthusiasts might not find a lot here.

Glass sleepers

In Little Briar Rose, you play as a prince who is trying to venture through a magical forest to kiss and awaken a sleeping princess. It's not the most creative story in the world (in fact, the end credits mention the game is based on Sleeping Beauty), but it matches the old feel of the stained glass aesthetic in the game.

On your journey, you'll encounter a lot of familiar fantasy tropes like gnomes, fairies, and more. All of these groups have their own issues and it's up to you to help resolve them to move your progress forward.

Princely puzzles

Like most adventure games, Little Briar Rose expects you to tap your way around your environment to talk to folks, gather items, and figure out how to use everything you discover in such a way to solve the problem at hand. To keep you on track, Little Briar Rose cordons off a lot of areas that aren't quite important to your current quest yet, leaving you with a small area to focus on.

Other areas open up once you've completed a previous one, and doing so usually ends with some sort of mini-game. Once multiple areas open up, some of the puzzle-solving then involves you revisiting old areas to find new things or talk to characters about new information. Nothing ever gets to complicated though, as Little Briar Rose only presents a handful of areas before ending.

Flat as glass

It's not fair to say that Little Briar Rose doesn't try any new stuff in the realm of adventure games. It's just that–as neat as some of its tricks are–none of them really amount to much.

In particular, there's a clever way that the game makes the forest feel magical and dangerous (as it should) without really punishing players for making mistakes. Also, the conceit that Little Briar Rose uses to pull this trick off ends up tying into the end of the game in an unexpected way that's pretty clever.

That said, the entire experience of Little Briar Rose is otherwise so cut-and-dry and short that this one trick doesn't really make the whole thing feel worth it.

The bottom line

Little Briar Rose feels like a game that would be perfect for someone who has not played an adventure game before. It has pretty standard mechanics, a very simple story, and it's contained design make it easy to get through in a sitting or two. While it has a neat idea or two in it, most of Little Briar Rose focuses on being simple and beautiful, just like a stained glass window.