A couple years after hitting the scene with their fascinatingly surreal About An Elf, Meringue Interactive returns with another strange adventure in the form of Miss Rosen’s Wowtastic! Marching Band. Like before, it’s a visual novel full of weird characters and places, now inspired by the uncanny mishmash of styles seen in content farm kids’ shows, and features a focus on puzzle solving that results in a sometimes tricky though charming romp.
Miss Rosen is a clockwork marionette who hosts a weekly TV show where she travels the world, visiting amazing places and helping out a variety of (mostly) friendly guests. One episode, she meets a dinosaur boy named Dunno, who’s run away from home and insists on co-hosting the show with her. She humours him for now, and so they embark on many adventures, unaware of mysterious events and disappearances happening in the background…
The game’s mainly a visual novel, so you’ll be reading and clicking through text, but you’ll frequently be asked to solve packing case puzzles by the folks you encounter. These puzzles have you grabbing a handful of objects (either with a cursor or directly through the Switch’s touchscreen) and arranging them so they fit within a condensed space like a suitcase, a desk or whatever receptacle the game’s chosen today.
You can also touch the items to rotate them at set angles if you need to pack them more tightly, which will happen because some of these spaces are very cramped and require precise placement. Not only that, but there’s a time limit of 60-80 seconds that passes quickly while you’re trying to figure stuff out. Some puzzles are even dastardly enough to reduce your time, make you click on certain parts of the screen to make objects appear, or even have the objects drifting aimlessly around.
It’s not a big deal if you fail though, since you’re allowed to skip the puzzle after three attempts with no consequence. There’s a surprising amount of variety here, including the difficulty which rises and falls instead of getting consistently harder, but a few of them can be quite frustrating. They also feature plenty of amusingly strange imagery that sometimes has a logic, such as arranging electronic devices to build a robot, and just as often doesn’t in a way which compliments the game’s overall silly vibe.
Although the writing is more one-note than About An Elf, keeping to a light-hearted goofy tone that can veer into “lol so random” territory, it’s still a cute game. You’ll run into endearing oddballs, there’s a few running gags that become funnier through their insistent repetition, and a lot of the conversations are quite chuckleworthy. This is accentuated by the ridiculous character animations, where people pull the stupidest expressions and jitter about frantically in front of bizarre backgrounds populated by fancily dressed mice. The music also coins the mood with various tunes backed by upbeat marching rhythms with a heavy focus on brass instruments, like a marching band is performing them off-screen.
