Ronnarium is a Japanese-only adventure game about exploring an aquarium at the center of an urban legend. It describes itself as being a puzzle game that also has shooting elements, but you should know going in that the “shooting elements” are really just a joke sequence near the end. This is otherwise a very simple RPG Maker-style adventure game.
Daytime
The game begins with you exploring the aquarium during the day in order to find a place to hide until closing time. I think you could just rush through this sequence if you wanted to, but it’s always important to interact with everything in this game because there’s really no telling when something will be important. Once you’ve worked your way through the aquarium and settled on a hiding place, time advances to night and the real game begins.
Nighttime
After night begins, you almost immediately meet a helpful penguin who offers to help guide you to the exit. Shenanigans inevitably transpire and you end up blocked by something or other that needs you to do a fetch quest in order to get past each floor. None of the puzzles you’re asked to solve are particularly difficult, although one requires information you might have missed in the daytime. The main sequence of the game is very linear and, other than a secret branch for the true ending, doesn’t really give you any opportunities to make choices. Still, there are a couple of completely optional sidequests that grant Steam achievements and have fun effects on the background.
The quirky Night at the Museum-style interactions with all the talking animals are what will carry this game for most people. It’s fun to meet each different animal, but the story doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere until the very end, and by then it’s gone so long without addressing the main plot that it almost feels out of place. I’m not fluent, so it’s possible that there was context I missed that made it flow more naturally, but I don’t think so. On that note, if you’re also playing this as a non-native speaker, it’s worth noting that some of the kanji are very small and distorted by the game’s low resolution, so they’re be quite difficult to look up if you don’t already know the word. There’s not any particular outlandish vocabulary here outside of some obscure animal names, at least. Screen translation seemed to work pretty well as a backup, and you might even be able to play the whole game that way if you can stomach the usual consistency issues.
Conclusion
Overall, Ronnarium isn’t by any means an essential game, but it’s a pretty good time for $2. As an aside, although there aren’t any hints in the game about how to get to the true ending, many of the Japanese reviews on the Steam page have a vague sentence or two in [spoiler] tags about how to access it. I don’t think anyone was intentionally creating a bonus meta-puzzle here, but it kind of has that effect. You could also get there by just clicking on everything if you’re rather do it that way.
Rating: 75%
Time to beat: 2 hours to get both endings, but it seems like 1-1.5 is more typical if you read at native speed
Price: $2
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