Mask Of The Rose
PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Failbetter’s premise for its newest game is as catchy as any this storied developer has ever established: “Mask Of The Rose takes place in 1862, mere months after London was stolen by bats.” If you’re unfamiliar with Fallen London, a world in which Failbetter has been setting games since 2009, that will raise expectations of a headily surreal adventure through Victoriana. But if you’ve trodden the dank pavements of a city trapped beneath the ground in the original browser-based MMOG, or sailed its inky waters in Sunless Sea, Mask Of The Rose holds even more promise. This visual novel is the first time Failbetter has explored the tumultuous times which immediately followed London’s descent into the Neath, when the city came to terms with a magical new reality in which cats talk, clay people toil, and death doesn’t quite work any more.
You are investigating a murder in which the victim has returned to life – and of which your friend has been wrongfully accused. It’s a setup that gives you many reasons to explore the city and to talk to different characters. “And also leads into lots and lots of other weirdnesses in the setting,” creative director Emily Short adds. “We know some of the players will be long-time fans, and we hope some will be completely new to the setting, so we needed a way to guide people into a very strange world.”
The setup also leads into what Mask Of The Rose really is: a romantic visual novel in which you both choose to romance characters and matchmake relationships between others. The form its romancing takes is up to you: you decide at the outset whether you’re looking for short- or long-term partners, or even platonic ones, an acknowledgement of the breadth of Fallen London’s player base and reflective of the depth of interactive storytelling that’s going on beneath Mask Of The Rose’s hood.
If you’ve played Persona 4 or 5, or even Tokimeki Memorial, you’ll understand Mask Of The Rose’s basic structure. It plays across three seasons – Hallowmas, Christmas and the Feast of the Rose – and at the start of each day your newspaper indicates what’s happening in the city. In addition, as you learn about locations they open up on your map. Choose your daily actions wisely: you’ve only time for so many.
Both Failbetter and Short have long been interested in the mechanics of narrative design, and while a lot of Fallen London’s systems didn’t translate to the visual novel format, Mask Of The Rose will offer plenty of choice and consequence. Take, for example, wearing different outfits for conversations in order to influence characters’ reactions. If you want to convince someone to tell you a secret, you might dress to indicate you’re in a position of authority. Alternatively, you might dress down if you want to present yourself as nonthreatening. Of course, Mask Of The Rose’s culture is often delightfully obscure. “What is the social symbolism of wearing a portobello mushroom on my head?” Short ventures. As you’re dressing, your character will give clues about the properties of each article of clothing, making it a game of intentional roleplaying than one of trial and error.
Similarly, there will be repercussions to your choices, but you’ll often have the opportunity to repair dented relationships and build them up over time. “Some visual novels are extremely mechanically complex and you have to play them over and over to get everything,” says Short. “We didn’t want to be quite that brutal, but we also didn’t want to be at the other end of the spectrum, where you can completely lawnmower all the choices because everything is visible. We wanted there to be hidden information and secrets to figure out, and mechanical moments of choice. That’s the spot we’re trying to occupy.” Mask Of The Rose remains a simpler project than Sunless Skies (and it’s being made by a team of just three: writer Short, artist Paul Arendt, and programmer Séamus Ó Buadhacháin) but Failbetter’s tendency to put its idiosyncratic stamp on its chosen genre was always going to lead it into stranger, and more wonderful, places.
“What is the social symbolism of wearing a portobello mushroom on my head?”