Failbetter Games know their way around a dark, brooding narrative. Sunless Skies and Sunless Sea unfurl like a Kraken, luring us in with a satisfying exploration game loop and then applying the suckers with its story. With their next game, Mask of the Rose, the Kraken is unfurling once again.
Out now on PC via Steam and Nintendo Switch, but making its way to Xbox and PlayStation at a later date, is Mask of the Rose. We blew the dust off our keyboard to give it a go, knowing full well that Failbetter was going to ease us in with a conventional narrative before whipping off the mask and revealing something more sordid underneath. As it turns out, we were right, but not in the ways we expected.
Unlike Sunless Skies and Sunless Sea, it’s easy to discern what kind of genre Mask of the Rose sits in. It is, at its core, a visual novel, and it draws on a few of the visual novel sub-genres. It leans heavily on the romance sim, allowing you to woo pretty much everyone (we’re racking our brains to think of anyone we couldn’t bump uglies with), which took us aback for much of our playthrough. And it’s a schedule-driven visual novel, where not everything can be done in a day. Picking and choosing, before submitting to the FOMO, is all part of Mask of the Rose.
Much like Sunless Skies and Sunless Sea, however, the setting and story are almost pitch black. Mask of the Rose adopts Failbetter’s love for the subterranean setting, as it takes place in an alternate version of London – Fallen London – that has sunk beneath the earth. How or why this has happened is pure conjecture, but humanity has to quickly learn to deal with constant darkness, bats, rats and demonic-looking entities like Mr Pages, who have sidled into the ruling class.
Needless to say, Fallen London – or the Neath, as it is often called – is a stone’s throw from Hell. Humanity is infighting, everyone’s miserable, and it’s clear that no one is really dying anymore. Well, aside from one grisly murder that seems to implicate your neighbour, the chisel-jawed Archie.
As you can probably tell, Mask of the Rose is hiding a Pandora’s Box of ideas. Your role in Mask of the Rose is with a Ministry dedicated to a census, gathering all the names and private information of its citizens. It’s a foot in the door to talking to Fallen London’s residents, as you grapple with the ethics (and GDPR) of harvesting civilians for their private information and delivering it to a likely malevolent force.
It doesn’t stop there, either, as Mask of the Rose is also interested in what you’re wearing. Every hat, badge or jacket will open up (or shut down) dialogue options, so you have to be careful with your personal presentation. Going into the slums? Best not wear your admiral’s hat. The aristocracy won’t like a shabby coat, either.
It’s fit to bursting, but you’d be surprised how well a lot of it works. The twisted lens on London is glorious, and it’s such an onion of mysteries that peeling off layers with each playthrough is a joy. The clothing stuff is surprisingly fab too. There’s a deal of preparation to do before you go through a door, anticipating which accessory will get you the desired result. It’s very much a game where a notebook and pen will do wonders.
But there’s stuff we worry about, and the delay to the Xbox port of Mask of the Rose might be a boon. The first – and easiest – thing to solve is surely the save system. Mask of the Rose adopts an autosave with no manual save in sight, but that’s a very definite no-no for a visual novel fan. When a playthrough is as dense and long as this, but divergent paths happen every five seconds, it’s extremely offputting to know that we’d have to pump in several hours to see an alternate path. We’re not quite sure why Mask of the Rose is so determined to protect the sanctity of a playthrough.
The other stuff isn’t quite so easy to resolve, but we have fingers crossed. Romance in Mask of the Rose is downright odd, and never believable. From the first moment you meet someone, you’re given dialogue options to canoodle and flirt with people. But you’ve barely met them, and we were nowhere near ready to commit to one or another. It’s also a little icky: it makes us feel like a swarthy lothario. But dialogue options are often a choice of saying something untoward or saying something too forward, and we often felt like we’d missed our chance with someone if we said a premature no.
Very generally, our character felt like they couldn’t keep it in their pants, and we respected our character a lot less than the vibrant cast, who deserved better. Ivy the seamstress, the neighbours Griz and Archie, and Harjit the volunteer policeman were all exquisitely written, but the pacing of the narrative and the odd choices in the dialogue meant that we always kept them at an arm’s length. That’s when the narrative doesn’t steal them away for large chunks of the game.
But there’s time. And there’s also so much that’s rich as a Rioja in Mask of the Rose. We’ve deliberately held ourselves back from multiple playthroughs, simply because we want to preserve them for the Xbox review. Will the faultlines in Mask of the Rose unsettle the glorious art and writing? It could survive them, or it could just as easily topple in.
Mask of the Rose is due on Xbox and PlayStation later. It is already available for purchase on PC via Steam and on Nintendo Switch.
Huge thanks go to Failbetter Games for providing us access on PC via Steam. Hit up that Steam page if you can’t wait for the Xbox release.Â
We’ll be running full review as it hits Microsoft’s Xbox consoles.
