Mask of the Rose marries romance and murder in the apocalypse

pcgamesn.com:

Rejoice, delicious friend, for our descent into the Neath is at hand. It’s been four long years since the release of Sunless Skies, and while Failbetter Games’ speculative steampunk future of Fallen London left the station with a triumphant billow of steam, it’s been a long time since we’ve stumbled over the gaslit cobbles of the doomed city itself. Enter Mask of the Rose, a visual novel that promises to bring Fallen London into stark, often unnerving focus. To cut to the heart of the matter, we caught up with Failbetter Games senior producer Stuart Young at WASD 2023 to talk love, death, and bats. So many bats.

In the Fallen London universe, gothic horror tugs at the fastened buttons of Victorian principles, creating a delicious friction that lends itself well to a dating sim. It’s exacerbated further in Mask of the Rose by the immediacy of the Fall itself, which only occurred a few hundred days prior. “It’s certainly had an impact on society – a lot of conventional morality and rules of propriety have been suspended in this emergency situation,” Young says.

A portion of this cultural upheaval can also be attributed to the Masters of the Bazaar, the unsettling cloaked figures that have assumed control of the trade economy of Fallen London itself. Veterans of Fallen London will know the Masters well, but in Mask of the Rose they serve as an unlikely catalyst for social change. “They may not be entirely human, but they’re in charge of the new situation. They don’t see gender in the same way.”

In terms of its cast of characters, Mask of the Rose takes a micro approach in comparison to the likes of Sunless Sea or Sunless Skies, which are themselves tapestries of faces and locales across a wide open expanse. “It’s Fallen