Mask of the Rose

I ended up really liking Mask of the Rose. I think there are caveats, and for someone who doesn't know any of failbetter's other games, it might not be for you. But I really liked it! It grew on me kind of suddenly, and got me back into the browser game. I wanted to write this review after digging around the community and looking at general impressions and complaints that came about from the early onset of the game. I doubt there will be a lot of readers and I'm not sure I'm going to convince anyone this far out from release lmao but. Failbetter is also releasing some new game information soon so I wanted to get back into their stuff and share my experience. I think there are still some problems that people disliked in the beginning: mainly the saving system. I had to dig around for how to copy and return saves on the forums. This is pretty easy to do, but I think it would be better if it was in the game naturally. The romance can be a little jarring with the regular requests to update your relationship with someone, but I think there are some good experiences to be had. I came to enjoy trying different options and matchmaking some of the characters together. I love the characters and the stories around them. I love the art style, the writing, and the music. The romance is nice, though I used the wiki extensively to get the options I wanted ngl. Storycrafting can be a little confusing but it's something I think you get used to eventually. Overall, if you've played failbetter games before (especially Fallen London,) I think there's probably something to enjoy in it for you. It's worth giving a shot, in my opinion. This last bit is kind of unnecessary but like. Idk if the devs would still read the reviews at this point. but I wanted to say thank you, cause I'm sure you worked hard on this game, regardless of how it was ultimately received. I like it. And thank you, specifically, for Milton. I know I am some nerd on the internet you will never meet, but you made him just for me

打了三小时也没搞懂游戏目标到底是什么，侦探部分做得莫名其妙，恋爱元素更是一坨。

Great writing, good characters, interesting mechanics, abysmal limitations Overall writing - 10/10 Main story - 5/10 Art - 10/10 Mechanics as Idea - 8/10 Mechanics Implementation - 0/10 Overall - 4/10 I absolutely love the idea that clothes define our behavior and how it's tied to the narrative. Also the storyboard mechanic is great and overall I loved it (after I realized how it worked). I can’t recall any character that I can call cardboard, but some quests felt like a waste of time. And that’s precisely this game’s main issue. Now comes the rant) The creators literally steal 10 days from your calendar at the end to reach the epilogue. And if you haven’t finished some quests, characters might call you out on it with subtle ‘I don’t hold it against you though’ Thus, I know that they are consciously guilttripping us into replaying the game. And since this game has my favourite ‘autosave’ feature, it’s not fun at all. You can’t finish the main quest and at least a few additional ones. Give me more days to play or ability to save where I need, I don’t wanna see the prologue for another twenty times! Limitations in this game do not add to its replayability, they just make the game awful and waste our time on clicking through the prologue over and over again. I swear I came to hate the starting animation, even though I liked it at first. And it’s not like it’s the only way. Make a different mode for hard core players with less days. I mean it’s only one variable in the code. How hard is that? I probably sound like an awful autsource client right now, but it’s not like I dug through your code, so my suggestions are obviously dumb. Or the dressing up mechanic may be a restrictive factor instead. Perhaps, you choose an outfit for a day and can’t change it without spending ‘time’. Not to mention, I may be not the brightest, but I swear I figured out the details of the case before I realized how to use the storyboard to actually start investigating 0-0 At that point I had to replay a few times already, so I straight up started abusing saves by coppypasting them. Actually, its a good game if you start abusing the saves from the get go. Seriously, if you liked the premise, you’ll probably enjoy it, here’s the directory: %userprofile%\AppData\LocalLow\Failbetter Games\Mask of the Rose\saves I really hope creators will recall what replayability means some day. For example, in my teens I played a weird free game that basically was clicking magic school simulator or something. It was dumb, but the animations, art and other small details that were changing during the playthrough were so great that I replayed it even after I got all the achievements. I could save at any moment, but the experience in its entirety was so good that I rarely saved the progress at all. Another example - Ebon Light. You can choose whatever route you want in the third act, regardless of with whom you interacted more. But all the characters were so interesting that I replayed it from the start almost each time I tried to romance another guy. I think I can recall good detective games too if I think a little more, but truly I don’t want to invest any more of my time. Maybe in a year or two I’ll forget how frustrated I was and finally finish all quests I was curious about) It just breaks my heart that so much effort from designers, writers, coders, testers went to waste(

This is an incredible visual novel and as you can see I liked it enough to painstakingly get every rare achievement. The characters are really interesting and diverse and you, the main character, are very different depending on choices you make and dialogue options you select. I cannot even imagine the amount of text and branching behind this game because the variety in each playthrough was nothing short of astonishing. It's the perfect mix of romantic, unnerving and fascinating.

Maybe it isn't for everyone, but it DAMN sure is for me

This review is a "yes, BUT." Read the other reviews; people have been thoughtful in them and I agree with much of what they have to say here. This is long, sorry; I'm invested... I've played about 15 hours of this game now, which amounts to about two and a half playthroughs. My first one was awful. I understood nothing. I got nothing done. I semi-accidentally [spoiler] stumbled into the Drowned Parliament ending very early on while trying to pursue Griz's friendship, [/spoiler] which got me a conclusion to solving the mystery without me fully realizing it'd done so. Then, not knowing I'd found a solution, I faffed around for several hours trying to discuss the mystery with the characters and not really getting the opportunity to. I think I misunderstood something about the story-building mechanics. My second playthrough, having already failed to make much headway in the first play, I ended up solving the mystery and getting what I would consider to be a very well-written and interesting conclusion. It was a good time, but I felt a bit like I was fighting against the game to get there. The good: Very rarely do I find visual-novel-style games where I am genuinely this interested in learning more about most of the players involved. I'd be interested in developing relationships with almost any of them, just to see how things played out. More to that point, if you like Fallen London / Failbetter already, you'll like this. The writing quality and tone is exactly the same as it is in the browser game; if that style is something you enjoy, great; you'll enjoy the work they've done here too. For folks who are already fans of the universe, there's interesting lore here, and it's fun to poke at the edges of that and see where it leads. The bad: This game expects you to fail, as most other FL installments do, and to play again. I imagine my two playthroughs I outlined above might be considered a success of the mechanics in some ways, on paper. With that said, despite being genuinely curious about the other characters in the story, I don't think I will be doing any additional playthroughs because getting anywhere in this piece feels like trying to run a machine that keeps repeatedly stalling. The game is full of loading screens, intermediary steps, and breaks to the pace. Huge amounts of progress can be lost in a single wrong statement that are not always clear. Every character interaction requires clicking through several UI dialogues, with the interaction sandwiched between them. Text repeats. Autosaves happen regularly, but manual saving isn't offered. Something about the design has distorted the pacing of the story in a very strange way, so there seems to be both never enough time to do anything but also every action you make takes forever. Somewhere under the belly of Mask of the Rose is a very interesting snappy FL mystery that has been all but smothered by its mechanical design choices, and I don't think I would recommend the game to anybody without this huge caveat in mind. Can I say that I didn't like it? Not really. (Steam, why won't you let me give mixed reviews!) I enjoyed going through it and I'm glad I paid for it. But even after all the patches were done to it, Mask of the Rose still feels somehow unfinished. If you know the setting, you know it's one that asks you to grind in order to reach interesting content on the other side-- do a lot of repetitive clicking, watch a lot of progress bars creep up. I bought this title because I'd hoped to engage with a Fallen London that felt less like a narrative compromised by its own gameplay. I'm sorry to say that this is more of the same pace in a different shape. If you're all right with that, play it and you'll most likely enjoy; if not, you can probably find a summary of all of the cool new lore on a wiki somewhere.

Imo this game is pretty much a dating sim, but a mild one at that. If you expect a sunless sea style experience of lore rich storytelling, expect to be disappointed.

Ack! There are things I like about the game, but overall I really cannot recommend it. The good bits: the lore-engaged moments of the writing are very impressive -- it has excellent art and music. Fans of the game should take a look at the roster of characters -- is there someone in the list that you want to hang out with? If so -- do so!! There they are. There's a lot of bold and fascinating systems, for that matter! The Storycrafting system should probably be lifted and reused in future games. It kind of reminded me of Scents and Semiosis in a way that made me happy. That said, my overall recommendation to anyone who isn't a Fallen London obsessive is not to buy the game, so I want to spend the rest of the review selling the idea that there are severe and noticeable bad bits. So I'll segue to that -- The overall impression I have of the game is that it is extremely dense with filler text. This comes from a few things: - The game's day/night system will present the player with a lot of text unrelated to their current progression state. You do about four things per day -- a memory, a supper event, two errands -- and only the errands are determined by player choices. - The bulk of the game's conversations are formalistically structured. There is a procedural salutation (and solicitation for romance); there is a human-written observation on a relevant world event; there is a response to the player's purpose of inquiry; there is a second salutation and an invitation for the player to reconsider their decision on romance. - You're given a staggering number of options amounting to "Ask character X about character Y." Because most facts are known to more than one character, most of these paths produce redundant answers. But of course you can't know this without checking them. The filler text problem is bad, but I would add to this that the game suffers from a serious tension between its detective features and its dating features. The most obvious instance of this tension is that -- unlike in Fallen London itself -- your errands can either be dating or detective-oriented. Any dating you do does not advance your detective work; any detective work does not advance your dating; you have a limited number of actions that can be spent on either. For an example of a system that's not present: I couldn't see evidence that the general level of my relationship with a character actually fed into that character's willingness to feed me clues. I would add to this that there's apparently some kind of hidden reverse feedback between the dating system and the detective system which seems to make this a lot worse. I couldn't totally figure out how it worked, but it seemed like my romantic interest kept showing up and derailing quest scenes. My best guess is that there's some kind of pattern of dialogue variations which are split into two categories: "follow-ups on info the player probably already has," where each version of the scene tries to adapt to include information you might have learned elsewhere -- versus "romantic versions of the conversation, where the player experiences the most basic version of the scene, but now their love interest in the room." Something like this -- - <version 1> Player has ZERO CLUES and now STEVE tells them CLUE X. - <version 2> Player already knows CLUE Y; when STEVE tells them CLUE X, they reject it and interrogate STEVE. - <version 1B> Player has romanced GLORBO and therefore GLORBO talks about CLUE X. (again, even if the player already knows CLUE Y.) STEVE is not interrogated. Whatever the mechanism was, it felt like seeing my romantic interest in a scene meant I was about to get blocked from useful progress. There's one other problem I would tend to identify, which I think is understated in the positive reviews of the game. The game struggles as a character piece: it has an absolutely damaging tendency to take its text and whack it with a hammer until it fits into its procedural storytelling system. For an example -- in general, characters in Mask of the Rose do not require the player to complete failable actions as a condition of their trust. A character might say "Don't interrogate me until you talk to Steve," but they'll break under pressure instantly if you really didn't talk to Steve. Or a character might say "I have a secret; I won't tell anyone who's a cop; I think you're a cop" and then by the end of the scene she has told you anyways. I can only understand this as an attempt to limit the depth of multistage questlines. The game apparently can't ask the player to walk away from an errand because errands are a limited resource and walking away means a wall of filler text. Everyone will do everything they were opposed to, if you ask persistently enough, as if they lack stable preferences or a stable evaluation of your character. The compromises of this system are the sort of thing I would expect a really inventive writer to be able to write around, but there's not a lot of liveliness and zest when it comes to the detective bits. The writers could have confronted this as a problem, but instead it seems like they tried to ignore it. Ultimately, while a handful of individual mechanics are pretty impressive, the quest structure doesn't present much that feels expressive or original. I'll reiterate -- I think a dedicated Fallen London fan would probably still find a lot to enjoy here, but as a game I think this is really not very good!

I wasn't terribly keen to play this at first because the store page and the game description made it sound like it would be a fairly 'simple' visual novel game with 2-3 romance options. I should have known better, given the quality of the rest of the games from Failbetter. There are a ton of romance options and a lot of ways to craft your own character, so you don't feel like you're moving on rails through predetermined events, which is how a lot of less well crafted visual novels feel. I've played Fallen London online since 2012, so a game that shows what it was like for Londoners close to the fall, rather than 4 decades later, is really fascinating. I'm glad I finally gave this game a shot.

This was recommended to me and since it was on sale I thought why not. The artwork is nice! Which is often a make-or-break deal for me with these types of games. The characters are interesting with a wide range of backgrounds and cultures on display (as it should be in London)! And I am enjoying the mysteries unfolding. HOWEVER, I feel like I am missing a lot of references or context for certain things. While I feel you do not need to know the wider Fallen London franchise, (I have no experience of Fallen London beyond this game) it probably does help to know the other games or series as a whole to be more aware/informed on certain things. There is also the matter of how the game itself plays, I’m not sure how to explain it other than at times I feel like I am fighting with the game or missing things/clues/context? That might better help me muddle through certain choices. I also feel that there should be more time (days/month/seasons) to explore because while you can solve certain puzzles it feels like you can only do one thing at a time and while I am enjoying this game, I don’t want to have to do twenty or thirty playthroughs to get through this entire game and its achievements. And yet somehow I feel like the game can also drag in places, especially when you do repeat playthroughs. The mini-games, the story crafting aspect while fun feels like it gets in the way of the plot of the story, or progressing the plot, I have to hunt around for things for the mini-games while also being on a deadline to complete certain stories, so if I do not get the right info on time I cannot get the outcome I want. The romances and friendships in this game also feel weird. The first romance I tried failed because I could not save him in time, I’m still not sure how to get him out of prison, (again the story crafting mini-game is causing me some grief). The second romance I tried was a little better, (Mr. Pages,) but aside from the surprise of what he was (again I feel knowing about this franchise before hand helps) I was somewhat confused about certain things. It does not feel intuitive, other visual novel romances are simple, a lot in this game feels unnecessarily complicated. I know I’m not the best at puzzle games, but this doesn’t even feel like a puzzle game, it feels like a murder mystery that doesn’t actually want you to solve the mystery and while that would be interesting in of itself I do not think that is what the Dev’s intended. Its weird, it frustrates me and yet I am inspired to check out the rest of the Fallen London series now because of this bloody game. I do recommend it, but please don’t ask me why I like it, I just do?