Set in the same universe as Sunless Sea and the other Fallen London games, Mask of the Rose is a romance visual novel planned for this October/November and included among the titles featured at LudoNarraCon. A demo is available now.
The first thing you do is customize some basic traits about your character. You can choose from two different character backgrounds, although there will be more in the full game, as well as a few other details. Interestingly, since Mask of the Rose has a strong romantic element, one of these traits relates to your romantic interests, asking you to set whether you’re interested in friendship, chaste romance, passionate romance, or intimate encounters without romance. I’m not entirely sure what the ramifications of these choices will be, but one thing that stood out is that if I picked the friendship option, I didn’t get a hat when choosing my clothes.
You might be asking yourself what in the world a hat has to do with anything. That’s actually one of the parts I found the most intriguing. Not only do your choices influence subsequent dialogue options, but so do your clothes. While I wore my fancy hat, I had new flirtatious dialogue options available in almost every conversation. Meanwhile, the official regalia I donned with it gave me other dialogue options focused strictly on work.
Speaking of dialogue options, they come up often. Mask of the Rose is presented in a common visual novel format, but the frequency of the dialogue choices took me by surprise. It didn’t seem likely that I’d be sitting back to read a long stretch of text without choices any time soon. That’s not a bad thing; in fact, the only thing I disliked was that it wasn’t always clear if having a number of topics to choose from would let me circle back to discuss the others or if I was choosing a single one to move on from.
Dialogue options aren’t the only choices you’ll make. You have a set number of activities you can perform each day, with a map to choose which locations you want to visit to talk to different characters. Even in this short demo, I found myself needing to choose who I would prefer to focus on. Starting out a new day also presented me with the option to remember the past, which led to shorter sequences set immediately after London’s fall. Meanwhile, in the present, you’re gathering census data for the totally-not-inhuman-cloaked-figure who has a particular interest in learning about people’s romantic activities.
Mask of the Rose has an intriguing story setup, with a lot of weird things happening, as well as an incident at the end of the demo that raises the stakes even higher. I only have a passing familiarity with the Fallen London universe from a few hours I spent with Sunless Sea a while back, but I can already tell how well-crafted and thought out it is. A weird sense of humor also runs through this demo, such as the previously-mentioned cloaked figure using bizarre word choices (which you have the option of recounting to other characters verbatim instead of rephrasing it in your own words) or encountering strange situations and having a choice to “calmly accept” whatever impossibility you’ve just been struck with.
Ironically, the one thing I don’t have a good feel for yet is the romance. I had plenty of options to flirt with characters but didn’t meet anyone I particularly had an interest in. So I expressed my interest in romance, donned my fancy hat, and seriously questioned everyone about census data and strange incidents. Nevertheless, it’s still early on, and the Mask of the Rose demo certainly left me interested in meeting more of its characters and seeing more of this strange world.
