Mask of the Rose on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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A marvellous romance with a hint of murder, where every playthrough is different! Seek love, friendship, or more... intimate encounters. Help a murdered man find justice. And watch out for the bats.
Mask of the Rose is a visual novel, dating sim and detective game
developed and published by Failbetter Games.
Released on June 08th 2023 is available in English on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
It has received 356 reviews of which 278 were positive and 78 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.3 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 19.50€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Mask of the Rose into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Mask of the Rose through various videos and screenshots.
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: Windows 7 64 bit and Windows 10 64 bit
- Processor: Intel Pentium 2GHZ or AMD equivalent
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: DX10, DX11, DX12 capable
- Storage: 3 GB available space
- Sound Card: DX10, DX11, DX12 compatible
MacOS
- OS: High Sierra 10.13+
- Processor: x64 architecture with SSE2
- Memory: 3 GB RAM
- Graphics: Metal capable Intel and AMD GPUs.
- Storage: <8 GB available space
Linux
- OS: Ubuntu 20.04+, ArchLinux
- Processor: Intel Pentium 2GHZ or AMD equivalent
- Memory: 3 GB RAM
- Graphics: OpenGL 3.2+, Vulkan capable
- Storage: <8 GB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Commenting this right after I got 100% achievement on this game at 58 hours. It took a long time for a game that shouldn't have taken so long almost solely because the devs didn't implement manual save. It's unthinkable for a visual novel with multiple endings -- so many times I had to started the game from the very beginning just because I missed a small thing or two, or had to utilize the save files. As a veteran Fallen London/Sunless Seas/Sunless Skies player, I enjoyed the writing of the game and the more deep Neath lore (Ascension and Reunion are both so well written). I have prepared for the hardship of the grind that is the tradition of the series but not from the lack of a key function. Forcing us to play without manual save doesn't contribute to the narratives or make sense to the game play. I would still say I had some decent fun playing this game, just wish the devs did things differently from the beginning.
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This one was a tricky one for me to decide on - in the end it's getting a recommendation, because on the overall balance (and me finally having gotten to resolve the actual mystery once), there are enough good aspects to the game that I don't want to give a thumbs down. let's start with the good There is so much freedom, it's wild. Starting just from the designing your own backstory in a few words (are you still who you were on the surface?), the different choices with respect to interpersonal relationships throughout the game (friendship, friendship+sex, romance, romance+sex, aka aroace, aro, ace, allo options) and the wealth of characters with distinct looks and well fleshed-out personalities encountered throughout the game - all of whom you can befriend, romance, seduce and/or set up with each other as you fancy. Secondly, there is so much choice with respect of how to spend your time: do you want to complete the census and help the ministry? try to incite a rebellion against the masters with Archie? facilitate the introduction of the rubbery men and/or rats to London? Help hell? Get involved in solving the main mystery? Don't care about any of these and just want to flirt with and/or get involved in relationships with a non-zero subset of these characters? Anything is possible, just give it a try. Lastly, but definitely not least, the art is insanely gorgeous and I adore the music. 11/10 for those aspects, and if, like for me, aesthetics are an important part of any video gaming experience, it's nearly worth it just for that. the bad That being said, with all the freedom come some downsides. Often one will be asked about what relationship one wants with the game's characters after what feels like far too little time to decide, and many of the sentences and statements can feel cringy and out of context. I've played with pretty much every iteration of the story crafting system, and I don't think there has ever been a time where I haven't found it massively annoying. Definitely too many precious turns wasted on not quite having the right question/thing to ask or not learning new information. This could very well be something that's on me, perhaps I'm just too daft to use it properly. Nonetheless, this can be very frustrating (and so very nearly made me give a negative review a number of times). As a massive fan of crime and mystery, I've pretty much tried to crack the murder from the start, and had the outline as an idea from basically the first time round. I found out that a couple of details of that outline weren't 100% correct when I finally managed to get the relevant characters to like me enough to open up + asked the right questions, but by that point there had already been a lot of annoyance built up at clearly having the shape of the mystery, but no even vaguely clear game path at how to get it to conclude successfully. the ugly In my opinion not just bad, but frequently downright frustrating is the combination of 2 possible things that can be done a day, the classic failbetter autosave system (i.e. the only existing saves will be from the game saving itself at preset points, you will not be able to save manually and unless you want to mess around with the files on your hard drive, you will not be able to revert to any previous savepoints), only having 3 save slots available full stop, whilst playing a game that relies on at least several play throughs to experience a good chunk of the underlying story. The fact that one has to more or less slog through significant parts of the plot without too much choice (especially if you're still keen on certain outcomes, because sometimes you still require the same level of intimacy with people to extract information from them several playthroughs in a row, and even worse if like me, you mightn't have realised that unless you tell Harjit about the actual murder story before the trial, it doesn't matter that you solved it, you will not be able to free Archie/bring about justice this way ) again and again really detracts from the replayability value, even if one would like nothing more than to explore further. tl;dr: gorgeous art, music, a lot of freedom to decide your path, which is equally it's downfall. Very slow gameplay which can make replaying rather frustrating. Recommendation by the skin of it's teeth, 6/10 - it's for you if you don't mind the slower aspects/pacing, like the world, and/or aren't too fussed about wanting to explore every single thing and dig into every single mystery/option.
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This is a difficult review to write because simply giving Mask of the Rose a "recommend" or "do not recommend" rating fails to capture the massive list of caveats required for either choice to feel genuine. As such, I'm going with a positive recommendation because I did really enjoy the game through all six or so playthroughs it took for me to get all the achievements and see most storylines. There are several ways in which the game excels and several more that it fails to live up to hopes. Perhaps most significantly, it fails to be completely compelling as both a "dating sim" and a "mystery game" due, in some part, to the constraints of the mechanics. However, the constraints don't fully explain why both aren't entirely satisfying in their goal. Before I dive into what the game does and doesn't do well in regards to these two gameplay/plot aspects, here is a breakdown of the other compliments and criticisms I have: The Positives: - Enjoyable soundtrack - Great world-building - Very nice art - Plenty of time to explore multiple quests and relationships in both seasons - Interesting characters The Negatives: - Not every character seems to be (end-pairing) romance-able for unclear reasons - The "affinity" system is vague and, at times, confusing - Unclear how to manipulate some endgame character pairings - No, and I cannot stress this enough, save states - No feature to skip previously seen dialogue (a visual-novel staple) With that out of the way, let's first talk about the dating aspects of the game. Like most modern visual novels, there are options for all levels of comfortable interactions: platonic relationships, platonic and romantic relationships with no "seduction", platonic and "seduction" relationships with no romance, and all of the above green-lighted. I, for one, always appreciate when all options are present because it is more inclusive to players of all types, so I was happy to see this here. The character creation options were also interesting, though they ultimately made little impact to the game's mechanics (i.e., starting as one "class" only influences initial clothing and location availability, which is soon rectified, and one dialogue option talking about your background, which can be avoided and doesn't seem to make a huge impact on favorability with characters). What I did not fully understand until after my first two playthroughs is that the initial conversation with Griz determines your personality and dialogue options more than anything else, until building a strong relationship with a character gives you the option to emulate their attributes. Thankfully, I liked the choices I made in that conversation the first two times, and once I realized that they were part of the character creation model, I started exploring with other options to see what effects they would have on my later interactions. All in all, I found the favorability system in the game to be a bit obtuse. No matter how repellent I might try to make my character, it was difficult for me not to have characters falling over themselves to flirt with me or end up back in their good graces despite how rude I might be. (For instance, during my last playthrough, I cried to create the worst person I could and was horrible to everyone, picking the most offensive choices I could, and I still ended up with multiple characters wanting to be friends or lovers. I was as rude as possible to Horatia, and she still ended up considering me her friend by early Yule.) Of course, my preference is to play a character more like me on initial runs and then mix it up once I become familiar with the mechanics, but even after understanding them, I couldn't seem to get a truly repugnant experience for my MC. Furthermore, the friendship and romance system was rather "flat" compared to most any other dating sim I've played. Part of the fun in a dating sim, for me anyway, is getting the know the characters on a "deep" level, and then exploring an even deeper connection once making my choice of who to befriend/romance. As much as I liked the characters, I felt like there wasn't a lot of depth to any of them. Our relationship never really changed in a dramatic way from the beginning to the end, and all interactions intended to "deepen" our relationships were nonexistent for me as the player (i.e., there was a whole lot of telling and not showing when it came to conversations between the MC and characters as they got to know each other). I wonder if, perhaps, this methodology is a remnant of how short each season was in the original version of the game, but even with a greater time constraint, I don't understand writing stuff like, "We talked about our hopes and dreams" or "We fell into banter for a while and did not recover quickly" instead of actually providing details and dialogue options. In fact, there were more times that I found out something fascinating about a character when I wasn't pursuing a friendship or romance with them than the times when I was spending every free moment interacting with that particular character (e.g., if you don't talk to Griz within the first day or so of the game, you will probably never hear her tell you about her mother's fate). I genuinely struggled with wanting to actually romance any of the characters after a certain point because there was no true development to our relationship. (The ones I still wanted to romance were seemingly unromance-able, or I was never able to make enough progress in our relationship to trigger a successful meeting at the bridge anyway.) The same lines might trigger twice in a conversation, whether I had been courting them for five minutes or five days. This aspect of the game was especially disappointing to me because I know the Fallen London games are known for remarkable depth, and that was lacking here. The mystery aspect of the game fared a bit better than the romance, but it still wasn't entirely compelling for me. For the sake of spoilers, I won't speak about the crime or the myriad of ways to resolve it, but I did enjoy that there were multiple approaches to the problem and even layers behind the actual true solution. Unfortunately, it is far too easy, in my opinion, to figure out the culprit and motive. I was a bit confused at first on how to use the information I gathered to continually change my hypotheses and present them to characters, but once I did, it took quite literally one interaction to get the culprit to confess everything. (I will say that I was initially shocked by the crime because I was romancing the person affected, and I was devastated that I had invested time into our relationship only for them to seemingly be unavailable.) I think part of the reason the mystery fails a bit, too, in terms of motive to solve it is that it is based on the assumption that you, as the player, will care about a certain character from the beginning. My first playthrough, I blew this person off and didn't like them, so when the crime occurred, I was entirely unmotivated to help said character and far more interested in pursuing my relationship with Mr. Pages and talking to Rubbery Men. Playing the game more as it was intended, I found that whole mystery plot to be far more interesting. Honestly, what I enjoyed the most about the game was getting to explore the world and lore of Fallen London. I wasn't able to dive as deeply as I might would have hoped, but it certainly whet my appetite. I was more drawn to figuring out what was going on at the Ministry (and seducing Mr. Pages lol), investigating the Rubbery Men, trying to help Harjit find Lucian, and doing that whole (AMAZING!!!) subplot with Moss. I feel like part of the game's biggest problem is that it tries to be too many things at once and, thus, can't (or didn't) give everything the kind of care and attention it deserved. The mechanics further hampered the storytelling. Still, with all of these things in mind, I did have a really good time playing it.
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I love Failbetter games, and I admire them for making an ambitious, highly branching, relationship-based experiment like this. Unfortunately, I find the plot, the characters and the choices to be lacklustre. This is in part due to the procedural dialogue, which at times ruins the suspension of disbelief by giving you weird or boring responses that don't really match up with the flow of the conversation. There's a lot of potential here. I wish the devs would make an expansion or add some DLC to flesh out the game. Definitely worth a try, but temper your expectations. This isn't as polished as Sunless Seas/Skies. Recommended with caveats.
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I've just completed my first run of the game, and I do intend on replaying it but I wanted to share my thoughts on it here. Overall, I would recommend the game because of its wonderfully unique setting, visual, and writing style, especially to those who, like me, are really into gothic horror. It's got a wonderful atmosphere, characters, and secrets for you to uncover. However, I do have to say - I have already played most other Failbetter games out there, and this one does fall significantly flatter than the other ones. It's gorgeous, it's charming but I feel it lacks the density and depth of its cousin installments. I don't want it to be longer and more tedious, I want it to be more 'meaty' for lack of a better word, like others were. I can't really point my finger onto what specifically is different but it doesn't have quite the same feeling. So, if you're coming here from other Fallen Universe games, I'd advise adjusting your expectations slightly.
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Online players
1
Developer
Failbetter Games
Publisher
Failbetter Games
Release
08 Jun 2023
Platforms