Mask of the Rose review: Dating and murder in the early days of fallen London.
It's hard for me to believe that it's taken Failbetter this long to try its hand at a visual novel. The studio has always had the most engrossing, amusing, and evocative writing in the business, but it's got an uncanny knack for hiding that writing behind mechanics that eventually wear on my nerves. Between browser games and roguelikes, the studio's wit keeps ending up blunted by repetitive gameplay loops. Only Sunless Skies, so far, has managed to strike a good balance.
It's admirably open-ended, and should hopefully give anyone room to play without feeling uncomfortable. Even if you mark yourself as down for whatever on Victorian Tinder, the game will regularly check in about what kind of relationship you're pursuing, if any, with each of the game's individual characters, including the giant bat and the squid-man.
You can get through a full run of the game in around three or four hours, but it means you'll inevitably leave plot-threads dangling and lots of relationships at a halfway point when you hit credits. Even going through with a new character background and some different choices, I ended up feeling like I was repeating certain sections of the game to get back to where I was previously.
My first time through, unaware of how little time I had, I accidentally left my friend to hang because I got distracted pursuing various other plotlines: Fomenting revolution, taking London's census, trying to woo someone attractive even though they're definitely a Tory. The second? I tried to balance my responsibilities and left them all half-finished. The third time through, I focused and finally managed to assemble one of many possible cases for why my boy was innocent.
In theory, it's great, and lord knows it fits impeccably well with the themes of Failbetter's London and its entire vibe as a studio, but more often than not I found myself thwarted trying to use it. Either I'd input a narrative that I thought made sense but that didn't give me a new story to go and talk to people about, or I wouldn't quite have the building blocks necessary to construct the theory I had in my actual, real-life head.
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