It’s 1862, the Earth is hollow, and bats have stolen London. The city has been put the city in a giant cave. Welcome to the Fallen London universe, which started as a free-to-play browser RPG and has since branched out with games like Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies. Now, developer Failbetter Games has announced a romance game in the same universe called Mask of the Rose.
Failbetter have provided a short synopsis of the game, as well as your potential love interests.
Mask of the Rose takes place in 1862, mere months after London was stolen by bats. Londoners are still adjusting to life underground. The old street signs are being erased. New ministries and new festivals are being established. The mysterious Masters of the Bazaar seem to be in charge.
You share your boarding house with a few other lodgers: Archie, a medical student discovering firsthand that Death works differently here. Griselda, a close aide of the new Masters. Horatia, the landlady with a soft spot for the Neath’s native inhabitants. Harjit, the local constable looking for a missing person of his own.
As you make a new life below, you may find yourself visiting the underwater ruins of Parliament; intervening in a murder trial where the victim is a witness; or steering a hooded, vocabularious Master through the subtleties of a London courtship. However you choose to live in the Neath, you have your own friendships – and your own heart – to look after.
The previous Sunless games are heavily text-based RPGs, but gained new visual worlds to explore via a movement system and light top-down combat. The upcoming game, meanwhile, will have content that Fallen London players are used to, like solving mysteries and exploration, but the game promises a significant amount of time spent on romancing and spending one-on-one time with characters.
A Kickstarter for the game will begin in Feb. 2021.
