Mask of the Rose game review — dating and sleuthing in an atmospheric netherworld

A homesick golem, a couple who may or may not be the devil incarnate and a doctor with an acute case of melancholia. These are just a few of the characters you meet in the dating-sim/murder-mystery Mask of the Rose, all of whom you can converse with and, should the mood take you, seduce in the name of romance or something more Machiavellian. 

The year is 1862, and London has just fallen into a vast cavern. Your immediate task is to conduct a census of those who survive in the so-called “Neath”, and so you set out on to the city’s newly subterranean streets to speak with its inhabitants. Each character you encounter draws you deeper into a dark, delightfully perverted fictional universe, one that developer Failbetter Games has explored since 2009’s excellent text-based RPG, Fallen London. Like that game, and other entries in the series such as 2019’s Sunless Skies, you can practically smell the breath of the spluttering characters and feel the dampness in the air, such is the strength of the game’s character writing and world-building.

The story is told as a first-person visual novel. Once you have created your character (I played as a friendly, well-meaning tailor first; an assertive dock-working seductress second), you’re free to explore London and gab away with its residents in any order you please. There’s a wrinkle, though: unlike most other visual novels, this isn’t a story of branching paths, but one that rearranges itself dynamically according to your actions. Such is the accommodating nature of the game, you can even pursue the romance and murder mystery to whatever degree you please. Prefer to gallivant about town in the name of sexual liberation? No problem. Hope to bring about a resolution that maintains a semblance of justice? That’s your prerogative. 

However, there is a punishing time limit imposed on your actions. You are given two conversations per day and only a handful of weeks in total, within which you must make both your advances and deductions. Mask of the Rose convinces more as a dating simulator than as a mystery, modelling relationships with considerable nuance, from sexual desire and romantic intimacy to platonic friendship and outright hostility. As a piece of crime fiction, however, it lacks the major beats that typically make the genre sing: the twists and turns, the revelations. If you don’t crack the case (a murder victim that comes back from the dead just as quickly as they’ve been killed) in the allotted time (a near-certainty on your first playthrough), then the court case ends with disappointing abruptness.

Still, as a work of romance, Mask of the Rose is enjoyably subversive, alternating between beauty, horror, lust and gratification in ways that are never less than thoughtful or sensitive. I won’t quickly forget my tailor’s moonlit tryst with the golem, coupling as if it were just another night in London — and not one in which the city sat hundreds of metres below the ground.

★★★☆☆

Available now on PC and Nintendo Switch