


You can then share this story with other people. As you connect these elements, dynamic text fills in the story, giving it more flavour and context. When you're playing with story-crafting, you've got what looks like a murder board, with red string connecting text and images. Story-crafting is where the mechanics of interaction become more novel. As you do this, new opportunities will arise, be they side stories or more specific questions, maybe relating to the murder, or maybe flirty. You pick who you want to talk to, spending your limited time, and from there you can push the conversation in different ways, but no matter what, you're always trying to get to know the person better. The census, the search for love and the murder mystery all come together when you start chatting. But there certainly are things where you might not get a deeper explanation of something, depending on what your relationship with people is." "We don't want it to be that kind of play experience. "It's not designed to be the kind of thing where the first 10 times you play it, you have a frustrating outcome because you didn't do it quite right, and maybe the eleventh time you finally get everything to work out," Short says. This does not, however, mean you'll have to go through a bunch of unsatisfying conclusions before you get a good one.
#Mask of the rose steam full#
How you use and interpret the information given to you, and who trusts you enough to share it, could open some doors and close others, so to get the full picture you'll want to jump back in. "How do people trust you emotionally? How do they trust you with information? And how do they trust you with their secrets?" These are questions that matter if you're trying to get close to someone and if you're trying to ferret out clues about a murder.Īfter your interrogations reveal the murderer and you finish Mask of the Rose, you may still want to try again, as solving the mystery does not mean you've tied up every loose thread. "At the core of the entire game is the question of trust," Short says. Whodunit?Ī murder mystery slots into this quite neatly. This has also allowed Failbetter to explore and reveal different sides of these characters, and what might change depending on who they date. These characters aren't just waiting around to fall in love with you, and they could be just as happy with someone else.

They aren't all open to every kind of relationship, so you might end up falling for someone who's not actually interested in anything committed and long-term, like Milton, a devil whose longevity means he's never going to be interested in marrying a mortal human. Just as you can define your approach to romance, the cast of potential love interests also has some agency-they aren't, as Short puts it, a "menu of characters, all of whom would love to get with you, potentially, if you do and say the right things". So we wanted to make that space for them." "We wanted to support that as well," Short says, "because we've had a lot of experience at this point, hearing back from players about how they want to be able to inhabit the game worlds that we're creating. Some of these relationships may be explicitly sexual or romantic, gay or straight, but Failbetter also wanted to let people play matchmaker, setting up their friends while they remain asexual or aromantic. We wanted to build something where we were going to allow for a number of different ways of connecting with other characters. "But we wanted to build something where we were going to allow for a number of different ways of connecting with other characters." "Some of this ties into what our other games do as well, who our audience is, what we've kind of learned from working with the players who play Fallen London and the Sunless games," Short notes.
#Mask of the rose steam free#
This is indicative of a game that's interested in presenting a broad view of romance and relationships, free from the expectations of Victorian society.
