Xbox Series X|SPlayStation 4LinuxPC (Microsoft Windows)PlayStation 5Mac2023

Mask of the Rose

A marvellous romance with a hint of murder. Lose your heart to a stolen city in this game of amorous intrigue! Seek love, for yourself or your friends. Help a murdered man find justice. And watch out for the bats.

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Mostly Positive

2 Steam reviews

Review History

Reviews

2 total

≥h

Steam User 3469STEAMNot recommended

Could maybe be fun if replaying wasn't such a chore.

Mar 11, 2026·7h·Verified

Steam User 3814STEAMNot recommended

Great writing, good characters, interesting mechanics, abysmal limitations
Overall writing - 10/10
Main story - 5/10
Art - 10/10
Mechanics as Idea - 8/10
Mechanics Implementation - 0/10
Overall - 4/10

I absolutely love the idea that clothes define our behavior and how it's tied to the narrative. Also the storyboard mechanic is great and overall I loved it (after I realized how it worked).

I can’t recall any character that I can call cardboard, but some quests felt like a waste of time. And that’s precisely this game’s main issue.
Now comes the rant)

The creators literally steal 10 days from your calendar at the end to reach the epilogue. And if you haven’t finished some quests, characters might call you out on it with subtle ‘I don’t hold it against you though’

Thus, I know that they are consciously guilttripping us into replaying the game. And since this game has my favourite ‘autosave’ feature, it’s not fun at all.
You can’t finish the main quest and at least a few additional ones. Give me more days to play or ability to save where I need, I don’t wanna see the prologue for another twenty times!

Limitations in this game do not add to its replayability, they just make the game awful and waste our time on clicking through the prologue over and over again. I swear I came to hate the starting animation, even though I liked it at first.

And it’s not like it’s the only way. Make a different mode for hard core players with less days. I mean it’s only one variable in the code. How hard is that?
I probably sound like an awful autsource client right now, but it’s not like I dug through your code, so my suggestions are obviously dumb.

Or the dressing up mechanic may be a restrictive factor instead. Perhaps, you choose an outfit for a day and can’t change it without spending ‘time’.

Not to mention, I may be not the brightest, but I swear I figured out the details of the case before I realized how to use the storyboard to actually start investigating 0-0

At that point I had to replay a few times already, so I straight up started abusing saves by coppypasting them. Actually, its a good game if you start abusing the saves from the get go. Seriously, if you liked the premise, you’ll probably enjoy it, here’s the directory: %userprofile%\AppData\LocalLow\Failbetter Games\Mask of the Rose\saves

I really hope creators will recall what replayability means some day.

For example, in my teens I played a weird free game that basically was clicking magic school simulator or something. It was dumb, but the animations, art and other small details that were changing during the playthrough were so great that I replayed it even after I got all the achievements.

I could save at any moment, but the experience in its entirety was so good that I rarely saved the progress at all.

Another example - Ebon Light. You can choose whatever route you want in the third act, regardless of with whom you interacted more. But all the characters were so interesting that I replayed it from the start almost each time I tried to romance another guy.

I think I can recall good detective games too if I think a little more, but truly I don’t want to invest any more of my time. Maybe in a year or two I’ll forget how frustrated I was and finally finish all quests I was curious about)

It just breaks my heart that so much effort from designers, writers, coders, testers went to waste(