Failbetter's gothic dating sim Mask Of The Rose delayed to June

There’ll be all kinds of horrors present in Fallen London’s spin-off, Mask Of The Rose: green-tentacled creatures, underground Londoners, and most frighteningly, love. Sometimes two or more of these horrors intersect, and by that I mean you can romance that tentacled man in this gothic, alternative-history dating sim. Spooky suitors will need to wait a while more, though, as Mask Of The Rose has been delayed to June 8th - previously slated for April.

Developers Failbetter Games say that recently added features made the game “more responsive to player choice than is usual for visual novels,” but this ambition also added a laundry list of bugs to fix. On their Steam blog, Failbetter say, “you can meet characters in different orders, important information can be conveyed in multiple different conversations, and the story can vary a lot in how the parts are connected together.” They continue to say their testing has to account for all of these variables to ensure each is functional and satisfying.

Since releasing a demo, Failbetter have now implemented a couple of key changes. In particular, when using the map you can now select an objective, on top of where and who to travel to. This means you can catch characters in a private moment or a crowd, depending on what your intentions are.

Mask Of The Rose puts heavy emphasis on your wardrobe, allowing you to tinker with your outfits, impressing your dates or making them embarrassed by association. A recently implemented change now gives clearer feedback to let you know when an outfit is enabling new dialogue options. Other recent changes include an objective tracker and better signposting of what dialogue options advance time.

The romantic visual novel was originally funded by Kickstarter backers who reached the £90,000 goal in a single day, and it's since swooped onto RPS's 101 most anticipated games list. Our AliceBee also had a chat with the Failbetter team on how they handle DLC and how Mask Of The Rose was conceived.

If you’re at WASD London this weekend, you can go hands-on with a nearly-finished version of the game. The rest of us can only enjoy the recent launch trailer above, in preparation for its June 8th release on Steam and consoles.