I played Mask of the Rose last night.
In Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies, and Fallen London, it felt like I could do anything, given enough time and willingness to grind. This gives the opposite impression: there’s not much of a grind to accomplish anything, but time is a precious and limited resource, and realizing I’ve squandered half a day on a something that didn’t yield the results I wanted makes it feel like the possibility space is crashing in upon itself like a crumbled parliamentary building.
An example, followed by other lightly spoilery material:
thoughts on my first playthrough
You need money to buy clothes, pay debts, and grease palms.
Your first job is as a census-taker, which provides material incentive to meet and interview new people. Pay is low, but predictable. After a few days of play, I gained a new opportunity: I could also (or instead) help a struggling writer develop the plot of her new novel.
This makes use of one of the game’s more unusual features in which you can slot characters and narrative concepts into a chart to describe a system of actions and motives. This process generates a “story” that you can then refer back to in dialogue for various benefits.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. In practice, the story creation process is a bit ambiguous. You can generate as many stories as you want and they fill up a page of your journal with their various titles, but I think you only discuss the most recent story relevant to the conversational category you’re pursuing. So, although I can create three different narratives for the authoress to make use of, by the time I’m actually talking with her, I may not be able to remember what distinguishes the story I presented with the others I generated but did not get to show.
This was bad enough for me, but the entire “exonerate your fellow lodger from a false (?) murder accusation” angle requires much more involved use of the storytelling system to generate theories and probe witnesses for necessary details. I was floundering, so I abandoned the pursuit of justice to find another method by which I could save my friend.
The game also lets you play matchmaker, and I wound up encouraging a relationship between the murder victim’s sister and the very architect whose plans prevented her brother from obtaining the justice he sought posthumously. That proved awkward.
As for my own romantic-and-otherwise prospects, I wasted such time on the writing project and on pursuing tenuous murder leads that I never got around to talking seriously to the lady I’d been flirting with. While our spark never blossomed into flame, she did invite me into a fraternity of criminality due to my “Jack-of-all-trades” disposition. That’s not nothing, I guess.
Though this is nothing like a roguelite, it offers the same “let me try again and see how things go differently” impetus. I’m curious to see how well it stands up to that additional scrutiny.