Gothic Horror Dating Sim/Murder Mystery 'Mask Of The Rose' Delayed To 2023

Failbetter announced last week that their new game Mask of the Rose — a dating sim visual novel based around their Victorian-London-but-spooky setting of Fallen London and Sunless Sea — would be pushed back from its initial release date of Q3 2022 all the way to April 2023.

The delay is due to "signs of an over-tight schedule", according to a post on their website, and the team was unwilling to force "significant overtime" to meet the original release date.

"In this situation, there are three things we could do in principle.

We could ask our team to put in significant overtime to meet the current schedule, but it’s important to us to provide a good workplace where everyone has time for personal and family life. We could cut features and parts of the story, releasing a game that didn’t fully meet our intentions and ambitions.

Our sense, though, is that our players and backers would rather get the game later in its best state, rather than sooner in a worse form. So that leaves us with the third option, moving back the schedule."

The post said that the exact release date would still be up in the air for a while, but they weren't expecting it to move again, so for now we'll peg Mask of the Rose for an April 2023 release.