Sunless Sea News

You may have seen that we Kickstarted a new game in the same universe as Sunless Sea in February this year. Now we're pleased to announce that it has a shiny Steam page!



Mask of the Rose is a romantic visual novel, so somewhat different to Sunless Skies and Sunless Sea. However, it's set in the same universe, and brings all of our expertise in writing deep, surprising, meaningful stories, this time on a more personal level.

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Thanks to an unknown bargain, London now resides in a vast cavern under the earth. Down here, the sun doesn't shine, and Parliament has sunk into the Thames. Queen Victoria never emerges from her palace. Cats spy on their owners and whisper their secrets abroad. The fabric of strait-laced Victorian society has begun to fray.

New Masters are in charge. Why are they so… tall? And always cloaked? And why are they so interested in love stories?

Even death itself has a twist here: the first murder victim since the Fall is feeling much better, and keen to see justice done. Unfortunately, as the doctor who treated him immediately before he expired, your housemate Archie is the prime suspect...

• (Re)invent yourself: who were you before the Fall? Who will you be now?
  
• Create outfits from a selection of clothing and unusual accessories to unlock different story options
  
• Fall in love with a cast of diverse Londoners, each with their own secrets
  
• Matchmake among your friends, or seek love for yourself (by any definition you like)
  
• Write love stories in a delightful minigame, and use them to impress the new Masters
  
• Pick up odd jobs to earn money and gather resources. How are you at rat catching?
  
• Solve the first murder since the Fall, with the assistance of the victim
  
• Discover cosy, mysterious and magnificent locations in a dark and delicious version of Victorian London
  
• Seek deeper and deeper secrets over multiple playthroughs
  

We hope you'll take a look at Mask of the Rose, and wishlist to find out more about romancing bats!

We’re glad to announce that Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition will be released very soon, on Wednesday 19th May. This will be the first version of Sunless Skies we release on consoles, and will also be a free major update for everyone here on Steam!



This is a greatly enhanced edition of Sunless Skies, containing all additions and improvements we’ve made to the game since launch as well as many more completely new ones. Here's a link to the trailer!

For the Sovereign Edition, we’ve reworked and extended the starvation mechanics. Captains will now find a range of increasingly dubious gastronomic options available to them as desperation grows.

We’ve improved character progression, with a new interface, a greater range of facets to define your past, and even a way for experienced captains to continue improving their capabilities after reaching the level cap.



There are also new trading opportunities to exploit, an exotic engine for your locomotive, better performance, greatly improved gamepad support, and literally hundreds of fixes and small improvements. If you’d like to know more, we’ve included a more detailed list below.

This ultimately took longer than we’d hoped, partly due to the considerable scope and partly because it turned out to be pretty difficult to achieve the level of performance optimisations we wanted. But all is now well, and we’re very glad to be able to share it with you.

We think this will be by far the best version of the game for new players, and we hope the new features and many quality of life improvements will make it exciting for the veteran captains among you, too.

For a while now, we’ve been working on a couple of new projects. Today we’re very excited to announce the first of them!

Mask of the Rose is a romantic visual novel and prequel to all our other games set in the Fallen London universe.


Here’s the trailer: https://youtu.be/QujJ4oVaFKI

Mask of the Rose takes place in 1862, mere months after London was stolen by bats. Londoners are still adjusting to life underground. The old street signs are being erased. New ministries and new festivals are being established. The mysterious Masters of the Bazaar seem to be in charge.

You share your boarding house with a few other lodgers: Archie, a medical student discovering firsthand that Death works differently here. Griselda, a close aide of the new Masters. Horatia, the landlady with a soft spot for the Neath's native inhabitants. Harjit, the local constable looking for a missing person of his own.

As you make a new life below, you may find yourself visiting the underwater ruins of Parliament; intervening in a murder trial where the victim is a witness; or steering a hooded, vocabularious Master through the subtleties of a London courtship. However you choose to live in the Neath, you have your own friendships – and your own heart – to look after.

The art of Mask of the Rose draws on Film Noir, Victorian photography and Blitz-era Britain, and is an evolution of the Fallen London universe’s painterly style, keeping the atmosphere of the original but with more detail and depth.

If you’re a fan of the Fallen London universe, Mask of the Rose offers a glimpse of events we’ve never shown before, as part of a more personal story. You will get to explore the origins of beloved characters and institutions, as well as encounter brand new mysteries. Mask of the Rose is also an excellent introduction for players just getting started with the Fallen London universe.

We’ll be running a Kickstarter campaign for Mask of the Rose in February 2021 - sign up on our Kickstarter page to be notified when the campaign goes live, and join our Discord or forums to discuss the announcement!



With our porting partner, we’ve submitted builds for certification on all three console platforms. This is the process in which Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft sign off on them as ready for release. We don’t know exactly how long it will take, and it’s common for certification to throw up a few issues, but this puts us in striking distance of a release!

Much of the work on the console editions is being done by an external team who’re much more experienced with porting games than we are. We're looking forward to being able to share the fixes and performance improvements they've made with you!



That’s right! We’re working on two new projects. We can’t tell you much about the other yet, but we can say that its game mechanics are very different from our past work, and that it takes place in a new setting.

Sign up via Kickstarter to be informed as soon as the Kickstarter campaign for Mask of the Rose goes live.

Surprise! Sunless Sea: Zubmariner Edition is coming out for Switch on 23rd April and XBox One on the 24th!

You may have heard that we’ve been working on console ports for Sunless Sea, and Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition.

Initially we’d expected Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition to release for PC/Switch/PS4/Xbox One first, with Sunless Sea: Zubmariner Edition following. Schedules on both projects have moved around a bit, meaning the release dates are now as follows:

• Sunless Sea comes to Switch on 23rd April
  
• Sunless Sea comes to Xbox on the 24th
  
• Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition comes to PC, Switch, PS4 and Xbox in August/September
  

We'll have more to share about the Sovereign Edition for Sunless Skies as work continues, but we hope that for now, the opportunity to return to or discover Sunless Sea is an enticing one.

See you in the dark,

Your friends,
Failbetter Games

Note: Sunless Sea: Zubmariner Edition is already available on PS4 and Sunless Sea is available for iPad.

If you've played Sunless Sea or Sunless Skies, you might be familiar with Fallen London!

Fallen London is a text-based browser game set in a subterranean city inhabited by Victorian Londoners, talking rats, and people with the faces of squids. In the last decade, it’s grown from a handful of stories to a 2.5-million word epic with tens of thousands of monthly players.

We’d like to think that it’s remained popular for the kinds of stories we offer. Not just the weird, inventively horrifying world, but the fact that you get to act on fantastically bad ideas, from publishing horrendous poetry to feeding your soul to a cat.

To hear more about the celebrations we have in store for Fallen London's 10th birthday, follow us on Twitter or join our Discord.



In honour of our 10th birthday, we've produced some gorgeous, special edition merchandise with Gametee: Storridge's Definitely Unmarked Playing Cards! Perfect for long zee or High Wilderness voyages.





We're also busy working on the Sovereign update to Sunless Skies, which will be launched across PC and console.



Sovereign will feature new starvation content, trading opportunities and facets, along with a redesign of the character progression interface. It will introduce a new exotic engine, the ability to continue to raise stats after reaching the level cap and an equipment stat rebalance.

Along with fixes for outstanding bugs, performance improvements and a number of quality of life updates, it will feature a redesigned control scheme and interfaces optimised for controller support, plus a fancy radial to make UI navigation more intuitive.

• The correct category can now always be selected when submitting bug reports.
  
• High Wilderness inhabitants and other locomotives will now keep more distance from ports and relays.
  
• Curators, Logoi and Eaters of the Dead are less unrelenting in their pursuit.
  
• Various small adjustments have been made to ambient messages.
  
• The bug report interface now includes a link to the troubleshooting guide.