Hello, zailors!

Quick little update to fix the Steam auto cloud issue that's been bugging many of you.

Full notes:

• Save files now load correctly via the Continue button on the title screen when the steamcloud_saving.vdf file is present
  
• The steamcloud_saving.vdf file will be automatically deleted when loading the game through non-Steam clients
  
• Buy 10 options have been added to Avernus/Naples for Fuel and Supplies
  
• Lots of typo and grammatical fixes

Happy zailing!

We're delighted to offer Sunless Sea, Zubmariner and Sunless Skies in the World Oceans Day sale this year.

If you're already a Sunless Sea player, this is an ideal opportunity to pick up Zubmariner at 50% off in the knowledge that any damage you do to our imagined unterzee-beasts can be metaphorically offset by our contribution to WDC. We'll be donating 30% of our net profits from the sale event to WDC to support their conservation work.*

WDC is the leading global charity dedicated to the protection and conservation of whales and dolphins. WDC defends these remarkable creatures against the many threats they face by fighting to stop whaling, end captivity, prevent accidental entanglement and deaths in nets and create healthy seas. They also advocate for the vital role that whales and dolphins play in fighting climate change and keeping our planet healthy. Their vision is a world where every whale and dolphin is safe and free.

If you want to read more about WDC, you can do so here: https://uk.whales.org/

You can find many other amazing games in the sale here: {LINK REMOVED}https://bit.ly/OceansDaySteamSale

Thank you for joining us and for supporting WDC!

*30% of our net developer revenue from this sale will support Whale and Dolphin Conservation. Whale and Dolphin Conservation is a UK registered charity (no. 1014705)

Today it’s been exactly a year since Mask of the Rose was funded on Kickstarter, and we've just released a demo of the first act, available right now on Steam!

Offering a condensed version of Act I of Mask of the Rose, you’ll be able to explore select locations across Fallen London, introduce yourself to some key characters and encounter Mr Pages, one of the mysterious new Masters who have recently taken over London, in its office at the Bazaar.

At the opening of Mask of the Rose, Mr Pages has employed your housemate, Griz, who has in turn found a few pennies’ work for you as census taker. The census goes some way beyond the expected (Surface census forms never did ask if anyone in the residence was in love), so you’ll need to approach conversations with care to find out all you need to know.

Demo Feedback

We're really excited to know what you think about exploring Fallen London from this perspective for the first time. The very best places to talk about it will be the Steam discussion forums for Mask of the Rose, or if you want to join one of our community spaces, there's Discord[discord.gg], our forums[community.failbettergames.com], and the Fallen London subreddit.

There are a few things it’ll be useful to know before you send feedback:

• In the final game there will be a text log, so you can scroll back through conversations
  
• There will also be audio sliders under Settings
  
• And of course, there will be saving in the finished game (the final version of Act I will be fleshed out from this version, so carrying choices over wouldn’t be possible).

Spotted a bug?

The demo has been through our internal testing, but if you see any bugs or typos we missed, please let us know by emailing mask@failbettergames.com, attaching your player log. Here are some instructions to help you find your player log.

We will probably only update the demo if something pretty bad has slipped through, but this will let us fix everything before we release the full game. Thank you!

Release Date News

We have also announced that Mask of the Rose will release in Oct/Nov this year. Hopefully this taste will keep you going until then!

As ever, your friends,
Failbetter Games

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.

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.

Because the Sovereign Edition includes so many changes, there will be a couple of significant oddities if you play it with a very old save file.

Specifically, if you haven’t used your save file since we released the Wayfarer update in 2019, the chart will forget which areas you’ve uncovered, and you’ll begin play near New Winchester, wherever you were before. Everything else will work fine, so you won’t lose any progress with stories. If you want to avoid this, you can just briefly load up your save in a current version of Sunless Skies before 19th May when we release the Sovereign Edition.

Finally, the Sovereign Edition includes a much better default experience for gamepads, but it unfortunately doesn’t support rebinding for them. We anticipate that there will now be much less need for most players to rebind the controls, but we know that some players may have specific accessibility needs. There is some third party software that should still make it possible to rebind the controls in this case – if you need some support with this, please do get in touch with us and we’ll do our best to help.

For the curious, this is a slightly more detailed list of new features and changes in the Sovereign Edition – we'll share a more detailed changelog at the time of release!

• A major rework of starvation, with various new and probably inadvisable choices about what to eat.
  
• A completely redesigned character progression screen.
  
• On level up, the winds of fate will now offer you a choice from a subset of available facets, rather than all of them.
  
• To compensate for the reduced control over your captain’s exact stats, requirements for locomotive equipment and weapons are now substantially less demanding.
  
• Also, level 20 is no longer the end of your captain’s development: while they will not be able to choose more facets, they can continue to improve their stats.
  
• Several new facets: perhaps you lost your soul (and found it again) or attended a seance. Perhaps you have a notable hobby, or are close to rats, spies, Rubbery Men, devils?
  
• You will now be informed when you unlock a new deed.
  
• New trading opportunities.
  
• Hints for prospects.
  
• Many improvements to the chart.
  
• A saving indicator (finally!).
  
• A new exotic engine to discover, which may be of particular interest to experienced players.
  
• Numerous performance improvements.
  
• A rework of the saving and the save file system that should result in fewer eccentricities if your play session is interrupted by a power cut.
  
• Various quality of life improvements.
  
• Literally hundreds of bug fixes.
  
• A UI overhaul to provide better support for controllers.
  
• Sundry small and subtle things, which we’ll get into in the full patch notes!

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[discord.gg] 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[www.fallenlondon.com]!

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[discord.gg].


In honour of our 10th birthday, we've produced some gorgeous, special edition merchandise with Gametee: Storridge's Definitely Unmarked Playing Cards![gametee.co.uk] 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.