YMMV / Fallen London

• Adorkable: Many of the Masters manage to come across like grand, unknowable, eldritch beings of mystery. Mr. Pages is a big giant nerd who can't think in a straight line, makes up its own language, and writes romance stories under a lady pseudonym. Even its burglary-induced tantrum is strangely adorable.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The Great Game was the actual name of the political struggle between Britain and the Russian Empire in the 1800s.
• Awesome Music:
  • The same composers who wrote the soundtrack for Sunless Sea have composed an even beefier OST for the Fallen London mobile app. Behold!
  • “Veilgarden Last Call” perfectly encapsulates the chaos and thrill of night in a lively arts district and starts all the way at 11 for the strangeness of the city and Veilgarden itself with distorted female vocals, instruments sounding on the edge of broken, and a percussion section of not tap but Irish step dancers.
• Base-Breaking Character: Virtually anyone who runs for election swiftly become this. Is Feducci a cool and badass duelist or a warmongering foreign spy who has no business being in office? Is Virginia the only one with a sensible and progressive platform or is she just another Deviless looking to make Londoners' souls more delectable for Hell to claim? Is the Viscountess of the Viric Jungle a brave and capable frontline general looking to defend Londoners on frontiers not previously taken seriously or just another bourgeois with little care for the average Londoner whose only goal is to invade lands that rightfully belong to the Fingerkings? Sometimes the debate dies down after the election. Sometimes resentment remains. Failbetter Games stopped the elections mostly because it got so heated every time some people always took it too far.
• Broken Base:
  • The removal of the "Ah, si- er, Ma- er, yes" option for gender-neutral characters has caused some friction. Some really like the new options, finding the old one slightly distasteful, some would enjoy still having it around while they themselves pick something else, and some have gotten rather upset at its complete removal, finding it iconic of the game itself or just enjoying it in general. Probably as a response to this, the option was reinstated.
  • The revolutionary Calendar Council are contentious amongst lore-seasoned players. Some see them as crusaders for freedom giving the finger to the natural way of things in defiance of law-imposing tyrants; others see them as mad and hypocritical for trying to force their idea of freedom onto everyone without regard for casualties or even the consent of the soon-to-be 'liberated'.
  • The Liberation of Night. Namely, whether it is desirable for humanity, whether it is justified, whether it is worth the cost it would incur or what it even entails. There are few topics that provoke such instant, often heated and usually entrenched debates. Tellingly, many players are weary of the topic being brought up at all due to how quickly it could provoke arguments among players that veterans have taken part in or spectated time and time again.
  • The Election events inspire lots of spirited debates on the forums about the candidates that become a little too contentious for some to such an extent that a separate forum had to be made for Election discussions because they were swamping all other discussion forums. This is one reason why the developers decided to cancel them in 2021, replacing elections with a more cooperative annual event.
  • The new Favours/Renown system for faction connections. Some like how trading in Favours feels much more logical than reducing a Connected quality and gives players more incentive to care about their faction connections; others dislike how tedious and card-dependent grinding for Favours and Renown can be and how Renown only significantly impacts gameplay if you spend a long time grinding it up. Still others think that the Favours by themselves work well but that the Renown part is inferior to the old Connected quality. The conversions of players' Connected qualities to Renown being scaled to the entire playerbase's Connected averages has also created controversy; while high Renown is largely a Cosmetic Award apart from the 10, 25, and 40 Renown items and Failbetter told players well in advance which Connected qualities were set to be converted into Renown next, many still got upset when their triple-digit Connected levels didn't yield as high levels of Renown than they expected and wished that Failbetter had given more details about the conversion scaling. Some players have even left the game after the Connected qualities they spent years building up were replaced by minuscule amounts of Renown.
• Catharsis Factor: Becoming a full-fledged Corsair opens some opportunities a lot of veteran players had been waiting for, when it comes to zee travel and its perils. Before, all your fights with other vessels involved simple intimidation or hand-to-hand combat, at best a single warning shot, always leaving the enemy relatively unscathed. But as a pirate? You can sink almost everyone you find, including the Circumcellion Brotherhood brutes, the Unfinished and Iron Republic pirates, fellow corsairs that often robbed you in the snares, and if you deliberately tank the Persuasive check even Dr. Orthos' goons can meet the Fathomking at your call. Older players have been known to rampage through the Zee taking their long-delayed vengeance thanks to this. And of course, there's the Bounty system. The Khanate, the Iron Republic and even London usually seem like entirely unassailable entities, but now you can pave the zeefloor with their ships if you're so inclined, and you have a particular dislike for any of them.
• Complete Monster: Mr. Veils, aka the monstrous Vake, presides over the trade in cloth and spends his free time hunting innocent people for sport. Haunting the nightmares of his victims before hunting them down in the waking world, Veils has some of his victims consume a version of a drink known as Black Wings Absinthe spiked with prisoner's honey, which transports them physically into the nightmare, where as the Vake he taunts, torments, and then tears them to pieces. In ancient times, Veils betrayed the fellow Master Mr Candles by having him stabbed repeatedly by the other Masters and fed to Priest-Kings, after which Veils delivered the final blow when he drowned Mr Candles in the tears of the Bazaar and dissolved him in purest sorrow, causing his vengeful disembodied spirit to become Mr Eaten.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: A common response among critics, due to the fact that the game more often than not does not respect the player's time, and can require weeks, if not months of repetitive grinding to fulfill longer storylines, such as the ambitions and Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Intrepid Deacon from the Exceptional Story For All the Saints unexpectedly became a player favorite/heartthrob due to his sweet personality, handsome portrait and compelling storyline.
  • "Furnace" Ancona is a relatively minor player in the very, very late-game storyline that is the railway. And yet she seems to be the most appreciated of all the available board members, as she represents the Tracklayers' Union, defends her workers at all turns, is never shy about telling the other board members what for, and is generally someone Mr. Fires would probably strangle personally if he was allowed to. Plus, she wears a brass furnace like a helmet at all times. Around the 1898 elections, memes flew about how she should have been a candidate.
• Evil Is Cool: The game itself is full of Grey-and-Grey Morality, Black-and-Grey Morality and just full on Blue-and-Orange Morality, but for certain characters and factions, this still applies in full force.
  • Due to their enemies, Hell is somewhere between ambiguously evil and A Lighter Shade of Black, but their aesthetic, ideology and behavior just oozes this. Because of this, while not without their detractors, Hell and the Devils are full of die-hard fans who can't get enough of them. Possibly as a result, storylines involving Hell are very common in Exceptional Stories.
    • To a lesser extent, likely due to their more limited appearances, this also applies to the Exiled Monarchs of Hell. Unlike their humanoid counterparts, the Princes of Hell are vast and powerful, contrasting Hell Republic's industrial look with a more primal and eldritch aesthetic. Their mysterious and affable portrayal helps.
  • The Masters of the Bazaar, arguably simultaneously the main villains and face of the game. Their distinctive personalities and mysterious nature combined with them being the centerpiece of a lot of the game's plot mean they have as many fans as they have enemies. Their true nature as giant space bats also help. It is telling that the Power ending of the Heart's Desire ambition appear to be one of the most popular.
• Fandom VIP: The community has a couple of them, such as "Spacemarine9," who runs a lore blog and was responsible for the Ratmas incident, and "NiteBrite," whose claims to fame include being one of the few Hesperideans (and possibly the first to become one fair-and-square rather than through Bribing Your Way to Victory), picking the "this-will-destroy-your-character" option during Mr. Eaten's Name, and not having their character destroyed, and becoming the proud owner of a Heptagoat.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The Director: The player character. Specifically, a late-game player character with much of their big stories complete, and considered as a character within its setting more than a PC. Named so because, of all the routes and decisions late game characters do, they're all the Director of the Great Hellbound Railway, and they needed a title anyhow.
  • Brass Lollipop: Headless Skeletons capped off with a Brass Skull and sold as is. Useful to get certain basic utilities like Incorruptible Biscuits from the Bone Market or simply converting converting Echoes inti Scrip, especially since you can just buy Brass Skulls and Licenciates in particular have an infinite supply of decapitated skeletons.
  • Reggie: The Bishop of Southwark's, whose real name is Reginald.
  • Corn: Cornelius.
  • Mammoth Ranching: A possibly outdated method of Money Grinding that relied on amassing ingredients for mammoth skeletons and concentrating on assembling them during profitable moments.
• Genius Bonus: Four of the Recurring Dreams can be said to correspond to the four Classical elements. The Fire Sermon is obviously fire, and Death By Water is obviously water. What the Thunder Said relates to the air and wind, while The Burial of the Dead talks a lot about the earth. Is Someone There? may even correspond to the fifth element, ether, since it seems to have a connection to the Mirror-Marches, a very strange and dreamlike world. This might also explain why A Game of Chess is classified under "Dreaming Strange Dreams" rather than "Recurring Dreams", since it doesn't seem to correspond to an element.
  • All five titles are also a Shout-Out to "The Waste Land".
    • The 2021 Zeefarer update brought three new recurring dreams: "I Shot the Albatross", "Upon a Painted Sea" and "Betwixt Us and the Sun". All three are lines taken from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (with "Painted Ocean" changed to "Painted Sea").
  • Another one for Fridge Brilliance and recurring dreams; Almost all of the initial dream cards are autofire (which is to say that you can choose whether you activate the card or not, but you have no control on what happens afterwards). However, as you progress higher above the dream levels, you get the opportunity to have more control over your dream. Initially it's just normal cards (which differs from autofire in that you have some idea of what you're getting into), but then you get choices, you have additional options if you've fulfilled other dreams to a certain extent; essentially, the more you dream, the more control you gain over your dreams!
  • If you can get to the Iron Republic - a terrifying place where the laws of nature change constantly and sometimes at the behest of protestors - you might read The Day Numbers Stopped Working, in which the already scrambled, deranged notes your character writes stop making sense entirely. They do include the line "Vinum inquit si non placet mutabo." Which is Latin, a quote from the Satyricon - a work of fiction written two thousand years ago. It means "'Wine,' he said, 'If it does not please, I will change'", and is said by someone who had gone from slavery to something like a king.
  • There are two kinds of mushroom wine found in the "Infernal" category instead of the usual "Wines:" Amanita Sherry and Muscaria Brandy. Amanita muscaria is a well-known species of poisonous mushroom, which is why only devils can drink wine derived from them safely.
  • In one zailor storylet you are ambushed by the the ship "Israelite" owned by the Circumcellion Brotherhood, who seek "both plunder and martyr" and wield clubs. This is a reference to a real early sect of Christianity who revered martyrs and would attack travelers in order to die. They used clubs called "Israelites" based on a perceived prohibition against bladed weapons in John 18:11: "Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?"
  • The Exceptional Story Paisley features a heavily censored play by the name of The EXPURGATED of EXPURGATED EXPURGATED with an actress named V___ as the leading lady. Some have theorized that the play is The Importance of Being Earnest, a satirical 1895 Victorian play by Oscar Wilde, with the leading actress being Irene Vanbrugh. This is supported by the fact that Oscar Wilde is both persecuted by the Masters (and Revolutionaries are heavily involved) and referenced in other points of the story.
• Good Bad Bugs: The bit of code preventing players without an Exceptional Friend subscription from entering the House of Chimes occasionally fires in other locations, resulting in humorous errors like this one◊.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: An early plot point in Heart's Desire is that the Marvellous would not occur for another five years unless your player character takes matter into their own hand to speed things along, being unwilling to wait five years. Then, since the ambitions were incomplete at the time, over five years go by without updates. For those who have been waiting for the conclusion to Heart's Desire, that bit of text seems like a naively optimistic estimate in retrospect.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Some players have taken to using the game's syntax for stat changes ("[Stat] is increasing..." or "A twist in your tale! You are now [something]" after the main body of text) to flavor posts or phrases.
  • The Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name questline has become incredibly memetic for its excellent and unique story, its mysterious endings and its incredibly memorable and ominous arc words. The number 7 and phrases like A Reckoning Will Not Be Postponed Indefinitely have become rallying cries for seekers everywhere.
  • By extension, the game status Unaccountably Peckish is popular for being such a common example of using Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness to politely obscure something nightmarish... as well as joke about its various depictions. ^note In Fallen London, "Unaccountably Peckish" is an affliction of Horror Hunger that grows over the quest for Seeking Mister Eaten's Name, and it takes a long, slow descent into madness for it to reach (and then surpass) acts of cannibalism. By contrast, in Sunless Skies, you can acquire a permanent taste for human flesh by eating the wrong tin of contaminated beans.
  • This is a plan without a flaw nor any possibility of error! is a popular comment for any Violation of Common Sense, whether sarcastic or earnest.
• Paranoia Fuel: "Someone is Coming" is a particularly nebulous quality that goes up from seemingly random actions. The text on it changes from "Distant Footsteps" to "Getting Closer" to "Just Behind Your Shoulder". What it really does at a high enough level is add a card to the Opportunity Deck where the Capering Relicker gives the player a gift.
• The Scrappy
  • The Sardonic Music-Hall Singer for being a massive nuisance for your deck and an incredibly unsympathetic character to boot. Mechanically, a bug that has since been fixed caused her opportunity cards (she has three, though you can dodge two if you know what you're doing), which are all rather unhelpful, to plague your deck way more frequently than they ought to, and many players have become very familiar with her face as a result. Narratively, what sympathy she didn't lose stringing a devil along for her own game (a devil who may be genuinely in love with her, something more or less never seen before or since), she probably lost when it was revealed during her Hallowmas confession that she poisoned a rival for incredibly petty reasons. Perhaps fittingly, she's the only one of your acquaintances you can outright scam for a bunch of Moon-Pearls in order to end your friendship, on top of the usual "stop visiting" option.
  • The Starving Artist for being almost just as much of a nuisance. He is one of the early love interests in the game, but unlike the Artist's Model who ends up making a name for herself and can become the player's spouse, the Starving Artist (if you made the unwise decision to reconnect with him) will continuously beg you for things while never improving his lot, clogging up your deck with a useless card like the example above. Later, you can dump him into your Laboratory to get him out of your deck, but this will simply mean he takes up a Lab Assistant slot instead of an Opportunity Card slot. Though later on a curiously profitable option to just make him useful by sending him out for more honey was added, on par with some of the more prominent money grinds. Either he's less starving than one thinks or your character is embezzling ten kinds of hell out of the university's tenure (honey is a research expense for a researcher that needs regular access to Parabola). And if that isn't enough for you, during longer experiments you can use an Unwise Idea to kill him just for research's sake. This being the Neath, he'll be back to your deck soon afterwards, but there's catharsis at least.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Most ventures have an alternate branch at the end that grants better rewards, but is riskier, and completely resets your progress quality if you fail, regardless of how high it is. Keep in mind that it usually takes 20+ actions just to get the challenge rating to "modest", and that the rewards are rarely worth 20+ actions in the first place. Oh, and did we mention that it's entirely luck-based?
  • Making Waves and Notability prior to the New Years 2014 update (which made them much more forgiving). They both decreased in real time, requiring a frantic rush just to break even most of the time^note (the update made it so that having enough MW kept your Notability from falling). Both were largely increased by rarely-drawn opportunity cards, and gaining the latter required massive grinding of the former^note (nowadays almost everything increases MW, and you can raise Notability with a static action once you have enough MW). It wasn't uncommon to grind for a week to get a point or two of Notability only to have all or most of your progress wiped out the next day. A few players even complained that Seeking the Name was more rewarding than pursuing Notability; at least you got some flavor text for your trouble.
  • Nightmares. Unless you're lucky enough to have a very high Touched By Fingerwork rating, or at least one Memory of Light, which sends you to a far gentler area, hitting 8 in Nightmares puts you in an area where all you can do is lose stat points and grind down Nightmares. (To put it in perspective, dying gives you a chance to increase a useful knowledge.) And once you finally get out, your Dreams take such a massive hit that they're usually reset; before an update, they'd just reset outright. Nightmares increase constantly - many, many storylets hit you with Nightmares, and many actions that raise another Injury meter just so happen to add a few points of Nightmares on top of it. The only easy way to reduce this meter that doesn't cost Fate or require aid from other players is laudanum - and that gives you Wounds in repayment, as well as an irritating addiction once you become a Person of Some Importance.
  • Every time your Suspicion exceeds 8, your Criminal Record quality increases near-permanently, and if it gets high enough as a PoSI, Ablution Absolution (the most reliable way to reduce Suspicion and Scandal at high Shadowy levels) becomes ineffective, making it that much harder to stay out of prison in the future. While New Newgate itself does have its upsides, most players trying to land there on purpose do so by deliberately failing to rob the Brass Embassy, which skips the Trial sequence and doesn't raise Criminal Record. And for players that already raised it too high, the only way to lower it is during the late endgame in the Railway storyline, after unlocking the Magistracy of the Evenlode — and it will cost you a ton and a half of Constable favours.
  • On the topic of malices, Unaccountably Peckish not only has horrendous subtext, but it can also land you with non-discardable opportunity cards that can royally mess you up along the lines of gaining four(!) stacks of wounds and losing several levels of your four abilities at a time. This is also the only Menace which gains a point from Time's weekly visit. If you're unfortunate enough to gain some stacks, getting yourself some food-related events to lose the stacks with as little harm as possible is top priority. Considering the condition's connection to Seeking the Name, it certainly makes sense how god awful it is.
  • On the 29th of July 2020, FBG introduced an update that (among other quality of life changes) prevented players from changing their items while they are in a storylet. This caused players to be more careful with the items they have equipped, made a number of already difficult checks even more so, in some cases necessitating the user of the wiki to look ahead and made several previously viable gameplay options obsolete. This was so unpopular and provoked such a fierce outcry by the players that it would take less than a week before FBG made the lock much more lenient.
• That One Level:
  • Polythreme, mostly because almost everything there uses the above-mentioned luck mechanic. Want to spend 11 actions on a promenade and end up with little more than 20 scraps of silk for your trouble because the Random Number God wasn't on your side? Polythreme's your place. Worse still, by a certain point in the game, this becomes a required area for an ambition and one particular quest. This point is, not coincidentally, a common point at which players abandon the game entirely. Enough complaints were filed that the place was reworked around January 2022; one of the main changes to promenades was just swapping out the luck challenges with a specific quality that'd go up with every failed promenade until you finished one successfully, to ensure the RNG couldn't display its hatred for you so openly.
  • Ambitions contain a bunch of these, but two particular points in Nemesis are especially well-known for how demanding they are. First, you have to acquire a Bat with Attitude to progress. This isn't expensive, but it is incredibly luck-dependent, as you are relying on drawing a standard frequency opportunity card, achieving success on a 50% luck check and getting a rare success, which reportedly has about 10% chance success rate. Depending on how often you play and how clean your deck is, this might take weeks or months, and the cherry on top is that this is such an out of nowhere requirement that even endgame players with massive hoard of wealth and possessions are taken completely unprepared, giving this part a reputation as a kind of wake-up call for how demanding Ambitions are going to be on your wallet and inventory. It is infamous enough that Failbetter Games has since provided an alternative method to acquiring the Bat with Attitude, not that it's a cakewalk either. The second infamous example is the so-called knifegate, or that-bit-where-you-have-to-cough-up-ten-thousands-echoes-to-progress, and that is if you're lucky enough to pass a luck check. For players who have been playing for years, this might merely be a significant hit to their wallet, but survivable all things considered. For everyone else, this is a ludicrous amount of wealth, and considering most grinds earn you about 3.5 echoes per action if you're lucky, if you happen to be short on money, good luck progressing through this roadblock with any kind of expediency.
  • Everything about Paleontology and the Bone Market in their first iteration. It's easy enough to get some leg bones (you can acquire them in your lab), but everything else seems to have been made with the assumption that players would consult a wiki at every step. Where do you get the parts for skeletons? From all over the city, with a different method to obtain each part(for example, a human ribcage needs five Constable favours and needs to be called in the Shuttered Palace, a headless skeleton can be obtained with a Wolfstack-only opportunity card and an endgame-tier Watchful check, but getting a Thorned Ribcage requires a rare success when giving up the hunt for an animal in Parabola), and more unique parts are even more obtuse to get. What are their effects on your skeleton? You won't know until you've built one. How to get specific buyers (or oportunity cards in the Bone Market in general)? Get your Dreaded, Respectable or Bizzare to certain thresholds, and some cards only show up if two of those qualities are at the same threshold. And what are the items you get when you sell your skeletons (with different buyers giving different items) used for? The Railway storyline, which requires a massive amounts of different items, and the latter stages of your Laboratory, which both need the products and sometimes provide parts. It was so despised that barely two weeks after the release of the Railway storyline (which makes extensive use of the Bone market) an update removed the randomness to the Bone market, by listing outright what buyers there are, what they are interested in, how high which quality needs to be to interact with them, what they will buy your skeletons with, and removing the need to draw their specific cards. Another a day later gave you option to directly buy some of the more common skeleton parts with jade fragments (at a really expensive price) and added a tooltip to describe what part adds what to a skeleton.
  • Jericho Locks. Doing anything there requires the location-specific Esteem of the Guild resource, which can only be gained one at a time, require extensive grinding to get (by requiring high-level items to trade for it or absurd amounts of Docks Favours), and will be consumed in batch of ten or five whenever you want to take any action beyond the basic "talk to the locals" options. The sheer grinding required to explore the place is absolutely hated. A later update at least increased the amount of Esteem you get by trading in items (from one to two), but it still remains an expensive and long grind.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The second murder case at the University requires at least twenty actions per stage to grind your Investigation up to 9, and has about twenty stages to completion. Failing an attempt raises your nightmares and some storylets can reduce your progress (and they have very steep Watchful checks, so most players can't hope for more than 70%), and of course each stage ends with a storylet that resets your progress completely if you fail. And unlike most detective quests, zero attempt is made to integrate the Investigation grinding into the story. This quest can take literally weeks to complete.
  • Each of the best three lodgings in the game can be upgraded even further at the cost of one extremely rare and valuable item. Naturally, all three of these items require a ridiculous amount of grinding, but out of all of them, the Impossible Theorem, required to upgrade to a Suite at the Royal Bethlehem Hotel is maddeningly and punishingly random. The only one way to acquire one is as follows: Acquire 49 Searing Enigmas. Monetarily speaking, this is just as expensive as the Airag similarly required to upgrade the Bazaar Premises to a Spire Emporium. The Airag can be acquired at a stable exchange rate through an opportunity card. One for every five of the next lowest item. Searing Enigmas require 25 of the lower tier, and you may only obtain between one and six from the process unless your Watchful is ridiculously high (and even then, it only helps a little bit). Once you have your enigmas, you have to take an even harder Watchful challenge. Succeed, you lose the enigmas, gain the Theorem. Happy ending. Fail, you lose one Enigma, 100 echoes' cash, and die. Have fun with that! Fortunately, you can upgrade these lodgings for much cheaper prices during Neathmas...although the Brass Embassy upgrade does require you to sell your soul. And in the Impossible Theorem's case, there's also a way to get one through Labwork, once you have it; the process is significantly less random, but will take nearly a thousand actions all of its own and needs heavy investment in lab equipment, though you can cut down on the actions by spending Searing Enigmas; about 24 will get you there. The Brass Embassy upgrade also got an easier method for its own high-tier item in the late game, by way of generating an extremely elaborate Invented Individual and selling that identity to devils; once again, this is extremely tedious, but doable.
  • Acquiring a ship also falls into this category if you want either of the two best ships that improve your qualities. Want a cool Zubmarine? You'll need to get 20 Whirring Contraptions, an item that requires a minimum of 34 actions to obtain one of, which means that you'll need at least 680 total actions to get 20 of them, i.e. over 113 hours of real-life time. And you also need 7 Bejewelled Lenses that each require a Magnificent Diamond to craft that normally can only be obtained by cashing in the maximum number of Criminal favours on a certain card (which is entirely dependent on whether or not the card RNG is merciful to you) or by sheer dumb luck in expeditions. Want a Majestic Pleasure Yacht? You'll need to bet a number of expensive items on an "odds strongly against you" Luck challenge and a very likely failure loses you one-fifth of your stake, including a Comprehensive Bribe that's only slightly easier to make than a Bejewelled Lens.]
  • Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name. Or, a sidequest composed of more Schmuck Bait buttons than years you'll live in real life, will take longer time you'll reasonably be expected to play the game, and will take more resources than you're expected to get in the game, period. The entire thing is one big "do not do this" sidequest, and will do nothing to you but frustrate you and drive you to probable insanity. Then again, that's kind of the point.
  • The Heart's Desire ambition has a section where you're required to enter the Royal Bethlehem Hotel, which can only be entered with maximizing your Nightmares stat, or going in through the House of Mirrors in the carnival. Having a permanent reservation there as your lodgings while you're still sane does not count, despite being usable for other parts of the ambition. Once there, your objective is to find the manager, which is a Luck-Based Mission, as the only way to build the "Seeking the Manager" quality is through cards from your Opportunity deck, which will lower your Nightmares more often than not. Getting rid of all your nightmares boots you out of the hotel and resets your "Seeking the Manager" progress, and sets any progress made in your Recurring Dreams stats to zero. Going for the Stormy-Eyed attribute? Tough luck. Other ambitions do have spots where one must enter one of the other Failure states (such as going to prison for Bag a Legend), but the State of Some Confusion needed to enter the Royal Bethlehem is objectively the worst of these.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The Favor System. First and foremost, grinding to strengthen connections is rendered ten times as time-consuming, as you require rare opportunity cards and long quests to farm Favors (consumable, one-time assistance), which require an increasingly excessive shopping list and a full stack of favors to trade for Renown (which is used to get rare equipment, access to some one-paragraph storylets, and NOTHING else). Second, simple trades of goods require precious favors, which turned a simple dip in connections into an expensive barrier between third (.5 echo), fourth (2.5 echo), and fifth (12.5) tier items. Third, detrimential, undiscardable opportunity cards may pop up and stay in your deck until you agree to sacrifice one entire collection of favors (these were formerly discardable).
  • The new map and new icons in early 2020 were disliked by a number of players, the former for requiring zoom-ins and scrolling to get around as well as reorganization of key areas, and the latter for being too detailed in places, not enough in others, and changing long-loved existing designs and icons.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The stories and narrative in this game are absolutely fascinating, but an unforgivable amount of grinding is required to reach them. When you finally do reach the end, it can often be underwhelming for all the effort you had to put in. To add insult to injury, some of the storylines are unfinished as of writing.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Some feel this way about Gregory Beechwood in Heart's Desire. He is not evil, but many players feel that he is nowhere near as sympathetic as the story seems to portray him as. He was transformed into a monkey which he describes as a horrible state of existence and he loses his fiancé as a result. Allowing him to win is portrayed as a happy outcome, resulting in him selflessly putting an end to the Marvellous which he claims has ruined many lives rather than using that wish on himself. However, players who are not inclined to side with him point out that rather than this being a case of the monkey's paw, Gregory's suffering is a result of his own lack of foresight in what his wish intaled. He wished to become a monkey himself and the Masters of the Bazaar merely made his wish come true to the letter. His claim that the Marvellous has not made anyone happy rings hollow when we see that arguably more often than not the other players have indeed gotten what they wished for and show no regret, the player character included, if they choose to win the Marvellous. For those who do not feel inclined to side with Gregory, he can be seen as trying to blame his own mistakes on the game, projecting dissatisfaction onto the other players that are often not present in interactions with them.
• Ugly Cute: The Rubbery Men. Sure, London is freaked out by their faces, but from the portraits they just look kind of cute, and their innocent, bizarre behavior only ensures it stays that way. Even the more detailed, slimier and octopus-like Tentacled Entrepeneur is more of a perpetually baffled rich goof than the slithering horror masquerading as a titan of industry some would pretend he is.
• The Woobie:
  • The poor Albino Rat. Her friend and colleague worked herself to the bone only to get mentally destroyed by the Masters' constant interference, until she just couldn't take it anymore and drowned herself. And all the rat could do was watch. You sometimes find her drunk as hell on leftovers of your wine, singing in melancholy... at least you can give her a spot in your lab to distract herself.
  • The Last Constable (named as such because she's the only one to not fall into the Masters' pockets one way or another after London fell) is on a one-woman crusade against crime in the city, and her main target (who she is forced to flee from for an indeterminate amount of time) happens to also be the most ruthless crime boss in the city... And her father.
• Woobie Species: The Rubbery Men are a species of squid-humanoids who can't speak common tongues and look adorable wearing suits and top hats in an attempt to blend in with Londoners. They're disrespected by most and hated by some, and regularly get rocks thrown at them. On their opportunity card, the player character has the option to be cruel and kill one, and very few Rubbery-oriented stories end happily for them.

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