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Fallen London

browser-based choose-your-own-adventure game

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ5432255
Source-derived summary

Fallen London, originally Echo Bazaar, is a browser-based interactive narrative game developed by Failbetter Games and set in "Fallen London", an alternative Victorian London with gothic overtones. The franchise subsequently expanded to other games, including Sunless Sea, its sequel Sunless Skies and the visual novel Mask of the Rose.

The game has been running continuously since October 2009. In June 2018, the website received a major graphical update, with a page redesign as well as better scaling across devices and HTTPS integration.

Setting

Forty years ago, London, First City of the British Empire, became the fifth city stolen into the Neath—a vast cavern beneath the earth. The city's streets twisted into a labyrinth centred on the Echo Bazaar, which serves as the centre of commerce and covets stories of love. While London retains a monarch, a parliament, and a mayor, the true power lies with the Masters of the Bazaar—cloaked inhuman beings who oversee domains of trade and enact mysterious agendas. Even physical laws lose their supremacy beyond the sunlight; clocks and maps can no longer be trusted, rats and cats wag tongues as well as tails, and death is often a temporary inconvenience, although at the cost of never seeing sunlight again.

While the industry, poverty, and high-class society of Victorian London remain, its strict social mores have been disrupted by strange new factions roaming its streets. Hell maintains an embassy in the city and trades in souls, to the consternation of the church.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Fallen London” as browser-based choose-your-own-adventure game. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2009, 2018—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2009-09-30. The account is most persuasive where Fallen, London and browser-based can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as browser-based choose-your-own-adventure game. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5432255. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2009 and 2018.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Fallen London primary sources, Fallen London archive and Fallen research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Fallen London” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.