I was glad to get this one to do a secret Santa review on as I saw that I had already downloaded it and had planned to play it either way. It's a neat game that has what appears to be custom characters and tilesets and they look really good. The music is great too and fits the theme perfectly plus it's scoped well to fit into the "under one hour" suggestion for IGMC contest.
The game play is straightforward. You run around and find items that help you progress towards your goal. The unique feature here is that you independently control three different characters who each have their own special ability or two. You have to figure out how to utilize each one in order to either find items or to help the other characters gain access to areas of the map that they normally wouldn't be able to get to. There even appears to be multiple solutions to accomplish many of the various tasks which is really nice and allows for different experiences if you play through more than once.
The game provides a lot of helpful hints if you interact with the people and objects so I didn't get stuck or have to think too hard about how to move the story along which is often the bane of games like this. Kudos for that. There's also some interesting characters you interact with but unfortunately, due to the scope of the game required for IGMC, you don't get to spend enough time with most of them to really get to know them.
There's really only two negative things I can say about The Rosewood Masquerade and they're both very minor. The first is that, for a masquerade ball, there didn't seem to be a lot of people in attendance. Perhaps your characters got there early before most of the guests arrived. More likely, because of the custom art, the time crunch of the IGMC competition required that several guests be cut. Given more time, I'd suspect that the party would seem more lively.
The other one would be that it seemed to lack a certain wow factor. This is probably a personal bias, though. I wrote a game not too long ago that had a very similar character switching mechanic and required you have your characters work together to solve puzzles so that probably desensitized me to the central game play element. If I had to guess, I'd think that anyone who hasn't played many games like this, or hasn't spent a ton of time creating, testing and debugging game play similar to this, would find that wow factor switching between the three characters and figuring out how to use them to progress through the story. It is a really cool idea which is precisely why I did something similar before.
All in all, this is a very well done and enjoyable game. It's fun, has a unique plot and setting, is bug-free as far as I can tell and is pretty much solid all around. It's definitely worth checking out. I liked it a lot. Great job!