SUNLESS SEA Reviews

Love this game, the unexpected, the exploration, the stories, so many people to meet. It's really nice done.

Imagine someone took the worldbuilding of H. P. Lovecraft, the whimsical fun and commentary of Terry Pratchett and put it in an Ian Livingston/Steve Jackson "Fighting Fantasy" game book(where for those unfamiliar, you roll your stats at the beginning and read/play through the book by making choices and stat checks that lead you to different pages/outcomes and if you mess up you start the story over again, maybe uncovering a new storybit/path). Now imagine you play something like Darkest Dungeon, but after a failed OR successful run you get to keep various stats, gear and heroes to try again with a new Captain and maybe a new goal if you so choose to. Like all my very favourite games, this has some shortcomings, where if you love it you really love it, but you may also bounce off it for one reason or another. The biggest such reason would be, that your ship and as a consequence the entire gameplay moves slow. This is done to instill dread and urge you to manage your resources carefully but especially in the later game, where you are well prepared and have clear goals in mind can drag the gameplay down a bit. This is also coupled with the fact that as you are essentially playing a book with resource/risk management, the stories close to home shore become lists to work through since you've read them multiple times, although I found now while replaying the game after so many years that this bothered me way less that I thought it would. It is just another task to fulfill on my way to farther stories I hadn't gotten to yet. In essence, this is a Rouge Lite where your reward for going further in is new stories you want to see to the end, most of them having multiple outcomes that may influence others. It's a book that you have to earn to read through careful planning and a bit of luck and failure just means that you can try for different stories the next merry go round. That is Sunless Sea. And I love it.

Amazing game, amazing stories and atmosphere. For anyone playing it for the first time you should know: there is a lot of reading, there is a lot of stories, whole premise of the game and content of the stories is pretty bizzare and it's written in victorian-esque english. Been playing for almost 100 hours and just started a new run!

this game is interesting. its basically an interactive novel but you sail a ship and shoot stuff, i like the style and writing a lot, and i think its presented very well. it's not as overwhelming as it first lets on, and while i won't be playing more because i'm not that interested in interactive visual novels, this one seemed the most interesting.

Its a great story rich game. I keep coming back to it and finding new things every time. 10/10

Hands down the best lore you could find and the most mesmerizing game you can play if you want a REALLY slow pace, book-like game. Dreadful, mysterious and almost hypnotic experience with the aid of the beautiful soundtrack which in my opinion is really up there competing with AA games if not AAA. I crave for an rpg with this setting, will it be Isometric or platform. Still the best Indie game around.

When this game first came out I was a little obsessed. It has incredible story telling capabilities. The combat is hard and the time you have to sink into it to learn every possible outcome is insane. But it plays like a choose your own adventure and it is executed very enjoyably.

I adore this game, it's really important to me--one of my absolute favorites. Sometimes i'll play it just to hear the music or feel the ambiance, I wish i could experience it for the first time again!

It's a very strange experience. I was expecting hardcore Endless Sky in an underground sea and I got a bundle of interconnected short stories and a high quality flash game in a trenchcoat. I'd still recommend it, it's a solid game, but it's gunna feel a little strange playing it for the first little while

My dear friend Tim strongly recommended this game to me years ago, on the basis of setting alone. The premise is that something offers a deal to Queen Victoria after the death of Prince Albert: she can have her royal consort back, but the price is London. She agrees, and the entire capital is dragged into a watery purgatory beneath the earth, the eponymous sunless sea. You play as a sea captain making your way across this perpetually-dark ocean, attempting to wrestle with the horrors and the privations of ordinary nautical life, plus all this extra weird and nasty stuff. The genre is apparently “survival”, which is not how I’d have thought to describe it, but seems very apt once I think about it. You are constantly managing six different things that can kill you: hull, supplies, fuel, wounds, crew, and terror. And cash, I suppose. “Echoes”, as the underwater currency is called. Cash is perhaps the most perpetual concern, barring supplies and fuel. But supplies and fuel are downstream of cash. You try to stock up on as much as you can in Fallen London, but you quickly learn which foreign ports will also sell, albeit usually at a significantly higher price. If you set out for a voyage with a full hold but an empty purse, you feel nervous the whole time you’re away. Even what feels like a bulging wallet at the start of an expedition can begin to wear thin by journey’s end. The hub-and-spoke set-up of your sea voyages is masterfully done. Fallen London is not just an important node through which many questlines run. It’s also the location of: many shops where you can buy and - critically! - sell things; the University where a weird scholar character will pay you for intangibles (zee stories, outlandish artifacts, extraordinary implications); your lodgings, where you can sleep off your accrued terror and wounds; and the Admiralty. The Admiralty is the British Royal Navy in its dystopian subterranean incarnation. You work for the Admiralty as a sort of … consultant, I suppose. The Admiralty is constantly struggling to maintain its hegemony over the entirety of the Underzee, and it needs intel updates to do that. Every time you go to a port, you can gather a port report, which basically means getting an informal update on what’s going on in the area. Sometimes you gotta bribe someone with a coin or a bottle of wine to loosen a tongue, but, most of the time, gathering port reports is free. You bring ‘em back to your contact in the Admiralty, you get paid in coin and favours. You redeem the favour for fuel, you spend the coin on supplies, you head back out to zee. Critically, you can’t hold two port reports of the same location simultaneously. If you head out to zee and swing by Hunter’s Keep to gather a port report there, you can’t gather a second one on your way back to Fallen London. You can still visit Hunter’s Keep, of course, but it won’t pay. You have to turn in your first report, and then you’re free to go gather a second. This means that planning your trips and moving in strategic circuitous patterns becomes critical. I say that Tim recommended Sunless Sea years ago, and this is true, but I tried it years ago and it didn’t grab me. What happened more recently is that I played Dredge, a fishing horror game, and in the Steam reviews I read afterwards someone recommended Sunless Sea as something like: “Dredge for grown-ups.” This phrase compelled me to give it another go. Dredge was wonderful … but only for the first few hours. After that, the challenge, the risk, the constant sense of danger - they all wore off. My vessel was too sturdy, the engine too powerful, the menacing sea creatures too familiar. And I never, ever worried about money. You don’t pay for fuel in Dredge. You don’t pay for supplies. You pay for upgrades to your boat, which you max out fairly quickly, and you pay very modest fees for repairs. That’s basically it. Meanwhile, you’re constantly bringing in expensive fish and selling them to local fishmongers. The financial pressure goes away almost immediately. Sunless Sea is indeed for grown-ups, in that sense. Fuel is expensive. Supplies are expensive. Repairs are expensive, especially when all you’ve got is a miserable starting cruiser with an unimpressive cannon and a sputtering engine. Some creatures can kill you by ramming or firing upon your ship merely twice. (Honestly, almost once. Your starting vessel has 75 hull and there are things out there that can do 60+ damage in a single strike.) By default, Sunless Sea is played in something called “Unforgiving Mode”, which it tells you about right at the start. This means your game autosaves whenever you reach a port, and your game ends if your character dies. You can manually save and load your game, but then you exit Unforgiving Mode and lose your precious Invictus token. Did you know 30 seconds ago what an Invictus token was? Of course not. But the early instructions tell you that Unforgiving Mode is how the game is meant to be played, and that finishing a game with an Invictus token is a badge of honour (I think I’m quoting almost verbatim here), and you know at once what your target is. I feel sometimes that I don’t enjoy video games. What I enjoy is learning video games. Learning the world, the lore, the dangers, and the mechanics. Sunless Sea taught me this lesson about myself again. There’s something quietly miserable about the moment you finally fill in the entirety of your map. Likewise, when you first get a really strong ship, and here I count even the corvette one level up from your starting vessel. (not counting an intermediate vessel where you sacrifice a lot of strength for speed). I now had 200 hull instead of 75, I had two guns instead of 1, and I no longer felt danger in the same way. Very much to the credit of the game designers though: cash still had meaning. I was still paying to get around, and although a sense of personal inflation meant that the 100 echoes it costs to put your ship into a reputable dry-dock for repairs was now trivial rather than a staggering fee, there was still a sense that money could run out if you’re not careful. The game is very well-written, I think I should mention that. It’s immersive, and the world is exquisitely described. There’s an island where everyone wears masks all the time (including you, if you visit), there’s a vertical pirate’s city built into a rock spire, there’s a giant monstrosity called the Dawn Machine which implants the endless mantra into your mind: UN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE S The Sun is actually a wonderfully well-rendered character in this game. Apparently you and other Neathers (inhabits of “the place beneath the world”) have been down here long enough that prolonged sunlight can kill you. So there’s this constant longing for the world upstairs, mediated by deep fear and repulsion. Beautifully done. Would I recommend this game? Yes. Would I play it again? Hmmm. Maybe after a significant break. There definitely seems like there was more to see, more to explore. But the sense of the Neath being vast and terrifying and exciting might well be gone the second time around. (Or fifth, I guess; I have three captains behind me in watery graves, though my fourth succeeded.) In summary: I give Sunless Sea a 9/10. I recommend this game if you're someone who likes literature and hard games and the awful awful call of the ocean.