SUNLESS SEA Reviews

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.

10 Years later this is still a fantastic game. The stories are amazingly detailed, the combat is difficult but not unfair, and requires you to think about whether you can fight the creatures/ships. Highly recommended.

I haven't played Sunless Sea as much as others have. The game, as you may already know, has a lot of issues. It also is an unforgettable experience. It got me into Fallen London, which is so much bigger, yet it never lost its shine. This game is a rough gem that you cannot miss.

The atmosphere and story of this game is definitely interesting, but I can't help but feel it fails at the "game" part. You're essentially a steam boat captain in this kind of dark alternate reality Gothic Victorian world. The "unterzee", this giant underground ocean that London now lies next to, is the place you explore. It's full of pirates, monsters and weird eldritch horrors. Let's start with the positives. The game's writing is mostly very good and can be poignant and captivating in places. There are a few characters who are quite deep in their portrayal, such as some of the members of crew you can get. There is a good air of mystery about everything. The music is excellent and one of my favourite parts of the experience. Getting close to some of the islands owned as provinces of Hell in particular stirs this masterfully grim industrial kind of soundtrack that is pretty great. The atmosphere of the game, when you're chugging along in darkness and you have the little logbook pop-ups and ominous soundtrack...it's good. I like that. Once you start learning certain (rather restrictive) routes around the map, the game does start opening up and making more sense, again, nice. Onto the not-so-good. Remember how I said the writing was very good? Well, it is and it isn't. Sometimes it's so esoteric and "random" that the world of the game can feel like it's being weird and edgy just for the sake of it. The prose can turn downright purple at times, and worse is that fact that the tone feels a bit all over the place sometimes. An example of some writing that I really liked; the Hellish places basically don't conform to the laws of Physics, and your character finds it impossible to write a report of the conditions in those colonies. That's both funny and creepy, it's well done. However then we have "wacky" over the top ridiculous things like talking sentient silly mushrooms and an island ruled over by cheeky monkeys and the tone feels like a bit of a disjointed mishmash. Don't get me wrong, you can mix black humour and horror, but in this game it often feels jarring because it swings from one extreme to the next very very suddenly without much forethought. One minute we're talking about wacky mushrooms with personalities or comedy French chef stereotypes...then suddenly 30 seconds later we're introduced to horrible wasps that lay larvae in living people's eyes without skipping a beat. There's another story that revolves around rodents fighting for an island and the tone barometer flops back and forth every 30 seconds between light comedy and some really quite dark depictions of slavery and disturbing war crimes so much that I was left wondering what the developers were actually trying to say or do. One last thing about tone; I really like some of the art in the game. The locations look really cool, the sea feels moody and creepy and the little pop up locations look decent. Characters like the diplomat and admiral look great and fitting IMO. However some of the other crew portraits almost look like a totally different art style to me, and I don't think it really fits. It's probably the same artist and everything, but they look far too jolly and "wacky" to fit with the otherwise pretty grim storylines again. Just my subjective opinion, anyway. Next up is the gameplay loop. Basically it's all about leaving London, managing your "Terror", Fuel and Supplies. You're meant to visit a bunch of ports, bring back news to London for cash and fuel and perhaps do some various scripted trading on the way. The gameplay problem is that it is glacially, painfully, artificially SLOW. You will make pennies even with long trips at the start. The game flat out tells you trading things is basically not even worth it 90% of the time (which I think is a big part as to how boring and restrictive the start of the game feels). By the time I was making good money trading coffee with the surface (basically one of only about 5 good trades in the whole game, and it's artifically constrained in many ways), I was already getting bored with all the dull repetition. Also, here's my biggest annoyance; the roguelike nature of the game feels utterly pointless to me at times. There are a bunch of ways to die and lose all your progress, and basically all it does is mindlessly force you to play the exact same extremely slow start to the game over and over. You can pick different backgrounds but it really doesn't make a discernible difference 90% of the time. This would be bad enough, but I died once due to a terribly designed UI/menu on the surface part of the map. Basically if you click the right button in slightly the wrong order due to 2 seconds of lapsed concentration, the game tells you that you're out of fuel and instantly kills you. It does this while also hiding (due to poor design) your actual fuel level from you. This was so annoying that I basically just ragequit and couldn't be bothered to play anymore. I really think the game would be more fun if it wasn't a roguelike. I actually love roguelikes, but they tend to be quick-building affairs rather than ridiculously slow. The format just doesn't fit the insanely dull repetitive early game grind on offer here. I also think the game would have been far more fun with more free-range trading rather than restricting the player to maybe 3 trade goods that actually make money (Sphinxstone, Sunlight, Coffee). Also almost all of those good trades come from going to the poorly designed "surface menu" (see above) rather than actually playing the boat game the whole experience is meant to be about. Anyway, if you like good text adventures or story rich text games give this a try. If you like balanced worlds with lots of variation, consistent tone and rewarding progression I don't think this game is as good.

well i'm finally getting into the original webgame (fallen london) after playing this one. great game. good story and worldbuilding, the same kind pathologic classic hd has. also painfully slow in the same way pathologic classic hd is. i really prefer stories that throw you into the thick of it without very much of a tutorial or explanation, and this game does that wonderfully (there is a tutorial, its just limited). probably play fallen london first. i think going into this game blind is bad actually. i just had fun because im stupid, stubborn, and dumb.

The atmosphere of this game is top notch, absolutely enthralling. Superb story telling, but superb in that way that it's interesting and vague to let your imagination run wild. If you are looking for a coherent and well defined story, you won't like this. London was stolen by bats and set underground on a giant ocean. Other famous cities from history are here. There's eldritch beings who like formal titles running around. Feelings and ideas take physical shape here and are used as currency. Things are hella confusing, like all over the place. You are constantly trying to balance fuel and food so you can sail a ship in a place where the laws of physics make no sense. Also the stars are alive and are mad at you. It's great. My only advice, use some software editing tool to speed up the game if you are a on a timeline. My main gaming time is late at night after the kids go to bed, and I have to play at 5x speed or I'll get nothing done.

Absoultely delightful to get lost in the rougelike Victorian-Lovecraftian lore. If you love to explore and make questionable decisions with unknown consequences in a constant life-or-death adventure, or want to spirit yourself to a different and immersive atmosphere, give Sunless Sea a go

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!

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.