Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition Reviews

Eldritch wonders and horrors packed into this game. if u like reading this game is for u

tldr: the writers completely over do it in this game with the non-binary genderless stuff i dont mind representation, i didnt mind the antiquarian from the first game, that had the character quirk, that they are not defined as male or female. in this game? they constantly shove it in your face and never shut up about it: the first hirable crew member, a driver, is a they/them. ok. the faction leader of the first port the tutorial mission sends you to is a they/them. ok. couple story pages later the writers point out that they (the npc) are very satisfied, that none of their staff know if its a male or female - and im already rolling my eyes. on and on it goes, they use "they" and "them" so often, ist sometimes not clear anymore, if they mean 1 or more persons: theres 2 Twins, one ran away and youre on the fetch quest to reunite them. i stmble over the word "they" and wonder if they are reunited already because of a timeout or something... of course not! at leat one of those twins is a they/them, and i bet my behind the other one is too. worst part was when my driver needed to see a doctor for brain parasite and the writers make a point of it, htat they(the driver) crossed out the section where the patient information form asks ab out the gender.... you know at the dotors of all places, where it is in fact really important to know the biological gender of a person because of different procedures for different physiologies, different pharmaceuticals for different body chemistries and different risks and long term concerns attached to each of those things, according to gender and age... but nah, the writers take the nonexistant gender soooo very important, that their characters would rather vandalize an offficial legal document (patient intake form). a document that in my country has to be signed and dated by the patient, to vouch for the information they gave to mediacal staff, and the doctors office is required (by law) to archive it, to protect both parties from potential legal trouble in the future.

Requires patience, if not bloody-mindedness, but this is Fallen London after all. Good, gloomy fun.

Ambience, writing, and world-building give this game an overall lovely feeling of gradual building toward inexorable horrible ends.

Did you like Sunless Seas, but not all of that darned ol gameplay!? Sunless Skies has you sailing from port to port for hours upon hours across regions the size of the first game, but with only a fraction of the content. For starters, as I said the regional maps are each the size of the first games map, but there's only 6-8 ports in each region. This means that the majority of your game is going to be spent being completely bored and waiting for you to be at your next destination. The extremely large amount of distance between objects is alone not an issue. The problem is that sunless SEAS takes place in a wide open cavern and sunless SKIES takes place in a series of inch-wide caverns. Every region is filled with massive asteroids that form little caverns you can sail between, meaning the already amazingly boring and slow travel times are made worse by constantly requiring you to adjust heading. In the time it takes to do one total three hour "loop" of The Reach hitting every port, you can visit every single port in Sunless Seas. To make matters worse, you need certain stats to equip certain items. So if you were too stupid to not pick Veils or Mirrors then you practically cannot equip anything. Engines are downgrades, not upgrades in this game as well. None of them actually make you faster, but you do get to burn more fuel. Buyng a new locomotive past the trade ship is pointless as there's no ship that actually seems to go faster (which is the only thing that matters in a game about waiting 10-30 minutes between ports) There's also a bit of childish censorship, which I always find funny in games with overt racism. Words that have no actual negative meaning like "Bloody" or "Damn" are censored in this game for seemingly no reason. Meanwhile the game is very happily racist, offering you a "Clay Man" (A person with dark, rocklike skin) who refuses to sing with anybody who is also not a "Clay Man"; you can murder them an take their stuff without consequence as well unlike any other officer you employ. "Clay Man" is basically a way of saying "black person" in the Sunless series, in case you were wondering. Even if you argue it as "it's just a Lovecraftian thing" then you have to recall that he was... sorta extremely racist. In any case, the hypocrisy is hilarious. I really don't understand what the developers were thinking by making their game so boring. Ports in Sunless Seas were ten feet away from eachother, why is that not the case in the sequel? What drooling idiot played the first game and said "Yuck, I really hate all of the content here. If only the game was just watching a locomotive sailing past rocks"

I made an entire bloodline of insane space train captains who wished to figure out the truth about all of the insane stuff on their universe This is one of the most "gives me weird dreams" game I've ever played. It's basically a visual novel with some exploration and naval battles, so this is a game for the readers. Still, heartily reccomended, delicious gamers.

really really good. I think this is one of the most beautiful games you can play both visually and in its writing. Handles game pads perfectly, so you can play it on the sofa quite happily. The risk of accidental death while travelling feels much lower than in sunless seas and it's generally much more easy going.

High hopes, low realization. It's not awful, it just fails in comparison to Sunless Seas on nearly every level. Big time.

It's a good book, but a terrible game. You can lose 8+ hours on a single coin flip (or worse odds) at which point you'll have to play those 8+ hours again to get to the same point and potentially lose again! You'll find yourself doing the same trade route for hours straight, just to get enough money to buy food and fuel to get to a new area. It really is a game of unrelenting patience for minimal payoff.

the core concept of the game, an RPG that spans 'generations' as your captains die, is kind of interesting. the application is endless fetch quests, pretentious writing, tedious combat, and difficult to track storylines as every character is 'named' with a descriptor + noun combination ("the incautious driver," for instance). getting the same RNG "skill checks" constantly because someone saw a spooky enemy that you've killed thirty times already just makes the entire experience more tiring.