Sunless Sea

Good or bad? Pointless to argue. But it's a undeniably very particular game. Very well written, too. The thing in Sunlesssea it is not the action, the gameplay or even the strategy. This one is mostly about the history, or, even more, about the ambiance. You have to try it for yourself.

The game has a fatally bad onboarding and the starting hours are an excercise in frustration at arbitrary (at best) and moon logic (at worst) systems. I tried and managed to struggle through this. I did lose one captain, and "finished" the game with the retire to the life of luxury goal, and came to the simple conclusion. Sunless Sea is not a good game. It's also barely a game at all. 99% of negative comments coming from the first impressions and ditching the game altogether by most of the players are 100% accurate. The game doesn't really get better after completing "a crew", having a well equipped ship, finished/ongoing multiple quest lines, artifacts, high character stats, you name it. It's the constant and never changing struggle against the awful fuel/supplies/terror slider management. You are constantly held back by these systems, and everything you're trying to do is suboptimal. You can't trade using the game's trading system, unless you're trading within scripted quest chains using the abysmal journal/dialogue system. Buying and selling stuff gives you almost no margin of profit, if any at all. You can't really fight, because spoils of war are also abysmal and the activity always costs you more than you will ever earn, unless - again - you're fighting a specific quest marked ship/monster. You can't really explore, because there's no real exploration, and you do it only because it's the best way of progressing your ship and character by doing missions for the navy (ie. reach a port and click a dialogue button, go back to London). There's no real main story, only a ton of disconnected and mostly not interesting white noise. Some events are pretty fun (Pigmonte Island), others are awful (the island with masks). And 90% of the time you're idling in the background, slowly losing sanity when watching your slow ships advance through cramped and small world map. Only 0,3% Players have "finished" the game. It's not a hidden gem.

SUMMARY: Great game with lots of replayability. The atmosphere is awesome. The story is engaging. There are a huge variety of potential interactions and outcomes. I have sunk hours into this game and I expect to sink hours more --- FULL REVIEW: I can see why some folks are not fond of this game. It can feel a bit slow at first, but as you get upgrades to your ship and develop your character and crew, things really start to open up. ---- The world is one of scarcity. I find myself trying to plan and map the best route to use my lamp as little as possible while accruing the least terror for my crew because fuel isn't always cheap and terror will either open new and exciting stories or (and) make your crew go crazy. So while travel can be slow, it isn't passive. On top of that, the story is great and ever developing. Your last captain died and you don't want to do the same thing all over again? Run to different ports and see what happens. Choose different crew members as they become available and explore their stories. If you played well, your last captain will give this captain a leg up, and maybe they can find out what really happened to... whatever your main questline is for this captain! ---- What this game isn't: It is NOT an action game. Combat is boring and slow, but it can also be punishing. More often than not, I try to avoid it. It is NOT a roguelike. While there is some change in the world, it is not enough variety to be considered a roguelike. It is NOT less than a 4 star game. I almost gave it 5, but I try to reserve 5 for truly spectacular titles.

A beautiful game, with a very peculiar atmosphere. From the very beginning, being able to set your victory conditions sets this game apart from the "kill everything, get rich" routine. The game feels a bit unforgiving at first with the fuel and food management, but it's quite easy to get the hang of it. The music, beautiful graphics, and the tone of the unfolding adventures really create an immersive experience. Random events add to the atmosphere as they usually contribute to the world-building in small ways. The idea of the legacy you leave the next captain when you die is interesting. This would be a brilliant setting for a RPG. I just started, and already feel it was money well spent. I should add that I'm running the game under Linux with Wine, and it runs flawlessly.

Let me see. You start with barely any money (used to buy both fuel and food, which run out WAY too fast), and make barely enough to resupply (if even that). And if your ship gets damaged? Too bad, no funds left for a repair. Not giving the player tools to deal with what the game throws at them is not "difficulty", it's just bad design. The quest information is really insufficient and unintuitive, sometimes I didn't even know, what do they want me to do. Or where to take something, f.ex. some "Station III", ok, but where it is? Apparently nobody knows, but take me there! On the final attempt to give it a chance, I got attacked by two enemies at once... and apparently your crew can only even aim at one of them then (even though they are far away), and totally ignore the nearby pirate ship firing at you. That's when I gave up, F mark, terrible service, no tip.