Sunless Sea

I have sunk uncounted hours into SS and "finished" by retiring a captain, and I adore it. It makes my top ten list, flaws or not. The tone is unique. SS is classed as horror, but it's not about gore, jump scares, or unremitting despair. It's about ominous beauty, unsettling otherworldly forces, and subtle spiritual menaces. Danger is constant, but so is wonder. SS will soothe you with its peaceful interludes, fascinate you with strangeness, and trouble you with melancholia. Perhaps best of all, I found it nailed the obscure emotion of sehnsucht. SS can both induce and satisfy it. (At least on behalf of your character. You, it might cling to.) I love the minimal overt information about what's safe. You'll make decisions on instinct, and some might end tragically. I'd call this excellent design for a game trying to model interaction with the unknown. If the idea of being a real explorer and finding your feet in an unfamiliar environment enchants you, then this is just what you want. If you dislike permadeath, turn it off, for pity's sake. I recommend leaving it on. Some might say permadeath has no place in what is essentially a narrative RPG, not a roguelike, but I disagree. In most RPGs, self-sacrificial or daring actions taken by your character are cheap; just load an old save if anything goes wrong. In SS? They count. Depending on what destiny you wish, SS can involve lots of grinding. This is both what I like least and part of what I love most. Again, it makes decisions carry more weight than a game can usually muster. As you approach the endgame with a character in whom you've invested several tens of hours, a cozy retirement in London starts to sound alluring; moral dilemmas grow teeth; and you'll be forced to ask yourself difficult questions. It wasn't just my character who was scared while attempting the preludes to Salt's Song/the exaltation. I WAS SCARED and did it anyway. And that, I think, is one of the better opportunities a game has ever given me.

Everything in this game is written in the same way that that not really-smart-enough-friend-to-be-doing-would-he-is-doing-in-life would write stories, academic articles or just articulate himself: With a bunch of made-up words and flowery language that make no sense and obscures any chance of understanding what he means ALL the while he pretends to himself that this confused mess is a "stylistic choice".... and OH YEA, in a game with perma-death, this gibberish of which I speak DOES NOT CHANGE, you have to click through the same annoying jibber-jabber everytime you restart and run through all the basics at the start ... and then EVERY SINGLE little QUEST ITEM IN THE SAME PLACES OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Imagine if in FTL the writing was like: "Oh my! While pulsating our ship through the innards of the quandaries of faster than light dispensation, we have found a spuregelmonkee in the tentrills of this lickamapoo! Shall we vivisect the dingy-ma-ra for FUEL or throw it overboard, floating away into the darkness of the lurb as we harvest its SCRAP and a single whisp of space smoke." AND THE FTL MAP NEVER CHANGED. AND ALL THE SAME QUESTS WERE IN THE SAME PLACES. AND YOU HAD TO READ THIS TEXT OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN AT THE SAME EXACT POINTS. AND THERE WERE A BUNCH OF MONSTERS WITHIN THE FIRST 15 MINUTES THAT COULD TWO- or THREE- HIT YOU. AND EVEN THE MOST BASIC UPGRADES FOR YOUR SHIP (WHICH STILL SUCK) COST MORE THAN YOU COULD AFFORD AFTER HOURS OF GRINDING... If you can get all that in your head - then you understand what this game is like. The trailer proclaims that some game "journalist" somewhere (I assume a close relation of the game designer) says it is the "The most delicious writing in all of gaming" ... replace delicious with pretentious and you got it. Honestly, the fact that they quoted such a pretentious try-hard line like that for their marketing should tell you all you need to know. Which sucks, because the actual game looks like it could be fun.

Strange, not sure what I'm buying or selling, but I'm sure it isn't good.

Great game with fantastic atmosphere. Not linear, randomized experience. Takes some time to get into the mechanics, be ready to die - you will for sure. Highly recommended for Lovecraft fans

Since I first bought this game a year and a half ago, I have returned to it again and again, and always for the same reason: I want to write yet another chapter in my characters' multi-generation tale of ambition, loss, obsession, and madness. The mechanics are simple: sail around, explore islands, figure out what the denizens of each island desire, and fulfill those desires. Each island differs thematically, and not just superficially: one island is an enormous colony of eye-stealing spiders, another island is run half by nuns who process a drug harvested from human dreams and half by the pirates who smuggle it, another island is home to a city constructed entirely of mirrors and inhabited by a pacificist cult that venerates light, another island is (literally) Hell, etc. Each island not only feels genuine, convincing, and consistent (oftentimes with its own theme music), but also has sufficiently different mechanics to feel different from the other islands. It's a long game, not only because you'll be fulfilling multiple quests at once (sometimes to advance plotlines, sometimes to collect money and other resources), but because sailing from island to island takes time (especially towards the game's beginning, before you upgrade your engine). Travel time is the most common criticism of the game. If you would find the act of sailing tedious, avoid the game. Otherwise, there is no game at all that I have ever played with superior writing. I cannot emphasize how enjoyable and gripping some of the plotlines are. Some tales are nautical-Victorian, some Gothic, some Lovecraftian, most some combination of all three. If this game were a novel, I'd read it; as a game, it includes novel-quality writing and is interactive. In addition to three main ambitions (overall goals), there are two secret ambitions, an additional ambition in the expansion, and several ways to complete the game without "winning." After 157 hours, I've completed around half of that content.