Sunless Sea

The game is fun and I've enjoyed playing it, but you should not take it seriously. Death is a non-issue, as you can start anew and even inherit something from the dead captain. In a sense, the most entertaining plays have been when I've done something outlandish and ran with it. The premise is to take a ship, fight some monsters or enemies, arrive to other ports and then follow some actions in a choose-your-own-adventure type of interactive novel (with random outcomes, influenced by stats). Although the game is fun, it is not without flaws. The game feels as if someone has taken a ship navigation game engine and bolted the story on top, straight without bothering to integrate it properly. All variables are transparent and visible to the user. They form the basis for what you can do and hold the game state. These conditions are not always clear, because they just show a bunch of variables that mean nothing without some sort of context or documentation. The game does not come with a manual, and although there are free wikis with documentation, they consist of tables of the same variables and how other variables change with each choice. A much better product would have included textual explanations on what is needed to do, instead of just throwing the game variables to you. Overall, it's a fun game. Definitely not worth paying USD 19 for it. I got mine as a freebie, so I can't complain. Get it while on sale, don't pay more than 5 bucks for it.

The gameplay just felt... annoying. The combat feels tedious and annoying, the controls are uninspired, and feel incredibly slow and unresponsive. The fuel and other survival mechanics, which I thought would be interesting, just ended up making the game feel claustrophobic, since venturing anywhere meant you might not make it back before you ran out of fuel, etc. etc. Maybe this game just wasn't for me. Honestly, I loved the idea, but really boring combat, and mechanics that actually punish exploration (sparse and expensive fuel, food, etc.) made me dislike it. If you want to give it a try, at least wait for a sale imo.

It took me three tries to even start this game, but I've finally played it enough for a review. I believe this is the developer's first venture outside the world of idle/mobile games (although they were making them back when they were Twitter games). This has the same pacing. In a mobile game, you can take one or two actions, then you must wait (or pay). In this game the wait-or-pay period is replaced with steering your ship. You go to a location, click a few times, go to another island...repeat, repeat, repeat. The game is somewhat linear in that if you want to just sail around selling goods, you can make just enough to not run out of food and fuel. There are a strictly limited number of high-earning opportunities that come up that you will eventually locate and then feel compelled to pursue, as otherwise the grind is 100x as long (not an exaggeration). The game is set up to require several attempts at getting started because the budget is so tight without knowing about these opportunities and combat so deadly that your character will most likely die. This makes it difficult to connect to your character because you have to make so many to restart with. There is some attempt to make each character a "successor" of the other, but that doesn't quite work because the timeline resets, and all events proceed in exactly the same way with a slightly randomized map. The writing is good, but to be honest, it feels way more 1700s than 1800-early 1900.

So, it's quite a while that i last played this game. I only have now an Imac 2008, on which I cannot really play it without overheating the machine. I don't really understand all the praise for this game. I mean, there's a lot of work in it, it's true, but it fails in delivering a sense of narration and involvement. A bit like the "fallen london" browser game. I mean, if you like a bunch of unrelated stories with a bit of cyberpunk, a bit of gothic in it and some awkward boat simulator that's it. For me it's not worth my time, and i played quite a bit, so i'm just unhappy in thinking about it.

It has an interesting premise in a rich and deep setting, but it’s slow at telling any kind of story and it’s slow in the gameplay department. The intrigue and mystery kept me going, but the harsh difficulty in combat, constant resource management, and relying on luck to win encounters were really annoying - these mechanics get in the way of exploring the world and enjoying the stories within. Beautiful and eerily atmospheric in art style and design, but as the locations are all menus, the different areas end up being very similar. It also takes a while to experience new things, especially upgrades. The steep learning curve is off putting, as is the perceived lack of tangible progress. Overall, I did enjoy my time in the Sunless Sea, but was a bit disheartened towards the end.