Sunless Sea

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.

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.