Sunless Sea

Нет русского, нет польского, нет ничего...

Let me first say that I like this game. It has a wonderful atmosphere, art direction, and a unique setting. It's the 1800s, some terrible calamity has fallen upon the surface of the world, and humanity has retreated inside the Hollow Earth to survive, where they find a new world of mushrooms, darkness and a vast underground sea. You play a ship Captain, and you voyage across this dark world delivering cargo and uncovering secrets. Utterly charming so far. The problem are with the pace of the game, the rewards it gives you, and an expectation of legacy play. You begin each iteration of your character in Underground London, and there's a vast uncharted, semi-randomly generated world for you to explore. And explore it you do, at a snail's pace. Your ship is slow. Very slow. Even crossing known waters you must still pay attention as there's hazards in the sea. I timed how long one trip took, I was given a mission from the Admiral to collect important intelligence reports from an agents on an island halfway across the map. To make some side money, I looked up what trade goods that island wants. Sapphires, Not sold in London, but there's a port not too far off the path that has them, and they want Wine, which is sold in London, so off I go. That 3 port trip, with a few very slight detours, too me nearly a real life hour to complete. And the rewards? Well I could buy Wine in London at $21, and sell at the first port for $23, where I could buy Sapphires for $86, and sell them at my destination for $95. Netting a profit of $11 for every cargo space I could spare on the trip. How far does that go in the game? Well shore leave for your crew typically costs between $10 and $50, so not very. Sleeping one night at your London townhouse will set you back $100. Rewards are slim. And failure is punishing. And frequent. Dozens of hours sunk into one iteration can be lost with a single bad choice or unlucky outcome. Making the game feel overall not worth it, despite it's good aspects.

Sunless Sea has a great creepy strange setting. I wanted very much to like it and tried to. It was a success for the writing and story events but a failure for gameplay. A good 90 percent of the game is watching your ship go from point A to point B. The music and graphics are great for creating atmosphere and locations are creative and interesting. However, with the majority of the game being spent waiting for your ship to arrive somewhere that becomes the defining experience of the game. When the defining experience is tediousness and boredom there isn't any reason to stick with it. The good stuff is solid but it doesn't outweigh the rest in my opinion. It's also punishingly difficult, and even when you succeed there is little sense of achievement. You play a captain going from port to port in a vast underground sea completing story events and desperately trying to get enough trade goods and port reports to afford to stay afloat. That could be fine on it's own, but when permadeath can happen abruptly from encountering the wrong sea monster before you've been able to afford ship upgrades or some other doom happens out of nowhere you see luck is clearly an aspect of your success, which is unsatisfying. When you die you can pass stuff onto an heir to keep playing as. This implies a degree of continuity. Except that aside from whatever stats and bonuses you can give an heir, there is no continuity. The quests and the world resets, and not even to something different. It resets to what you just died trying to do, so you end up just repeating stuff you've already done. I hated the implication of continuity when there really isn't any in a meaningful sense. Having an heir makes no sense from a story perspective if the world just resets, and with the strength of the game being story it's especially frustrating. Your capacity for patience and level of enjoyment for reading a game will be the factors in how much you get out of the Sunless Sea experience.

I love me some rogue-lites. I put in over 900 hours to Dungeons of Dreadmore alone. But this game just isn't the one. I had big expectations for this game, but it has ground me down to total dissatisfaction. The main problem I have is that the gameplay is just soooooo slowwwwww. There were times when I was nodding off waiting for my slow boat to chug slowly back to port. In addition, instead of making progress as I went along, I felt like I was slowy being crushed into zero supplies and zero money, to the point where I would just commit suicide because it was easier. Speaking of, you have perma-death with barely any carryover between generations. If you love an atmospheric game that will cause you to either pull your hair out in frustration or fall asleep, you have a winner.

The story is great, the missions are great, the variety is great but the skill progression and the hard-assedness of enemies kills even the most resistant crab captain. It's supposed to be mysterious, unpredictable but at the same time relaxing and not too time consuming, and it becomes really stressful and time consuming once you actually get going somewhere, and then some random beefed-out monster attacks you and you are back to square one.... It takes too much time to do anything. Sometimes I'd literally weigh down the button and go make some tea, because of how long time things take in this game. I really don't have that much time to play.... and I wish the gamemakers undestood this.