If you enjoy short story collections and the absurd/horor/mystery genres, this is a good game. If you appreciate all of that, and are curious and patient enough, this is a beautiful game. This game is not for the trigger-happy thrill-seekers, but for the readers and writers and explorers, it's well beyond a feast. The fuel, supplies, terror, and time is always ticking away, while stories upon stories await out there as you make choices and progress through time and ports. Combat becomes a result of the exploration, and is easily broken once you have a strong enough ship, but while that aspect can be exciting for a moment, it's not the focus of the game's designers and tends to feel natural in its own right. This game is a stream of novels you can choose to write over and over and for which you can see so many different, unique and beautiful resolutions. If you are attracted to the page, the arts, the atmosphere of either, this game is your playground.
This game's predecessor "Sunless Sea" is a fantastic game, and a superb expansion from the browser-based "Fallen London." It would be hard to top. especially with its own expansion "Zubmariner" in the mix, adding to the established intrigue and severity of a magnificently written game. So here comes the big sequel. "Skies" appears, and swings so hard at a one-speed ball that it begs the question- 'What happened?' "Sea" gave weight to all of its choices because it accepted that the action and crises of the plot would take place on the written-word page, all the while making money and attributes difficult let alone dangerous to acquire, to the point where you as captain began having to make personal, non-plot related decisions as to how you wanted to reach your goals. "Skies" added one scoop from that box of ice-cream to its mix and the rest is just a blend of teaching you to fight for a living. That being said, they did a great job with the physics and combat mechanics, definitely an upgrade on an exploration game like "Seas," but seemingly at the cost of so much value to decisions made and characterization, both in the ports and on the quests themselves. Encounters in various ports became so much more succinct, predictable, and jarringly easy-- just have enough of an item or an attribute, or try again. The item list seems cut in half twice over, and with none of it difficult to acquire (save through combat), the enticingly exotic aspects of the previous games suddenly flatlined. For newcomers, "Sunless Skies" is a fun combat/exploration game, and will require some reading to appreciate the plots, which are well-woven and fun to ponder. For return Fallen Londoners and Zee Captains, "Skies" is a fun combat/exploration game that greatly reduces itself from its previous titles in favor of clicking the 'shoot' button and getting rich a bit too easily.
