Sunless Sea

It has an excellent storylines and lore, I like the interesting and varied landmarks on the map. The sounds are great and almost give you the smell of the sea immersion at times. While the graphics are simple, they fit the aesthetic of the game. Unfortunately, that is what it is, an aesthetic looking for a game. You can argue that this is the game the developers wanted to build, but I found so many of the mechanics just caused tedium and were not 'fun' in any way. This could have been so many fun things -- like a dark/scary version of Pirates!, or a randomly generated "roguelike", or a story driven adventure game, or many other possibilities. It ends up feeling like poor conversion of a tabletop RPG card-game, with large amounts of time being consumed doing nothing but travelling in the dark from one place to another. At least if it were a card game you could use your imagination and skip the boring parts.

At first glance, the game is unforgivingly brutal: roguelike (albeit with some carry-over benefits for your "next life"), little guidance, and as many others have pointed out, no obvious way to make money. Oh, and everything wants to eat you. And your pea-shooter gun isn't going to allow you to fight back. That said, this is one of my favorite games, and certainly the most fun I've had in a while. Each problem you encounter in this game is like a little secret that needs to be solved. In time, none of the game's challenges will feel overwhelming. For those who have already bought the game and are having a difficult time staying afloat (heh), here are a few tricks that helped me: - Most monsters attack by ramming you. Hug your ship close to them as they move and keep firing, they won't be able to attack you. Most ships can't attack from the back, just stay in back of them and you can pick them off without being hit. - The best way to make money is selling sunlight-filled mirrorcatch boxes. You can buy empty boxes from Khan's Shadow, and fill them at the Cumaean Canal after traveling to the surface. You can then sell them either to the Blind Bruiser at Fallen London, (if you've smuggled for him/accepted his dispensation) or on the Isle of Cats. You can make 10-30k a trip depending on how many boxes you fill. - You can also make money buying coffee in Fallen London and selling it to the surface via the Cumaean Canal, though this can only be done a limited number of times. - You can also make good money delivering salt stone loads from the Salt Lions back to Fallen London, though this can only be done a limited number of times. - Focus on your veils skill. This means choosing the urchin background and spending secrets with officers that let you increase veils. It's generally better to avoid enemies than battle them. - If you have a hard time exploring, pass on your map to your next character to save time. -Dig through the wiki. This game is full of secrets.

It is clear that a lot of vision and planning went into creating this terrific setting and style of adventure. How many games allow you to equip your ship with a Pneumatic Ratsender? As it sounds, it delivers rats to needed parts of the ship. The game features a very interesting story system, where fragments of many side-stories seem to be gathered over time. The writing is good and creates an effective atmosphere. However, I am beginning to think successful strategies are found by luck. Time and again, I set out with a new ship and initial supplies and play until they are exhausted, and then it's game over by destruction or starvation. I haven't found even a glimmer of a promising method of moving further along in the game. So either I am missing some basic understanding after several hours of play, or it is only possible to succeed by combing the internet for secrets. Either way, I consider it a major fault of the game. The game needs to do less teasing with promises of greater success later on and make it more clear what the designers expect the player to do. I can tell they are expecting me to do something I haven't done, but it's completely hidden. Unfortunately the bounty of fun clearly woven into the game's design fails to deliver. If there weren't so much talent put into the game, I would call it a fraud. As it is, it's just an attractive machine with no known purpose. Two stars.

I bought this game on impulse without reading many reviews or following the early access hype. The game scores points for visuals, writing and theme, but loses for mechanics (particularly inventory mechanics) that are needlessly obtuse and uninteresting gameplay. The game is visually impressive and has a rich, interesting aesthetic. From the towns to the mysterious locations across the Unterzee (kind of annoying seeing 'zee' and 'zailor' all the time) to the monsters, there is plenty to look at. However most of the time you're actually doing something, you'll be looking at either your ship or the interface, which are both not visually compelling or really even adequate. The interface is overcomplicated, which is mostly a factor of problems with the mechanics. The ships look like standard ship sprites, nothing special. The writing is occasionally annoying, and the text is too small even at lower resolutions. Maybe if I had played it for longer I would stop being confused, but the adherence to consistency within the world left me wondering what the hell people were talking about most of the time. The overall theme is definitely prevalent, so while you might not be able to parse a particular sentence referring to made up words you aren't yet familiar with, you can pretty well get the gist of what's being said and the consequences thereof. Where this game stumbles is with the inventory and "stuff" mechanics. Not only does everything have an indecipherable name and indecipherable use, but there is way too much stuff and no real categorization. You might defeat a monster at see and have the option to harvest its meat or its shell. If you take the meat, you get some supplies (generic food stat). If you take the shell, you can trade it in later for money. I explained that simply but under a coating of indecipherable text, you aren't really informed enough to make a decision. It feels like Dark Souls' inventory system, not in a good way. Buy it? Maybe.

Not a sailing sim, not a puzzler, not an RPG, not a proper legacy-roguelike. Sunless Sea belongs to the class of "light" "exploration games" whose mechanics don't support the genre the game appears to belong to, and the actual game consists primarily of trying things and seeing what happens. The media content (art, music, and of course writing -- the main attraction of this game) serves as a reward for jumping through hoops, but contextually dissociated from the act of jumping. Trading the regular way and fighting are currently traps; ship stats, fuel/food consumption mechanics, the combat system, and prices on goods, repairs and fuel are such that fighting and trading are chores you must do if you were suckered into buying a "better" ship hoping to advance in the game, so as not to go broke running your useless fuel-guzzler. Trying different characters will hit you HARD. The advancement system, such as it stands now, locks you into playing a long succession of clones, good at the same thing and doing the same initial quests as a result. The game doesn't support roleplaying choices. Everyone is awful, and taking a hardline stance against a particular atrocity (by not doing the quests) will simply lock you out of a bunch of other storylines which secretly require quest rewards from that one. Finally, there are no puzzles as such; the (admittedly very evocative) writing is mechanically dissociated from the quests, which comprise fetch runs and "you'll-know-it-when-you-see-it" blind scavenger hunts. Your job is to catalogue all the weird stuff you encounter for possible later use -- but there'll be a lot of false positives. Rant continues here: http://www.gog.com/forum/sunless_sea/b_dy_legacies_how_do_they_work_not_well So why play? Because the exploration is great and occasionally heartbreakingly awesome, and the devs' income model relies on releasing content updates, attracting new players and printing money Infocom-style. A good return on your time and money.