Sunless Sea

Steeped in underworld trappings Sunless Sea is initially a trade sim style game with exploration to amass assorted resources and invest in better ship parts, base, etc. Lack of map randomization means that you will always play the "same" game each time... and makes dying a grind. There is an inheritance system to repeat with your best ship parts, money, etc but that did little to keep my interest in repeating the same events/settings. SS has a good board game like feel with a sense that there are secrets just under your nose but is less suited to marathon play due to same-ness of each trial. There is a marginal plot with some locations changing over time and of submitting "port reports" obtained at most destinations for currency/fuel but the vague script alone does little to compel play. I've enjoyed SS but your mileage may vary. Pros: Novel setting, creepy scenarios, exploration required, cavernous world Cons: Same set-up each time, limited plot, wordy, some deaths feel random

One sentence summary: FTL-like game without the amazing gameplay, darker setting, less rogue-like, more lazily-programmed, and with a whole bunch more flavor text. This is the sort of game that looks fantastic in screenshots and video, but once you play it, it's very underwhelming. The developer wanted to craft a particular world with a particular dark mood, and it would've been great, except they forgot to actually make a game of it. This feels like the prototype of a game. Flaws: 1) Lack of indication of what to do. You have to keep a journal (more like a wiki) yourself. The game is a dump of random unrelated quests with requirements of items on the other side of the map. And it takes forever to navigate around. 2) Combat is extremely shallow. There is no skill to it, no real upgrades, nothing to strive for. The high cost of repairs means you will just circle behind the enemy ship, and the AI will be stuck turning around. 3) The "lazy programmer" approach to quests and their requirements. You literally see the programming variables that activate a quest at every port, under tooltips like "Knows about masks: > 5 (You have 3)" and "Has <some item>: No". It makes the whole thing feel a bit too random. You have no indication to get most of the items you need. Inaccessible quests show up always, and their description will spoil things you're doing right now! 4) The way the game is designed, you can't exhaust activities in a city. You do one activity, then you have to leave and come back. Except if you have 20 different ports each with their own culture, and you have to move on to the next destination and come back later, you forget the "feel" of that port, what is supposed to give it flavor. It's like reading 20 novels, by reading one page from novel 1, then 5 minutes later one page from novel 2, then 5 mins later one page from novel 3. Nothing sticks. 5) Everything is generic, nothing is gripping. There are no characters in this game, no villains, every interaction is a random event with different people you never see again, and none of them will mark you. 6) Navigation too slow and boring. I'm focusing on the negative stuff because that's what marked me. I'm giving it 3 stars because there's the start of a good concept here: the graphics are pretty, and I like the idea of a 2D ship exploration game with combat. They just need to build a real game around it. Watch a 5 minute video of the gameplay and stop there, because there is nothing else to it.

After all the praise I did not expect that - this game is really, really bad. It is a story-based rogue-like and this already breaks it. (1) The game has an extremely difficult start, not because you die in battle or can't do some tricky moves but because your ressources burn out fast and are way to expensive for a new player. So, at first you'll get a Game Over for lack of ressources quite fast without really knowing what you are doing wrong. Also, the game plays very slow, so you'll die very fast "ingame" but it will still take some time "in reality" which is as boring as it is frustrating. (2) The main focus is the story, not the gameplay. Which is fine on itself, a great written story with a lot of well-written text can be a very good thing. But those thing get smashed when the game has a permadeth mechanic! To be fair, you can save manually and therefore this point of critique has been fixed. Still: you WILL die in the beginning, and you will do so a lot of times. And qhile the game "rendomizes" it's world, the islands, stories and missions are 90% identically, just with some RNG outcomes. Pairing story-based and rogue-like gameplay is a really, really bad idea and one of the two reasons this is a really, really bad game. - After some time - if you managed to keep playing - you'll get the game and stop losing so fast. The clever way would be to read Wikis or tutorials,. but those are always spoilers for the story, which again shows that rogue+story is a bad idea. Still, let's get to the gameplay. Nowm that you've understood the game you realize: "oh, actually this game is not really... er... fun?". It is very slow, it does not have a real sense of progression or success. It just... goes on... untill you die or finish it. And remember, dying during the story forces you to re-play the already known, and after so many attempts very well known, story. -- Okay, the good stuff. Atmosphere. Music. Graphics, maybe? Well, not really. But it fits. It's okay

I got into Sunless Sea after playing the web-game Echo Bazaar (now called Fallen London), and was instantly excited. That excitement quickly wore off. This game is so much worse than Echo Bazaar, so much less interesting. Echo Bazaar is a text-based game that rewards reading and story-based adventure where you unlock elements of the plot bit by bit as you save up treasure and rewards to gradually afford bigger and better storylines, and you could die (and dying was its own adventure) but you'd as Fallen London was in a state of undeath, your mangled body would always make its way back home where your rat butlers, adopted orphans and thieving mistresses awaited you. It was a game of debauchery and decadence, where sex with all manner of humans (and humanoids) was just dessert after a night of raucous drinking and revelry. It was a game of footpads, wandering duelists, tiger-tamers, adventurers and brawlers who wouldn't hesitate to gut you like a fish and still expect to be gutted in return. It was a game of secrets and mysteries, where love stories were worth more than gold, where Hell was just around the corner, where the signs and graffiti could open your mind or break it. It was a game of pickpockets, and thieves, where shadows could be safer than the light of the undergloom, but not that safe. Not in Fallen London. The Sunless Sea takes place in the most boring and eventless part of Fallen London, travelling on your boat, the rewards are even cheaper, and everything you worked for could be lost if you died. The only reason I give this 2 stars instead of 1 is because the theme and atmosphere was the same macabre, Lovecraftian-meets-Victorian with just a hint of steampunk. Just save your money and go play Fallen London instead.

main problem with this game is that it requires you to lookup a wiki how to play this game. Now I know many people enjoy hitting a brick wall every 2 minutes, so for you this is a great game. Me, I like my games to be more immersive, to explore. This game wont allow that, it will put a barrier around you wich makes it impossible to sail in any direction without you running out of a) food b) money c) fuel within a very short time. You can try attack enemy ships wich are waaay more powerful then you (and you get oneshotted) or you run out food or fuel. And thats it really.