Great atmosphere and writing. Good locations, different ways to handle things with different stats, quests for crew members can turn out in different ways, some events might have a rare outcome in addition to the normal one for added variety. There are a lot of ways to get your captain to retirement either by buying larger houses and choosing to retire, completing long quests in certain ways or helping factions gain power, or by fulfilling an ambition that you choose when you create your character. The character creator allows you to choose what you would like to be addressed as, no matter what your portrait appearance is, which is great for non cisgender characters/players or people who would rather be called something other than Sir or Captain, romance options also allows for any kind of relationship you want (though you are kind of forced into having a kid and making them want to be a Captain if you want better choices in the event of your death).

I really like the officers in the game, the starting character that joins based on your chosen past is terrible stat wise but each one of them even has a send off where you can take them to a location and be given item for it, quests for other characters might have them create a unique and powerful item, reveal more of the world or secrets that they are hiding, their quests might lead to their death, or to them becoming changed in a way that effects their stat bonuses or personality.

It would be an excellent game if it wasn't for the terrible monotonous gameplay. The game is very slow and requires grinding. Fuel (which I think should be removed from the game entirely) and supplies take up half your cargo space and the other three ships that cost under $3,000 all offer the same amount of storage or even less (I don't even know how you would play with less), you can't buy a ship that can hold more until you get $7,000, items you get that sell for a lot of money are frequently needed for access to areas, officer quests, or other things that should prevent you from selling them. There is also no way to store extra cargo, not in your house or in a warehouse (a feature that has been requested for over a year), so you will have no way to do certain quests that require a lot of supplies and if you have something you need to full fill a job but you don't have everything you need you will have to waste valuable space carrying something for possibly hours. You will need to buy expensive engines to go faster to reduce the amount of time you are wasting during travel, but they also tend to ruin a lot of the combat because you can outrun monsters that need to run into you to do damage and enemy ships without aft guns are easy to just stay behind and shoot as they attempt to turn in a constant circle so they can see you.


In the first 12 hours I think I saw two events at sea, I have no idea why they made the thing that you do the most the most boring part of the game. With how few enemies there are, how easy it is to avoid or outrun them, and next to no events they might as well have just added a fast travel system. It's great when you discover new places and see new events but because you will want money for engines, a new ship, and due to fuel/supply requirements you will likely be travelling back and forth between similar areas to trade the same items, pick up the same passengers, see the same events with the same outcomes, and to record the same area logs in each port to pass on to the navy for free fuel when you return to London (which really should have been a more central location not the top left of a large map).

You can get permanent bonuses for future Captains by collecting books but these items only work in the same game when your current captain dies or retires, so you aren't able to just start a new game with stats that make things easier to get into it. Dying really isn't even that big of an issue, running out of money or fuel due to your terrible cargo space, low funds, and slow movement is. You will fail events constantly because so many of them will have a 15%-60% chance of success but the only negative to failing is usually more wasted time and the death of crew members (not named officer crew, just the crew that you use more for currency for stats and events that are easily replaceable, of course this also means that you can frequently die from losing your entire crew if you get really unlucky, so taking a smaller crew that will eat less food is not a good idea, causing you to waste even more time as you pay for and need to store additional supplies for the larger crew). Even the fear that you build up while sailing or from events seems like an afterthought because it is so easy to have reduced.

Having the ability to make your own save games and override the games rougelike design was a great option, because the game would be so much worse playing it in an ironman mode. It would be nice to have options to edit the game, most of the boring and time wasting aspects could just easily be removed or have simple solutions like adding storage at your house (could even be based on the size of your house since you can have three different ones).

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/693858096028848128/photo/1
https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/693860886813896704/photo/1
https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/693862231155433472
https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/693864792054861824/photo/1

The atmosphere and writing are great and I'm love with the setting, but it took a couple of tries before it stopped being overwhelming and starts to become more enjoyable. Sometimes it starts to feel grindy especially with how slow your boat is and how often you need to revisit the different ports.

Discovering a new port in the middle of the dark and oppressive underground always feel rewarding, though, in addition to that sense of "I wonder what kind of messed up thing I'm about to see this time." I like the one with the Sun.

Very good atmosphere and worldbuilding, and the narrative is so open you feel you are actually making a journey that's only your own (so many variables, so much freedom, the chance to set your own endings and ambitions). It is also great how it puts the sublime at the very core of the experience (and this is very Lovecraftian): during the first hours, the game is so much mechanically rich and complex that it becomes overwhelming. Survival mechanics and top-down, dark exploration enhance the feeling of being completely lost and vulnerable.

And yet its difficulty is also its biggest flaw, especially because it's combined with one of the worst pacing I've ever seen. The game is so hard you cannot but play it over and over before reaching even just one of your goals. And this usually takes hours, even if you already know where to go and how to survive. If something goes wrong, you are forced to repeat everything, over and over, meaning that most of the hours you spend on the game you basically repeat a standard pattern of early-stage (and painfully boring) actions. And this is nothing but machinic. After some attempts, atmosphere, narrative, Lovecraft, sublimity, disempowerment, exploration... all gets divoured by repetition.

Sail. Sink. Repeat.

The most frustrating aspect of Sunless Sea, which is bound to have players abandoning the game before achieving anything noteworthy, is the terrible amount of repetitions one is going to face of the early stages in any new playthrough. Also, the grinding wasn’t really well thought out, too much resources wasted too quickly, so that instead of being nervous for the unknown threats awaiting in the most obscure corners of the Unterzee the players will mostly find themselves rushing to the nearest port for a mere barrel of gasoline.

That being said, if you are able to counter these two problems and focus of the explorative side of the game, one is going to be immensely rewarded: Sunless Sea has one of the best writing ever seen in a game. It is immersive, gripping, terrifying and even humorous at times. In contrast with the slow pace of the player’s ship traveling discovering new isles and hidden stories, the sense of anticipation for a new menace or an unpredictable event is ever so present as long as the map has undiscovered bits left.

The game in fact shouldn’t end as one completes a main quest or surrenders to their inevitable death: the allure of the game is present as long as there are still mysteries left unsolved and new stories to adventure through (which, thanks to the dedication of Failbetter games, get regular updates and additions). The world itself displays incredible charm thanks to the art design and the simple, yet striking game engine, all the more emphasized by an atmospheric score fitting for the most diversified events.

Should you surrender to the chore that grinding is in the beginning of the game none shall blame you, be only aware that beside the game limitations what you are going to miss is a story worth of rivalling Melville and Conrad’s sea tales of descent into the abyss of human madness.

Another roguelike where there's no real sense of permanent progression, so you bang your head against the same few hours of content until you're tired of it.

Good thing the combat doesn't suc... oh wait no it does. And some of the draconian punishments you receive for minor mistakes or things beyond your control might accurately convey the chaotic nature of the world, but that doesn't make them fun.

I docked at a port and was approached by a fellow seeking passage to another location. I would have loved to oblige him, but unfortunately my crew was full, and there was no way to dismiss someone to make room for him.

Why does a guest even take up a crew slot? IDK it's almost like this game is badly designed or something.

So I have to turn him away, he proceeds to curse me and storm off. I complete my business and return to London, only to learn my wife and child died in a freak accident because the game literally wouldn't let me take some weirdo where he wanted to go.

Bearing in mind, having a kid is one of the few ways you can retain any of your progress after dying, and that quest takes multiple trips to-and-from London to trigger, so my run was basically ruined because of developer incompetence.

It was at this point that I gave up, hell, my rating has dropped by 1.5 stars because writing this review has reminded me why I really started to hate this game.

People praise the worldbuilding and atmosphere of Fallen London, but I'm sorry, while sailing the Unterzee is great, the overall story and lore are just esoteric weirdness for esoteric weirdness's sake.

There's no real theme to the "narrative", it's just a bunch of stuff that happens. And when nothing is as it seems, then the unusual becomes humdrum.

"You encounter a shopkeeper, but he's actually two squids in a trenchcoat and his wares are portraits of people who haven't been born yet that have value for some reason and for payment he only accepts the wistful half-remembered dreams of a cat called Algernon".

There, I just wrote a "character" for Fallen London, hire me Mr Kennedy.

It's not a bad game, per se; the writing and atmosphere is stellar and the art is worth at least watching some sort of hour-long walkthrough just to get a glimpse of it.

The problem is that the gameplay is more slow, methodical, and sluggish than it really needs to be; moving the ship around is a process in and of itself and combat is essentially "who can press the attack button first, me or the AI?"

All of that has been fixed in Sunless Skies, which makes playing this game obsolete.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve picked up this game, convinced that THIS would be the time I finally played it through, got my ending and saw even just one storyline through to a satisfying end. THIS would be the time I’d read every dialog I was presented with, that I’d savour the delicious prose, not skip immediately to the inscrutable rewards and punishments at the end of each passage. Devastatingly, I’ve yet to be right about that even once. I respect the game an awful lot, and admire it’s early-to-the-party cosmic horror sensibility, but between the tedium of starting over (the beginning of every run feels close enough to identical to be boring but too far from identical to be second-nature) and the drudgery of getting a run onto its feet, I don’t think I can bring myself to try to love it again.