Sunless Sea is one of the best ambiented games for cosmic horror/H.P Lovecraft fans that merge good and intriguing storytelling, ambiance, combat, and survival.
The good: The writing is by far its best asset. It's almost like an interactive book of sorts since most of the lore and action happen while interacting with other people and islands. It has immense replay value since every time you die the game ends and starts again anew (while you can leave part of what you had to your relative that will handle your heritage and continue the exploration in your place). This is a nice twist to other survival games that vanish with your existence; you will notice that in sunless sea, it's nearly impossible to succeed in your first or second try. That's mainly because of the hard money curve early on the game - everything is too expensive, and if you don't get good help from your previous runs, it's nearly impossible to succeed. That makes dying a vital mechanic since you will have both your ancestral's knowledge and money from the previous run.
The gameplay is fairly simple: upgrade your boat, do side quests and favors, and be a true merchant traveling the Zee - victorian london's underground sea- aiming for one of the tree goals you set in the begging of your journey: get rich, own your own island or collect Zee stories. Explore a randomly generated map containing islands, enemies, and danger lurking in the ocean, only with the help of your always changing crew and your Zee Bat that senses near islands for you. Most of the time you will be visiting islands and uncovering secrets, battling weird creatures and sharks and making wise (or unswise) survival choices, paying attention on your fuel level, your fear level and food level.
While the gameplay sure is straightforward, the game's lore, range of choices, consequences, and ambiance is enough to completely immense yourselves in it, even with simple 2D graphics. Outside of combat, the game almost feels like a visual novel. There are tons of eldrich horrors and old fallen gods and prophetic dreams happening all the time. A lot of crew members to be wary off and sacrifice for food. There are a lot of fear stories and tough decisions.
While the islands and enemies remain the same, only changing in location on the map, all actions are determined by RnG, and so, those will be the main cause of death. The main reason you will die in Sunless Sea is because you want to know too much: the game is made in a way that if you falter away from your main objective, you are doomed to have a bad roll and die. I believe it's almost mathematically impossible to experience everything in the game on one run without dying once, and that's what makes the game realistic. You survive just enough to attain your goals after receiving knowledge and money from someone before you. If you set to explore for yourself, then you will probably be the one to leave your belongings to the next in the blood line. If you absolutely despise RnG, there is an option to play it in Merciful mode, where you don't restart the run upon death. It is still deeply enjoyable even that way.
It plays with our humane temptation and curiosity: every island is full of secrets and promises, and you end up rolling the dice trying to know and get it all.
I'm a big fan of the art, even if it's not its strongest asset. I believe it has the right amount of weirdness to keep the game scary. Everything seems like it was taken literally out of a map, almost as someone would describe it. All island's main features are exaggerated, and you don't see a single human being in those inhospitable visual desceiptions they call nations. For instance, if an island is known to have a giant clock, it will appear for the captain as a giant literal noisy clock in the middle of the ocean. It almost feels like we are experiencing the shock the crew is having in it's senses as they approach. Since everything is unknown, it appears more hostile than it is.



The bad, and ugly: I find the combat system a bit clunky. It adds to the eerieness of the experience: you really do feel like an inexperienced captain with a useless crew, aiming clumsily to take down an eldrich evil in the total darkness. I find that it was made to be unpleasant. A better option would be a turn based or even an rng combat, similar to Fear and Hunger. However, I believe that it would break the immersion since there is something special in running away out of fuel and desperate watching your little beam of light of a ship try to get somewhere safe. So, a warning to all combat lovers: that's not what the game is about.
The writing: DON'T BUY THIS GAME IF YOU DON'T LIKE TO READ. DO. NOT. If you are not a fan of reading extensive (beautifully written pieces of horror and despair) texts, this is not the game for you. There are probably other games that mimic the fear of being on a boat alone in the ocean. The special perk of this one is its beautifully written lore and world.
Frustration: As in all RNG containing survival games, dont buy this if you don't like having to replay stuff you did before. The perk of this game is that you will always start again with an advantage, probably monetary, as well as knowledge of what not to do in the story and how to manage your supplies better. There is an option to turn off permanent death. If this is the only thing keeping you from playing it, I suggest you buy it anyway.
A. Lot. Of. Sailing: especially middle/late game, sailing gets boring. You know enough about the Zee and how to handle your supplies, and the good part of the map is uncovered. But sometimes, a mission requires you to travel all across the map on a path you did a hundred times before. And there you go. Very late game, your engines will be better, so it gets less boring, but still. Fortunately, I believe there is a way in PC to keep sailing automatically while you look at other tabs (thank god). The distance between islands is perfect for early/ middle game, so i don't believe they should fix this by making the map smaller. However, i think the speed of the ship late game with the engines at the max level should be way faster than it is.

Every so often I find myself typing "games like Sunless Sea" into Google to see if something, anything else has been made that gives me something approaching the same experience this does. To explore a strange land where truly anything can lie on the horizon and where all manner of adventures await.

One of the few truly Weird games out there in which weird doesn't solely mean something that inspires fear and revulsion, but can also inspire awe, curiosity, laughter and love (though there';s plenty of the former two, don't get me wrong).

There are a lot of critiques to make of Sunless Sea. The game is wholly unsuited to being a roguelike. It is dreadfully slow, both in terms of movement speed and how fast the game advances (standard trading routes make barely any money,) and the main gameplay reward for completing quests is getting to read the prose and advance the story. Thus a “run” is potentially upwards of 20 hours long, and restarting mostly just means beginning all the side quests from scratch, relocating places you’ve already been to, and skimming pages and pages of text that you’ve already read. In theory, the spectre of permadeath looming over your runs makes every penny you earn feel hard-won, but in practice starting a fresh game is just an absolute slog, so I think it’s best practice to turn permadeath off either the instant you start playing, or once you’ve familiarized yourself with the map and the basic gameplay (There is something to be said for the initial new-player experience of dreading losing your stuff before you actually accrue anything to lose.)

But! I nevertheless think Sunless Sea is an extremely recommendable game. The writing—the story, and the setting, which in some ways is itself the story—is fantastic. Sunless Sea is well written in the way that a book is well written, when I think a great many “well written” video games, including many near and dear to my heart, are well written in the sense that a good manga scanlation is well written. It’s wry and funny without losing its sense of gravitas; it’s fond of inventive, evocative metaphors and maintains a brisk economy of style. The game does not waste your time with dialogue options along the lines of “What’s a Snuffer?” “Who’s the Traitor Empress?”; the prose will mention new concepts and places—the Masters of the Bazaar, prisoner’s honey, Parabola, Unfinished Men—like you already know what they are, and force you to make decisions based on that, until you learn by doing, a sort of language immersion course for the narrative. It’s incredibly compelling.

The presentation is a little ramshackle at times; some of the older Fallen London art assets are truly very silly-looking, and the menu icons have such a mixture of styles and subject matter that the user interface has something of the appearance of a ransom letter; but I think that it crucially has a lot of heart to it. There’s also a lot of evocative artwork that I really like: the Visions of the Surface icon, the character portrait of the Dark-Spectacled Admiral, the picture of a ship used for the “Time, the Healer” quality. I like the big eye easter egg, the design of the ports and islands. Most of all I adore the soundtrack, the music that plays upon returning to London, the theme of the Iron Republic and Aestival, the song that plays when you travel to the Surface. A critical part of what makes Sunless Sea so enchanting is the game’s ability to cultivate an atmosphere, and the music is central to that.

The first four drafts of this review were consigned to the flames because I couldn’t stop myself from complaining about it, when I intended for the review to be positive. Sunless Sea is like that: deeply frustrating, but infinitely fascinating. I have since played most of the other Failbetter games and at this point I’m pretty firmly a dyed-in-the-wool Fallen London fan. I like Sunless Sea so much that I wish the game could have a second pass taken at it, to iron out its many oddities and imperfections.* That will probably never happen, and it shall remain a very flawed gem; but a flawed gem still glints when held up to the false-stars.

* In theory, that is what Sunless Skies is. But Sunless Skies—and this is absolutely crucial—is not about being a sea captain.

(warning: incomplete thoughts ahead)
thrilling in atmosphere, in games of luck, and in reckless chases and absconds from terrifying monsters. they, in fact, proceed to obliterate you regardless.
gameplay mechanics are fundamentally driven around written narrative, with all major interactions with the content of the game being delivered via journal, dialogue, atmospheric description. a reading game in a way, much like its roots, Fallen London.
moving the ship around and shooting the cannon is fun too c: