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.