SUNLESS SEA

The slower you play it the better it is. Read everything, and make sure you fully understand what you are reading. I've had to look up dozen of words used in this game because they are not in common usage. If you let the game progress at its own pace and not at yours you will be much more immersed in this world.

It makes zero sense for this game to be a roguelike. Making you replay 60 hours of narrative-driven text-based-adventure plot is awful. Good news is that you can just save the game and use checkpoints anyway and all you lose is an achievement. I highly recommend doing it this way; the intergenerational/descendant mechanics are very cool but not cool enough to play through 30+ hours of the exact same content. Not without a year long break, anyway. The writing and worldbuilding is phenomenal. I'm obsessed with this game and this world and really can't recommend it enough. It's bizarre and surprising and just twisted enough to engage you without dwelling in the grimdark of it all.

I like the idea of the game. I also understand people that like it. But its just not for me. Played a little and felt like a stressful chore, not a game i want to spend time in. Biggest offender was probably fuel management. My time is limited and game queue is endless so i will just pass this one.

[b][url=https://github.com/InstantComet/SunlessSea]SunlessSea 簡中漢化[/url]／[url=https://github.com/kaosensei/sunless-sea-zh-tw/tree/main] 繁中漢化[/url][b] 在此為漢化的成員們獻上深深的感謝，沒有你們這款遊戲對於不懂英文的中文玩家來說是死的。[/b] Please maintain and increase support for Unofficial Translations. [hr][/hr] [h1]關於官方中文......[/h1] 請不要因為沒官方中文給負評。STEAM商店沒寫明嗎？ [b]基本上，你沒辦法指望無光之海（SUNLESS SEA）這款遊戲更新官方中文，甚至應該說要推出任何其他語言的支持都相當困難。[/b] 第一個原因：這類作品一直都是「冷門」的，即便對於同類遊戲來說很有溫度，但這塊餅綜觀來看就是這麼大，多語言支持的風險不是他們能去擔起的。（也最好不要。） 第二個原因：翻譯的難度。我們都知道這款遊戲的重點在於「故事／文筆」，製作團隊為了確保翻譯後的內容仍然符合原來故事的調性／正確性會比其他非文字遊戲所要付出的努力更多。 再來語言是有親屬關係的，而英文和中文基本上就是截然不同的物種，你可以期待無光之海推出「美式英文」跟「英式英文」的選項（雖然一定不會），但是中文？中文甚至沒有足夠的空間來容納／轉換英文中的代名詞，而我們現在還只談到語義，那麼語感呢？押韻與韻律這些，中英八桿子打不著關係，英翻中的過程就像拿米紙和豆皮試圖重現水墨。 第三個原因：文字量。無光之海的文字量相當﹑相當龐大，這也讓我非常驚訝有人願意為這款遊戲付出那麼多心力去翻譯，因為文字量多﹑連貫的篇幅越長（詞彙和劇情越「傘式術語」）、虛構的單詞越多，都會進一步增加翻譯的工作量與成本（風險）——無論對於製作團隊還是譯者。不要誤會我的意思，非官方翻譯不代表品質不佳，但官方翻譯鐵定要對品質有更多要求，尤其放在一個被灌注愛與精力的遊戲上，又更別提文字還是這款遊戲的主軸。 最後但並非最不重要：這不是一個大公司製作的作品，即便他們想為玩家服務，也很可能心有餘力不足。換做是你的話，你不會想讓更多人看到你嘔心瀝血生出來的東西嗎？這是很簡單就能將心比心的吧？ 我認為絕大多數粉絲會更希望他們將重心放在新內容上，既有東西的客群擴展......真的只能說這塊餅就是這麼大，我也希望有官方中文但我不會真的去期待。 [b]許願沒關係，但希望不要過於苛求他們。[/b] [h2]　—共享世界觀的免費網頁遊戲推薦[/h2] 對製作團隊文筆／無光之海的世界感到好奇的人，我很推薦你遊玩同團隊製作的：[url=https://www.fallenlondon.com/login]Fallen London[/url] | 陷落淪敦 / 墮落倫敦。 由於[b][i]墮落倫敦[/i][/b]是網頁遊戲，所以可以直接掛上Google翻譯遊玩，大幅減少語言隔閡的問題——就我個人的經驗是——足夠了，足夠讓你知道這個IP的魅力，知道為什麼有不少人僅是因為摸過墮落倫敦，就對無光之海（SUNLESS SEA）產生遊玩的興趣......至少我也是其中之一。 當然即便有翻譯幫助，有些描述仍然可能很需要你去意會，因為有時原文本身就很抽象曖昧難懂，中翻後就更不容易理解了。 墮落倫敦（Fallen London）的故事更細，也是我覺得最適合用來呈現墮落倫敦故事的遊戲架構，但無光之海雖然有許許多多的小毛病，仍然不失為一款好作品，只是好的部分全部都落在故事上，以遊戲性而言實在是太缺打磨了......，你看得到理念，但這「理念」玩起來可能很不愉快。 [hr][/hr] 雖然我沒有計劃也不會為這款遊戲的內容寫更深的評論，因為基本上我只是來看故事的，而缺點有很多人都說過了；但我還是有開留言，有問題可以詢問，指正糾錯批評也歡迎。 如果你喜歡墮落倫敦的故事氛圍，那你可以試試看無光之海，這裡確實有些東西在等你。（而且還有很多墮落倫敦的影子！）或者當支持製作團隊也不錯！ [url=https://www.reddit.com/r/sunlesssea/comments/ljvz4a/bug_on_attempting_to_continue_a_save_on_pc_all/?rdt=48516]Sunless Sea Cloud Saving Fix[/url] 關於載入遊戲時出現畫面故障的問題與排除，建議關掉STEAM雲端儲存。

My dear friend Tim strongly recommended this game to me years ago, on the basis of setting alone. The premise is that something offers a deal to Queen Victoria after the death of Prince Albert: she can have her royal consort back, but the price is London. She agrees, and the entire capital is dragged into a watery purgatory beneath the earth, the eponymous sunless sea. You play as a sea captain making your way across this perpetually-dark ocean, attempting to wrestle with the horrors and the privations of ordinary nautical life, plus all this extra weird and nasty stuff. The genre is apparently “survival”, which is not how I’d have thought to describe it, but seems very apt once I think about it. You are constantly managing six different things that can kill you: hull, supplies, fuel, wounds, crew, and terror. And cash, I suppose. “Echoes”, as the underwater currency is called. Cash is perhaps the most perpetual concern, barring supplies and fuel. But supplies and fuel are downstream of cash. You try to stock up on as much as you can in Fallen London, but you quickly learn which foreign ports will also sell, albeit usually at a significantly higher price. If you set out for a voyage with a full hold but an empty purse, you feel nervous the whole time you’re away. Even what feels like a bulging wallet at the start of an expedition can begin to wear thin by journey’s end. The hub-and-spoke set-up of your sea voyages is masterfully done. Fallen London is not just an important node through which many questlines run. It’s also the location of: many shops where you can buy and - critically! - sell things; the University where a weird scholar character will pay you for intangibles (zee stories, outlandish artifacts, extraordinary implications); your lodgings, where you can sleep off your accrued terror and wounds; and the Admiralty. The Admiralty is the British Royal Navy in its dystopian subterranean incarnation. You work for the Admiralty as a sort of … consultant, I suppose. The Admiralty is constantly struggling to maintain its hegemony over the entirety of the Underzee, and it needs intel updates to do that. Every time you go to a port, you can gather a port report, which basically means getting an informal update on what’s going on in the area. Sometimes you gotta bribe someone with a coin or a bottle of wine to loosen a tongue, but, most of the time, gathering port reports is free. You bring ‘em back to your contact in the Admiralty, you get paid in coin and favours. You redeem the favour for fuel, you spend the coin on supplies, you head back out to zee. Critically, you can’t hold two port reports of the same location simultaneously. If you head out to zee and swing by Hunter’s Keep to gather a port report there, you can’t gather a second one on your way back to Fallen London. You can still visit Hunter’s Keep, of course, but it won’t pay. You have to turn in your first report, and then you’re free to go gather a second. This means that planning your trips and moving in strategic circuitous patterns becomes critical. I say that Tim recommended Sunless Sea years ago, and this is true, but I tried it years ago and it didn’t grab me. What happened more recently is that I played Dredge, a fishing horror game, and in the Steam reviews I read afterwards someone recommended Sunless Sea as something like: “Dredge for grown-ups.” This phrase compelled me to give it another go. Dredge was wonderful … but only for the first few hours. After that, the challenge, the risk, the constant sense of danger - they all wore off. My vessel was too sturdy, the engine too powerful, the menacing sea creatures too familiar. And I never, ever worried about money. You don’t pay for fuel in Dredge. You don’t pay for supplies. You pay for upgrades to your boat, which you max out fairly quickly, and you pay very modest fees for repairs. That’s basically it. Meanwhile, you’re constantly bringing in expensive fish and selling them to local fishmongers. The financial pressure goes away almost immediately. Sunless Sea is indeed for grown-ups, in that sense. Fuel is expensive. Supplies are expensive. Repairs are expensive, especially when all you’ve got is a miserable starting cruiser with an unimpressive cannon and a sputtering engine. Some creatures can kill you by ramming or firing upon your ship merely twice. (Honestly, almost once. Your starting vessel has 75 hull and there are things out there that can do 60+ damage in a single strike.) By default, Sunless Sea is played in something called “Unforgiving Mode”, which it tells you about right at the start. This means your game autosaves whenever you reach a port, and your game ends if your character dies. You can manually save and load your game, but then you exit Unforgiving Mode and lose your precious Invictus token. Did you know 30 seconds ago what an Invictus token was? Of course not. But the early instructions tell you that Unforgiving Mode is how the game is meant to be played, and that finishing a game with an Invictus token is a badge of honour (I think I’m quoting almost verbatim here), and you know at once what your target is. I feel sometimes that I don’t enjoy video games. What I enjoy is learning video games. Learning the world, the lore, the dangers, and the mechanics. Sunless Sea taught me this lesson about myself again. There’s something quietly miserable about the moment you finally fill in the entirety of your map. Likewise, when you first get a really strong ship, and here I count even the corvette one level up from your starting vessel. (not counting an intermediate vessel where you sacrifice a lot of strength for speed). I now had 200 hull instead of 75, I had two guns instead of 1, and I no longer felt danger in the same way. Very much to the credit of the game designers though: cash still had meaning. I was still paying to get around, and although a sense of personal inflation meant that the 100 echoes it costs to put your ship into a reputable dry-dock for repairs was now trivial rather than a staggering fee, there was still a sense that money could run out if you’re not careful. The game is very well-written, I think I should mention that. It’s immersive, and the world is exquisitely described. There’s an island where everyone wears masks all the time (including you, if you visit), there’s a vertical pirate’s city built into a rock spire, there’s a giant monstrosity called the Dawn Machine which implants the endless mantra into your mind: UN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE S The Sun is actually a wonderfully well-rendered character in this game. Apparently you and other Neathers (inhabits of “the place beneath the world”) have been down here long enough that prolonged sunlight can kill you. So there’s this constant longing for the world upstairs, mediated by deep fear and repulsion. Beautifully done. Would I recommend this game? Yes. Would I play it again? Hmmm. Maybe after a significant break. There definitely seems like there was more to see, more to explore. But the sense of the Neath being vast and terrifying and exciting might well be gone the second time around. (Or fifth, I guess; I have three captains behind me in watery graves, though my fourth succeeded.) In summary: I give Sunless Sea a 9/10. I recommend this game if you're someone who likes literature and hard games and the awful awful call of the ocean.

It's not a "BAD" game per se, but it's incredibly hard to get into. The gameplay and combat is pretty dull. If anything the navigation is just for you to do something between reading the text and making choices as its just picking a direction, and slowly making your way at a very slow speed through the water, and the combat, as annoying as it is, is the only part of action the game gives you, and it's just keeping the enemy within the red circle of range and angle where you can fire, waiting for the icon of the weapon to fill to have a good shot, and clicking on it to do damage. I don't mind reading in a game, but there's SO much reading and once you realize that all you do is go between points to read more, you realize that the game is actually a text adventure with a pretty looking top down ship game just to extend the game duration. Even then, the game difficulty is a wall, not a curve, its impressively hard to not lose money between buying basic supplies and hiring crew to keep your ship working. In more specific complaints, the game is surprisingly... dull in terms of interactions in real time. I went all the way to the top and disappeared to the top of the screen, only to be teleported to the middle-right top section of the map, the avid horizon. Other than some text lore and skillchecks nothing else came out of it. I salied south until i found the Khan and died of starvation because they didn't let me buy supplies to stay alive and make my way back to london. I then went south and discovered the Dawn Machine, not only it looks creepy as ♥♥♥♥ but the logbook just says "THE SUN. THE SUN. THE SUN." as if the person writing it went insane or is being controlled by it. It was VERY disturbing. SO imagine how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ANTI CLIMACTIC it was when... It does nothing. You cant park with it, you cant shoot it, you cant interact with it, you can bump into it and lose some hull points but nothing else happens. I'm sure there's something about it but i'm not willing to claw my way through the game and the text only to read 3 paragraphs related to it's function or plot about it. It feels like for as good as the lore and visuals and some songs are, the game is devoid of much that would make the lore "come to life" in real time. Then again I've not played MUCH, as the stats above say, but the big issue is that I don't feel like I want to play more... I already got a taste of what the game is like and I don't like it. I will soon try the sequel and I hope it's better. I did not try the DLC as I do not own it.

While this game has tons of charm narratively and aesthetically, ultimately it was a very polarising experience, and I could not finish it properly. I've given it more than enough time (35h atm), I've explored the surface map, and yet I had to stop playing. Let's start with the good parts. The narrative and writing are where the game truly shines. It has tons of interesting quests with different outcomes, hundreds of terrifying events, even the basic port flavour text is very well written. This is supported by a fitting art style and overall aesthetic, giving a Lovecraftian vibe to the entire thing. Even though the OST does not have hundreds of tracks, each of them is memorable and further immerses you in the world. The game puts a heavy emphasis on exploration and risk, going as far as stating it right when you load it: "take risks, explore". Now, here's where the cracks start to show and why, in the end, I cannot recommend it. All the amazing and mesmerising world with flavourful quests is utterly dominated by the "gameplay", which is abhorrently slow, clunky, and boring. The ship's initial movement speed is so slow I had to alt tab or go and make some tea just to wait until it arrives at the port. Moreover, there is hardly any risk in 80-90% of the journey since the sea monsters are pretty slow, and the enemy ships aren't very smart either. It results in a gameplay loop where you have to sit for 5-10 minutes barely doing anything, then do some cool quest, then sit for 5-10 minutes again. The entire risk theme doesn't work out either. As soon as you get some money and upgrades, you DO NOT want to risk lest you lose all that stuff and have to grind the numbingly boring early game again. There are ways to transfer some of your belongings to your next captain, but those, too, require one to grind first. The horribly balanced grind ends up discouraging one from taking risks, not the other way around. The best strategy, therefore, is to have your first captains be kamikaze and then properly play the one you want to actually finish the game with. The moment I understood the grind was too much was when I completed a very captivating devil-related quest and all I could think about was "the reward is not big enough to buy a new engine, I have to find something else". I tried to alleviate it by listening to YouTube while travelling not to get bored, but then I realised: the travel is about 70-80% of your playtime. I didn't want to participate in nor pay attention to 70% of the game. Then, I tried the submarine DLC, but was quickly thrown off by the oxygen mechanic, which forced me to periodically ascend. It meant I could not explore at my leisure and had to, once again, do some tedious thing just to get to the good parts. There was no risk with the oxygen either (maybe later on there is), I could ascend and submerge at any point in the game, which simply resulted in the undersea exploration being interrupted by the ascend-submerge cycle now and then. As much as I loved the incredible writing and atmosphere, I had to sit through hours and hours of mindless travel to see those. A death would also mean I have to sit through the same grind and complete the same quests again. It's just too much. For the majority of the game, it was not tense, it was dull. It pains my heart to dislike a game with such an amazingly crafted world, but not being engaged by 70% of the game speaks for itself.

great writing, great visuals, that's it. this is what happens when incompetent devs try to make a game instead of publishing an illustrated novel and fill it with the worst mechanics implemented in the worst way. that ship movement and combat, man... doesn't help that they come from the world of 'free' browser games where you have to pay to make any reasonable progress. sunless sea works the same insantely grindy way, except there's a $20 entry fee. and another 15 if you want the dlc. from what I've read, sunless skies is somewhat but not nearly enough of an improvement. they also made a visual novel, which suits them more but not me, so can't comment on that. and now they're making a farming game because why not be derivative? 10 years later they're still boasting about writing and art instead of gameplay, so not much hope there either. at least they're not lying by claiming their games play well, gotta appreciate that.