SUNLESS SEA

我是自身命运的主宰，我是灵魂远航的船长

Atmospheric weird horror in a unique setting.

I want to like the game. The setting, art, and writing are very good. However, it has many things about it that make it less fun as a game. It's very slow. Navigating the world is long stretches of just watching your ship inch across the screen. It's atmospheric, but also boring. Most of the time, nothing happens except your supplies go down and the 'terror' stat goes up. Maybe they wanted to leave room for improvements - new ship, better stats, whatever. Maybe. I would recommend they do what the old Sega Genesis Shadowrun game did. You always move fast out of combat, but when speed does matter then it changes your speed to be appropriately slow if your enemies are faster than you. The ship combat, when it does happen, is unsatisfying. It's slow,. and consists mostly of circling around the enemy and pressing the shoot button once a minute. If it was more like FTL, where you have your crew moving around, and can target different parts of the enemy ship, it would be so much better. When you do sink another ship, the rewards are middling. Often a few supplies, or small item to sell. Maybe they didn't want to make it a focus of the game, but it's undeniably here and unrewarding when it happens. Leveling up your stats seems very low, but that might be in part due to how slow everything else is. Note: The native linux version did not work for me (pop!_os), but it worked fine with proton experimental.

Fallen London is a gem. Sunless Sea is a faithful adaptation, and the writing is hauntingly beautiful. Looking forward to the TTRPG in 2025!

You never stop finding new things. Genuinely terrifying. I love this game.

I feel in love with this game years ago, and I always find the story telling intricate and satisfying. The sound track I found so mesmerising I have it on a playlist. The game play I find well thought out and it seems every detail, whether a boon or a con, has been thought about. The overall package feels like a real passion project and keeps me coming back, like one of my favourite books, time and time again.

This is a top down view, sail your ship between ports, read short paragraph and decide on which decision event to click, slow, low stress game, with beautiful graphics with a hard grind at start for beginners to learn its strategy of managing rising fear while at sea, dwindling fuel and food, with ability to restock if you've earnt enough trading in far off port reports for money back at your base in port London. It's a spooky feeling game with compelling stories from officers who join you to man ship roles with specific boosts, progressing their stories for rewards. I messed around my first 3 tries, about 12 hours, died a lot and lost everything until i got the hang...you won't get steam award for doing so, but I manual saved in every port to save my sanity after 3rd try loosing everything. Made game more enjoyable. Really enjoyed the soundtrack, graphics and story lines and driving ship around and the rare battles I chose. Getting upgrades and following stories to finish missions between many ports soothed my complete to end of upgrades completionist OCD. I also enjoyed playing it for a day and coming away relaxed and my mind not tired like with some other intense games. Enjoyed searching game wiki's for strategies and overall game big stories to understand, I'm not a do it blind sort of guy as I am a play through once after a few restarts sort of guy. Map spawns differently every time so it was fun to explore without a guide to find ports and islands on my own although I enjoyed using guides for a lot of decision making. Wasn't such a fan of what a time sink the game is for little reward. After 20hrs play I felt comfortable to relax and take risks, but after completing in 55hrs, I had only really upgraded a ship twice, weapons twice and an engine twice, and upgraded my house but with hours of just sailing between, manual saving religiously. There were more missions to finish, but some just take hours of sailing between 8-10 ports sometimes, just felt really slow and as if i hadn't achieved much, yes I could go onto 200hrs and complete it all but i'm a play once, then get bored guy, and game was sadly getting repetitive after 60hrs. Don't regret playing it, but you need lots of time for this game, tough beginning, great mid game, but a repetitive end game for me.