I'm not going that way. "Sunless Sea" is an exploration and survival RPG, with a side of cannibalism. The game is set in the "Fallen London" universe. It's a browser game that's been going since 2009, but you don't need to have played it to enjoy "Sunless Sea". So let's get right into it. Before you even hit the title screen, you get this tidbit: "Explore. Take risks. Your first captain will probably die." This is reminding me of "Darkwood". Within the first few moments of starting a new game, I realized it was gonna be more intricate than that. There's a lot to read in the beginning, but I'll give you a quick rundown on it. Let's start with a premise: you play as a Zee captain. Not Sea Captain – Zee Captain. You and your zailors are zailing on the Unterzee. The Unterzee is an underground ocean in a region called the Neath. The Neath is huge. Big enough to have climates. Big enough to have entire cities inside of it. Including, of course, Fallen London. You may be wondering, why London is underground? Well, the game says that... bats took it down there. Now that's an aerobatic wonder. The Neath has problems like supernatural weather, gigantic sea monsters, and the LITERAL PLAINS OF HELL. But, that won't stop the British Empire from trying to get some trade routes down there. Factions inside the Neath, and on the surface are wrestling for control of it. You can help one faction reign supreme or ignore it completely. "Sunless Sea" is an incredibly open game with a lot of ways to win, but even more ways to lose. An early problem is the game being so open that it's easy to feel overwhelmed. First, you choose a background. This will give a bonus to a starting skill, choose which officer character you start with, and also change some minor story events later on. If you want, you could hold off on this choice or use it as a challenge mode. After that, you choose an ambition. Which is your victory condition for the game. Not all of them are listed here, because some surprise options can pop up. Finally, you choose all the cosmetic stuff and you're good to go. Not all the ambitions will have a straightforward narrative. Your first assignment will usually be moving a passenger somewhere. I followed the beginning assignments as closely as I could, making stops along the way, but then I realized that I didn't know what was going on. A Memory of Distant Shores is a story, I got that, but then there are Zee Stories, and Secrets, and News, and Tales of Terror. Extraordinary Implications, or Interesting Snippets that use the same icon as Recent News. There's more but you get the idea. It seemed like a lot of the early narrative assumed the player had background knowledge in the setting, so I had to check something. The browser game. I mean, it's free, what did I got to lose? Never mind, I remember now... [Generic thwacks and sword clash noises] I forgot how bad "Skyrim" looked before that remaster. Well, after playing it on and off for a few days, it is very similarly structured to "Sunless Sea". There's a lot of places to go, lots to do and it uses a lot of the same resources. The way the story is presented is also nearly the exact same thing. It only gives you pieces. I know I said in the beginning of the video you don't need to play this to understand "Sunless Sea", but I should tell you why. I saw a lot of user reviews saying that you would HAVE to play "Fallen London" to understand this game. That doesn't sound outrageous. There are plenty of games inside of a series where, if you pick it up, and you don't know anything about the backstory, you're gonna be lost. I know that eventually "Fallen London" fills in a lot more about the setting, but for what it is, I think you'd be alright just playing "Sunless Sea". You might not have every detail filled out about the backstory, but as far as coherence goes, the main game was fine for me. I've been playing this daily for a while and it didn't fill in too much. So it's not a requirement. And even though I keep getting these awful opportunity cards, it's a pretty good time killer. In fact, it wouldn’t make sense if this had a big block of information to give you. This is a browser game that you play for, maybe, a few minutes a day. Compared to the free content on offer here, “Sunless Sea” gives you a lot more information and storylines to work with. One big thing that shocked me was this one quest where you had an option to give an item to your “Sunless Sea” captain. It was just a box, and it said you can go to the main menu of your game and download it. I figured it would be some extra money or some goodies. Well, I was right, but they make you work for it. If you don’t take the money upfront, it sends you on an entire new storyline. It is a journey to open this cross-promotional box. It was a fun surprise, and also a perfect example of how “Sunless Sea” gives you a lot more than the “Fallen London” early game. It will be a long while before you start to put some things together, and it’s intentional. You’ve been thrown into a world, where what was once otherworldly, is now normal. It’s a style of game we don’t get that much nowadays. It started to remind me of “Planescape: Torment”, but with less reading. There’s still a lot of reading, but, boy, is it hard to top “Planescape”… There’s still that pile of resources, but we’ll come back to it. For now, I wanna focus on the things that will take up most of your attention. The ones most important to survival are right on the top left. The first bar is your Fuel supply. The number represents the number of barrels of Fuel you have onboard. Moving faster, or having more powerful engines, will deplete Fuel more quickly. Having your ship’s light on will also eat more Fuel, so why not keep it off all the time? Well, that’s where Terror comes in. The Neath is dark. It’s also full of situations that make the Shackleton expeditions look like a river cruise. Story events can raise Terror, but so can being in fog or in dark places without a light. You’re near constantly getting Terror while at Zee. The color wheel indicates how fast Terror is going, with orange being slow, red being fast, and green meaning it’s going down for a while. The only way to completely reduce your Terror is by shore leave or certain events. So, finding a light can reduce your Terror indicator, but not your whole Terror level. Higher Terror levels lead to more negative events, like nightmares, or crew abandoning the ship. If it gets really bad, they might attempt a mutiny, which could be an instant game over. This means taking a spooky shortcut can end up with some homicidal sleep-walkers later on. The number of crew you have is also a resource. Having crew to spare is good, since, due to the nature of the Neath, a lot of them aren’t gonna make it. If you lose more than half your crew, you can’t go at full speed. Lose all your crew – game over. So, you want a lot of crew, but then there’s the food supplies. Big crews eat big. The battle between Fuel and Supplies will be your greatest struggle. Each takes up a slot, and earlier ships won’t have much space for it. Bigger ships have that space, but they weigh more and have more crew, so both, the Fuel and the Supplies, will go faster. U-UGH... It’s a never-ending balancing act, and eventually, one will lose. If you’re out of fuel, MAYBE you can burn some Supplies. Or you can sacrifice some crew members to the Dark Gods. Or they’ll get angry and strike people down. There is a dangerous pirate ship firing on me from behind, so I’ll use a Full Engine Power ability to give myself a lot more speed, at the cost of burning more Fuel. But then those damned child slaves let it get too hot. [*hweep*] The engines catch on fire, I fail the skill check, and it explodes, hurting the ship and losing more crew. This isn’t happening in a big scary area – it’s happening in your commute to trade wine. There are so many things out there that want you dead. But you have to make it all happen: balance your materials, don’t go insane and make money. People who told me about this game made comparisons to “FTL”. I understand now. Both are about managing a ship and its resources in a very hazardous environment. The thing is: “FTL” is very linear in how it progresses. You’re always outrunning an enemy fleet. You’re always moving from system to system, and it’s balanced around that. You always end the game fighting the rebel flagship. “Sunless Sea”, on the other hand, is completely open. You can play at your own pace, and there are multiple endings to choose from. If you don’t wanna fight a bad man, you can gun the engines and try to evade him. You can cut your lights and hide, before the enemy notices you. You can try and back out of their detection range. Oh God, please, back up! You can play as a trader, and beat the game without firing a shot. So, how do you balance around all of these options? Once again, this is a big early game issue. This is where “Sunless Sea” all comes together, but not without its cracks. No matter what you decide to do, gathering port reports will be a big part of your income. Whenever you dock, you usually have an option to spy on the locals. It’s easy to do in most locations, but others might require a skill check. The locals might be suspicious, or the area is supernatural. When you turn them in to the London Admiralty, you get some Fuel and some money. You can have higher payouts for visiting more dangerous or exotic locations. Like the skill check you need for gathering some reports, sometimes, turning in a report requires one as well. You might have to convince this man you saw talking fish out there. To find new areas, you can wander around blindly, or go off tips, but you have some extra help. You can launch a bat to scout for ports outside of your line of sight. You click on your log to mark it on your map, open up your map, and then you'll see a little icon – and that’s somewhere you can dock, but you don’t know what’s around it. When you discover new areas, you get Fragments. Get enough Fragments, and you get a Secret. In some locations, you’ll find officers that you can recruit onto your crew. They give you flat skill bonuses, but by talking to one and spending a Secret, you can upgrade a skill directly. So, the more you explore and visit ports – the more skills you get, and the less you need to spend on Fuel. Sounds like you should be able to snowball fairly quickly, but that’s not how it works. You can find a trade route that gives you a few hundred per run, but a new ship is thousands. You might need to pay for damage you took, pay to reduce Terror, pay to buy new Supplies. Something as basic as buying a new weapon can be a huge risk in investment. You could buy a new engine to move faster, but then you burn up more Fuel. After I upgraded my starter ship, I started to feel stuck. It’s a mind-trap I fell into, because I didn’t know the game enough yet. So I was sitting there, thinking of two options: I could explore more, but, unless I find something good, that means burning up the stuff I’ve collected already. You have one life. If you die – you lose it all. So, do you explore, risking hours of progress, or grind a sure thing and SLOWLY get new equipment? How do I describe this? [quiet grunting of wheels trapped in loose traction] Well, the map isn’t completely random. Some regions will have what’s in them scattered around a bit. Trading stone from the Salt Lions is a fairly attractive early offer. It requires a down payment and a hefty amount of cargo space, but it’s reliable. I have an awesome route in this game. It’s quick, and the money-per-run feels worth it. But in this map… uh-oh… it’s all the way down there. Now it’s a hell trip. So do you have to cargo-run early game? No, there are way better options – they’re just cryptic. If you bring the Admiral port reports, eventually, he’ll offer you missions to retrieve strategic information. It’s alright money, but what if you could make even more, doing nearly the same thing? Well, if you know that you can use it in your inventory, you can combine it with a story resource I showed earlier. I was probably 20 hours into the game when I found this on accident. Not only does this pay more, but it gives you access to a spy network. It’s a great feature, and there’s a lot you can do with it, but you wouldn’t know about it if you were just moving rocks all day. If you stick with the game longer, like I did, you learn ways to make money quickly in the beginning. I can see why so many people quit this game early, so the best advice I could give is to play smarter, instead of playing repetitively. You need to master the economy. If you think that 20 echoes is a good price for Fuel, then I think you need to go to Hell… They’ve got a client state on the south side. The Fuel prices there a very competitive. Get out and explore, and find some deals. HANK HILL: “That’s a clean burning Hell, I tell you what! Hehehe, hahahaha!” Obviously, your biggest problem is death. When you die, you can choose a legacy for your next character. There are several choices, but some, like Correspondent, are awful. Yeah, you keep the map, but then you don’t get Fragments for exploring parts that you’ve seen anymore. Only two of them will give you your money. Half of it. Back to “FTL”: you can die, but unlock a ship first. You didn’t disadvantage yourself for the next game. If you wanna pass down stuff in “Sunless Sea”, you have to give up your valuables to do it. Instead of selling an expensive treasure, you make it into an heirloom, and then send it down the line. You also need to write a will, but at least it’s relatively cheap. If you want the captain before to mean much, you have to do so much prep work. Do you sell a treasure to have fun now, or put it into the next life, so you’re not miserable then? I really don’t want to repeat the early game over and over. And if I sound irritated about this – I am. Nowadays, most popular rogue-likes use story as a backdrop for the game. After all, if you’re gonna keep repeating the game, doing long story arcs would get boring and repetitive. “Sunless Sea” has a few events that will change around (some might only have a percentage chance of spawning in your game), ambitions will give you some unique storylines to follow for a main quest, but here’s the problem: compared to all the interesting things you could do with the story, how’s the combat? The problem is that the combat itself isn’t interesting, but everything surrounding the combat is interesting. Here’s how it works: When fighting other ships, your best chance of winning is staying on their aft, or, as the Navy says – the ass of the ship. The way the ship slots work means you can have two overlapping guns on the front, and maybe one on the back. So, even if another ship is packing in the rear, it still makes more sense to stay back there. Better to soak up one gun than two. Sea monsters can be more dangerous, but if you initiate combat at the right range and keep backing up, you could stay out of most trouble. If an enemy is inside the red arc of a weapon, it starts charging. If you click before it’s filled, it could miss. Not having your light on the enemy increases the charge time, but they have a chance of not seeing you. So you can sneak up behind a target with your lights off, then flip them on and burst them down. That’s about the extent of your tactics. It’s so simple you would think it was an afterthought, but no. Early in the game’s life, it had a completely different turn-based combat system. It was revamped from what it was in the beginning, because the players trying it were complaining about it. I’m not sure that was the right direction. I’ll use an example from my game to illustrate why. I fought a huge sea monster named Mt. Nomad. It did severe damage to the ship. After a long fight, I barely killed it. I sent the boys in to grab all the treasures. We got away, but the crew was terrified, and the ship was barely held together. Before we could make it back to port, there was a mutiny. Half the crew rose up against me, and I thought I was screwed. Through an absolute miracle, I won the fight, but now, half the crew was dead. Out of a ship that held 25, only 6 remained. The nearest port that could hold crew was half a world away, and all the people inside of it hated us. There was a chance we might be arrested on sight by docking there. It was a risk, but we had to take it. Our ship was dying in the harbor, but we made it into Khan’s Glory. We gave one of their houses treasure to forgive our past crimes. We were able to get enough crew to sail back to London at full speed for repairs. Then I bought a dreadnought and tried to kill God with it. Out of that entire story, 90% of it was through text box. What makes it a fun story is “the story”. Would it matter if I had fought Mt. Nomad through a text box or a turn-based thing or a real-time thing, like now? Purely focusing on the story – no, not really. That is the core issue: the best parts of the game are when it’s a text RPG. The combat doesn’t appear to have this amount of focus put into it. You can enable a mode that lets you manually save at dock. The only difference between this and the base game is an achievement you could get on Steam. Why not have that be the default mode? Have it so, once players know what they’re doing, they can opt into it, instead of the other way around. Choosing the Easy Mode in a lot of rogue-likes, typically, causes drawbacks, like cutting off content, or not letting you keep rewards. Yet, here, it doesn’t matter at all, but it doesn’t tell you. Doesn’t it seem odd to have the more frustrating mode as the default for a game that’s heavily based around the story, with combat looking like an afterthought? Even with manual saves, you can still screw yourself with bad resource management. I know that being able to lose hours of progress in a moment does build tension, but it doesn’t seem justified here. I wouldn’t mind if combat was a series of skill and equipment checks. Because, ultimately, this combat doesn’t hold up to the rest of the game. Compare the combat to just exploring the world. [exotic-sounding melody] [calm melody with strings and gentle drumbeats] [subtle tune with soothing vocals] It’s a gorgeous presentation. All of it – the hand-drawn art, the music and, most of all, the writing. Despite all the problems with it, I haven’t been able to stop playing it. The world is downright captivating. There are interesting characters who can go through different arcs; you can meet a squid man and bone him. It’s like the game has an identity crisis. The atmosphere and story are some of the best I’ve seen in games, but everything else seems like an afterthought. I would be sure that I’d found everything, but I’d still find more. It never stopped being exciting to dock somewhere new. One island had a society, where you had to act like whatever mask you were wearing. Like the entire place was the idea of putting on a social performance gone mad. You could sell your soul to a monkey Mayor, but… I know nothing would probably happen, but look at him… One island had people fruitlessly sorting mail that would never be delivered. I eventually got a promotion and helped my talking rat friend’s niece get a job there. I gave her the strongest possible recommendation. I’d learn about new areas I could go to in old places. I used witchcraft with a crazy man to build a cursed engine. Characters I brought on from different parts of the world would interact with each other. There seemed to be no end of the stuff to do in sight, but I went ahead and bought the DLC. Now I can go on the zee floor. While the combat was still simple, they added elements to make it a surprise. Zonar highlights anything interesting – whether it’s an enemy or something to pick up. There were new kinds of enemies who would pretend to be wrecks, just to kill their salvagers. The combat was still simple, but it’s clear they want to improve. The artwork was at its best, and I had storylines that were even more interesting than stuff on the surface. There’s a giant sea worm you could go inside to breathe underwater, and people fight each other and have orgies. But if you stay too long you might transform. I can’t remember the time a game’s presentation outweighed all of its negatives by this much. “Sunless Sea” ended up being really rough, but still a gem. If you’re patient, enjoy atmosphere, story and reading – then, yeah, I could suggest picking it up. Strongly consider trying Merciful Mode for a while. You could grab it on GOG or Steam for less than $20. The DLC is about $10, and well worth it if you like the base game. The developers just released a sequel into Early Access last month, and I think they could do a lot with it. It’s too new for me to gauge anything from it, but I hope it does well. Failbetter was adding free content, along with improvements and fixes for years after the game released. I’m pretty excited to see what they do with the “Sunless Skies”. Thanks for watching! The next video will be an update video, like I did back in December. There’s gonna be some announcements, and I’d also like some feedback on some upcoming projects. I’ll ZEE you then! Less weird games coming soon. VAN DARKHOLME: “Deep, dark fantasies…”
Funny, he came to the exact same conclusion I did after a couple dozen hours of play, that permadeath was a horrible decision for the game. It's just too god damn slow to have that be enjoyable.
I gave up eventually though, as much as I enjoyed the lore and the stories, it wasn't worth the tedium. Back when I played, it seemed like there was no way to really increase your movement speed, no matter how much better an engine you got, it would require more fuel to take you the same distance, which would require you to have a bigger ship to hold more fuel, which would put you back down at about the same speed you had in the smaller ship you started with. I played about 40 hours using the starting ship and engine since that maximized efficiency (and combat was trivial) but it inevitably killed the game for me. My port report route would take me all the way around the map and I could pull it off reliably, I made a ton of money, but it took so god damn long, and 99% of the time was just slowly puttering through areas I was totally familiar with already. Combat was so easy to cheese too, I killed Mt. Nomad in the starting ship.
I really wanted to like the game but honestly I would have enjoyed it more if it was just a Visual Novel or something. Exploring the map for the first time is fantastic, but that great first time experience is not worth the endless tedium it causes later on. Maybe if the game had a fast forward button for when you're in parts of the map you've already explored, that might have solved the problem.
He mentions it in the video, but if the game sounds appealing to you, or you already tried it and enjoyed the text parts of the gameplay, then I would definitely recommend trying out Fallen London. The story is superb, and I played for over a year before exhausting pretty much all of the free content, as well as a fair chunk of the paid content. It is a free to play game with refreshing actions though, so if you aren't into that then maybe stick to the Sunless games, or try The Silver Tree, which is a (not as good) retired spin-off game where you now have infinite actions.