About Game:
LOSE YOUR MIND. EAT YOUR CREW. DIE. Take the helm of your steamship and set sail for the unknown! Sunless Sea is a game of discovery, loneliness and frequent death, set in the award-winning Victorian Gothic universe of Fallen London.
I got this game from the original Kickstarter and I can attest that it's pretty fun. There's a sequel of sorts, called Sunless Skies, which recapitulates the concept in "space".
The original game it's based on, Fallen London, is all the plot of the Sunless games with less of that pesky "gameplay" element. It's also free to play, so I think people who like the Sunless games should try it. I'd give two caveats:
1) the formats aren't that common: most of the action in the Sunless games happens in time-freezing text scenes, much like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. Resource management also happens through multiple choice text scenes and fairly slow stat progression. The steering and shooting takes up very little playtime unless you go out of your way to get into battles, which you might want to avoid because of the aforementioned resource management.
2) I played Fallen London between 2011 (when it was still called Echo Bazaar!) and... 2020? I finished most of the major storylines of the game, visited almost every area, and was very familiar with the backstory. I'm not sure how much I would have gotten out of the plot of Sunless Sea (which I should admit I didn't play rigorously -- only a few dozen hours) without that background, as the writing style in both games tends toward the very, very slow drip.
3) Speaking of format, Fallen London has a really retro format. I don't know if anyone else remembers those terrible Facebook games where you spent actions that slowly refilled... unless you paid real money... Fallen London still operates on this model, but since it takes a more literary approach there's a lot more to read over the actions you have to spend in a given session. The writing team also draws from the tradition of postmodern and interactive literature, if you like that sort of thing, and the number of actions it takes to do something is brought into play. That's the barrier, if you will, to accessing all that worldbuilding background.
Anyway, I hope a lot of people were able to catch the sale and try out the game! Back in the day, the Failbetter team worked on platforms for creating interactive fiction games and I always hoped the genre would take off. It didn't, but it's nice to see the Sunless games getting some traction.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote