SUNLESS SEA

very slow and quite boring to read, not for me.

Just.....broken. I got 20 minutes in before taking a break, and then the game just would not start. Crash on load every. single. time. It didn't even grant me enough play time to get invested enough to want to fix it. I really wanted to like this game. But judging by the countless reports online of this exact thing happening to others, this game probably shouldn't have quite so many positive reviews....

I am giving this a thumbs up, even though the game is not really for me. I can appreciate the immersive story line and quests. The gameplay is smooth and pretty easy to learn. There is a lot of reading and lot to understand the terminology - so it is quite immersive and also quite brutal in it's learning curve when you mistakes. Visually it is very pleasing and certainly captures the genre of the game very well and to boot it runs fine on older hardware (Ryzen 3 with GTX 1660 Super as my test rig). So in saying that visit the Fandom pages and see the whole offering before you purchase - I think some of the ratings on Steam are a tad harsh.

Amazing game! Hrs and Hrs I wish you all the best luck

i really like this game shit just kind of Happens. 25 hours 4 captains n half a story tracking spreadsheet in i still have no idea what's happening but that's ok i have a council of autistic people drip feeding me lore like a trained ape. great to play while on long train rides (of which i take many)

A strange combination of a top-down exploration game and text-based narrative adventure. The gameplay loop can feel slow at first with the starting ship and low-level engine & parts, but the stories are good and replayability is there. Most stories have branching paths, which players are prompted to explore across different lives/runs. Unlike traditional roguelikes or multi-run games, each “run” in this is a much lengthier investment. There are forms of meta-progression as well so you aren’t inclined to stay on a single character forever. A good game if you have the patience to put up with the slow pace.

perfect atmosphere, slow burn subtle horror game with exploration

When I saw this game was only half a gigabyte I thought it was going to be a small simple game, and it sort of is, but the way its structured makes it a really fun really engaging adventure. 20 hours in and I feel like I haven't even discovered half of whats in this game. I love the choose your own adventure feel it has.

An interesting and fun game about picking a goal to pursue as you explore a strange and sinister underground sea full of mysteries and monsters, stories and secrets, and darkness and danger. Utilising rogue-like elements failure is a part of the game as death lets you pass on things in game just as you use knowledge you have gained in your next attempt.

no one is doing it like failbetter games. Sunless Sea is an eerie, creative game one of of my favorites

Tedious, slow, has no translation (and there's a lot to read), and my save just got corrupted, so the long effort put into game has halted. I ain't doing this again, there's absolutely no reason to. Oh well.

There’s nothing more boring than moments in a game where nothing happens, and you’re forced to wait! In "Sunless Sea", it often happened that I would stare at the screen, which at that moment could have been completely black—empty, because nothing was happening while my little boat struggled through the sea. In the beginning, I imagined moving around on the boat, talking to officers, wondering what the horizon of the underground sea would look like, whether distant city lights and lighthouses would be flickering everywhere or if it would be an eternal night. I filled that time gap... but after several playthroughs, even that became boring. At first, when the map is still unexplored, slow movement makes sense. You feel the tension as you slowly erase the fog of war from the map and discover dock and island locations, connect trade routes, and uncover stories developing between them. But after you’ve discovered everything and understand how it all works, slow movement becomes unbearably tedious and boring—you can literally look at your phone while playing because nothing is happening. It wouldn’t be a problem if there was some progression of speed, or some portals that would speed up movement on the map, but that’s not the case. You’re condemned to long moments where absolutely nothing happens, and you feel like you’re wasting a lot of time because of it.

But at the end of every such tedious journey, there is a house with vampires, devilish woman that feed on souls, a snow child that will melt if you don’t find it a new cold metal heart, an island where mice and hamsters are waging war over a fallen star... At the end of each journey, there’s a story, written in an engaging language, and you’ll really want to know how it ends!

The game is a collection of short stories that you uncover by carefull resource management, planning routes from dock to dock, and through reading the stories, you earn rewards that allow you to explore other stories and, through them, dive even deeper into the world! The game’s visual presentation is minimalistic and simple, though much of it leaves room for the player’s imagination. The basic visual and sound elements, along with the bird’s-eye view of the world, are imaginative and striking enough to leave an impression of Lovecraftian horror, which is the foundation of the "Sunless Sea" world.

I won’t delve into the rogue-like elements of the game because I think they aren’t as important here. What makes "Sunless Sea", worthwhile is the unique world that is connected through a simple visual presentation, and simple game mechanic of trade routes, and very well-written short stories. When I say short stories, I don’t just mean the content of the individual stories as a whole! I also mean the separate texts elements of each story, which are written in a few sentences on the screen and rhythmically divided, both geographically by islands and temporally, as parts of the story are revealed to you as you explore. Every sentence is striking, thoughtful, and poetic. And believe me, they work so well because of the overall design of the game—they wouldn’t leave such a powerful impression if you were to read them separately on the internet or in a book.

The way this game tells the stories throw its specific rhythm is what makes it worthwhile, and even if the slow-burn gameplay pushes you away and you abandon the adventure, even the first few stories you experience will leave a deep impression on you!

Even though Sunless Skies, the sequel, is mechanically more polished and fluid to play, there's something about this one that makes me keep coming back to it

played a ton on ps4, had a blast there. Also played sunless skies on it. Failbetter is incredible, 10/10

One of my favorite games of all time-- the lore and writing is unparalleled and the gameplay loop is continually engaging.

Here is my review after a couple of hours of playtime:

The Pace Is Glacial

Lore Feels Disconnected and Simplistic

Final Thoughts

15 days, I'm lost and people with strange masks pretends they are animals... I should better have kept sailing in the dark. 10/10

Do you want a game that's a bad book? Then play this game

This is such a fantastic game. Entertaining, intriguing and eerie. Often very funny, often very dark.

You are a zee captain sailing the depths - if this sounds strange and confusing, don't worry because exploration, uncovering stories and getting your bearings (pun entirely intended) are the main purpose of the game. To do this you improve your ship and your legacy, and build trade routes (of sorts) as you carefully navigate the world.

Perhaps deceptively simple at first glance, the game is truly beautiful and neatly designed, from the gorgeous map to the strange-but-lovely soundtrack. However, the writing is the really the star with compelling story lines and delightful turn of phrase. The choices you make affect the narrative and have lasting impact on the world and the people you meet.

This is not a fast-paced game and it's tempting/easy to over-extend in the early hours, but dying is part of the experience (perhaps roguelike?) Gradually building your legacy takes time and the experience is all the better for it.

There are untold hours of entertainment to be had with Sunless Sea. It's timeless, great fun and well worth it's very reasonable price tag. Don't forget to buy the excellent dlc - Zubmariner. Highly recommended.

This is a transformative game in atmosphere, exploration, storytelling and gameplay loop. It's slow, I won't lie, and there's a lot of text, but it's soooo worth it.

Really good I would recommend for people who have lots of patience and love text-based stories. I would recomend trying to stick out the start as it is very slow and don't feel bad for using the wiki its a lifesaver.

--

Tldr: Sunless Sea wants you to get to know it, which is actually made quite pleasant and interesting by the many tales of the people living in it. Once you do know your way around, however... It's Dark Souls level catharsis!


I love this game.
Now that that's out, I wanna say I also get when people are confused about what the game really wants them to experience. As an overview: This game is, on the one hand, a thrilling 2D open-world adventure/exploration game with rogue-like elements and a difficulty I found comparable to any of FromSoftware's Soulsborne titles. On the other hand, it is a beautifully fleshed-out choose-your-own-adventure narrative, being told as a text adventure game in each port. Sunless Sea is immersive to me in the sense that it offers so many different things to be engaged with (from at times quite tricky route-planning to not strand in the middle of the ocean, to the age-old ethical question on whether to eat your Navigator... :) )

I remember being set into my first savegame: Being told that my character would likely not make it far, and that I'd have to act brazenly to achieve basically anything at all noteworthy. (Of course, I played with manual saves enabled back then.) The shops in the starting port of London layed out a myriad of stat boosting equipment for my ship (all of them wayy expensive, mind you!), as well as letting you glimpse the (literal) mountain of items that exists in the game as trading goods. At face value, this is nothing special at first, but I can assure you that every. single. item. on. that. list. (and all the ones London merchants are not interested in) can be turned into a way to break a profit! >:D
As you explore, you figure out what ports sell and buy which goods, which is also generally quite memorable because every single destination is a whole part of the world with its own culture, own customs and own peculiarities. When exploring, the world feels alive! You have to adapt to an unforgiving world (once, I "sank" by virtue of letting all my 5 crew fight a Siren. I learned the hard way that day that Sirens, if fought and lost against, kill six crew members. :,) ), while time actually advances, changing what events are available in the world as well!

I totally get why people get confused or frustrated when the material portion of the world you are setting out to explore is really just teasing your ignorance, without any explanation whatsoever on what "Parabola-Linen" is, or HOW THE HELL you will get your hands on one of the elusive "S&C Longboxes"...
Looking back on it though, I think this is all the more intentional: I find the creators have a unique and humorously grotesque style of writing, and when first confronted with one of the mascots of the game right there in London, you feel no less like the stranger in a strange land than the Londoners before you. Seeing that some people were frustrated by the vastness of the game while simultaneously being given no explanation whatsoever is something I can relate to, even though Sunless Sea wasn't that experience for me. I am a naturally very curious person and my drive to explore seems to have carried me through that initial phase of confusion...

I think the biggest point of critique might be the way quests, stati and quest-related attributes are being represented, which might be the most frustrating of all. Generally, anything that is neither an item (i.e. for trading) nor a ship ressource nor a player character stat is a little picture including a short description altogether found in the menu "Journal". Earlier, I mentioned that time advances, which is being kept track of by a quality counting up from 0 all the way to 199 (...I believe. To be honest, I have only once completed the game in a very unexpected "draw"... THAT'S RIGHT: I FINALLY FINISHED A QUEST AND THE REWARD WAS NEITHER MONEY NOR FAME, BUT GETTING A PERMA-BAN FROM MY MORTAL SHELL INSTEAD!). This quality steps forward a certain amount (usually like 7 or 8 in my experience)whenever you return to London after having spent an irl minute out at sea. I believe this is a quite elegant solution to the question of how to advance time, but it bears one of the many catches of this game: Being out and about uses ressources, and eventually you will run out of money to buy said ressources in London. Fortunately, the game is well-balanced in that regard as the people you meet on your travels often do things like dining with you, which boils down to free ressources, one way or another.
Back to qualities, which are far more than just the state of civilisations advancing in their schemes: Favours you get with factions, quest stages (including Officers', aka companion quests), any more abstract threats like nightmares or... ...(daylight...! o.o) -- heck, even the counts of the spies you instigated into various ports in the world (why, yes of course you can become a spymaster!), or the number of Captains lost on the current line of savegames has a neat little picture and a count associated with it! (By the way: You can circumvent having to start from ZERO after game over fairly easily... You will still have sunk that expensive merchant vessel you have drowned in, unfortunately...! o7 )
What I'm meandering around is the fact that the qualities' descriptions are often short and not rarely more emblematic than helpful. The time quality for example reads "Your time at zee will change you... and London." -- Now, do you know what this random quality that reads "Out with the old laws, in with the new." actually means?? Or try "You've been known to visit the three sisters of [Location]". I know how that quest progresses, but I am bloody unaware of how I get there. If you think it'll be half-bad because there is a list of quests, then I must disappoint you: THESE ARE THE QUESTS! >;D
Seriously though: I've played the newest game the creators behind Sunless Sea made and it handles quest information better. Sunless Sea's mercilessness shines through in this place as well, and I suggest you keep some sort of notes when playing this game in case your memory and/or attention span is prone to glitches like mine. ^^ :) Frankly, I like creating spreadsheets a lot, and one day I wanted to find out the most optimal progression through the game (as trading for money to buy better ships to get faster but more dangerous money is a little grindy... Look, if you want easy progression without story or immersion, play Cookie Clicker. :p). I started logging my journeys, timing the routes, and writing down my routing in advance. I make it sound more technical than it really needs to be, my point being that keeping track of where you will (migth have to) visit five ports over makes the game a lot easier, since even if your crew suddenly all go insane at the prospect of their Captain suffering prophetic nightmares, you can still acess whether or not straining the engines for that little bit of extra speed to get to one of the safer (== more sane) ports faster is a good idea or will break your ship in half. :) ...That is not to say that this game can not be played casually, oh no! I'm just saying that, at its core, it is designed as a mild sweatshop and is, in my opinion, most thrilling when played that way! :3

good

Much much better than casual Dredge. Unfortunately - not so popular....
Dredge - is just a small uncomplicated copy of the Sunless Sea.

I think we need the next game with a real 3D graphyc and falilbetter's level of stories!

It's . . . . . . . .So . . . . . . . . . Slow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Interesting game with great writing. But wow, it's a grind to get a boat that actually moves at a reasonable rate.

It became my personal Euro Truck Simulator but with blackjack and hookers

Even after reading the instructions, Advice for captains and a few online help guides this is one of those "you can do everything or do nothing and equally accomplish progression." games. World building is cool though, shame about exploring it.

This game absolutely oozes atmosphere! The writing, the art, the music, the setting, the mechanics, almost everything works together to create this creepy, mysterious and fascinating world that you get to explore slowly and carefully.

It's far from perfect, though, and it often ends up being a frustrating experience for me when it leans a bit too heavily into the enigmatic wording in descriptions and tasks plus the dozens of different and weirdly named goods, currencies, status effects etc. that you can spend hours trying to find and gather.
It's one of those games that I would have dropped fairly early on without the wiki, so if you don't like using outside resources like that and aren't incredibly patient and curious, this game might not be for you.

Played for 8 hours and then my game crashed and it deleted my save file for no reason. Just unbelievably frustrating to play this game.

The Dark Souls of Dredge

10/10 would die to the Sea again

Peak :LUV:

The majority of your time playing this game will be spent either:
1. Looking at a small book, reading a choose-your-adventure like novel and making choices. It's well written. Good!
2. Watching a small boat steaming quite slowly across the sea ("zee"). Oh dear.

This game has some roguelike elements that do not mesh well with the languid progress you make through the game exploring the zee and it's islands. Do not play on the default Permadeath mode. By nature of being a heavily text based game, resetting to the start of the game is like a book telling you to go back to page 1. You find yourself skipping over the the small book and spending more time watching that stupid small boat farting it's way from island to island. Imagine if Disco Elysium had permadeath!
This game is not bad. I do have almost 150 hours playing it. As I mentioned before, it's very well written (keep a thesaurus to hand, it throws obscure/archaic words at you often), that small boat in a wide dark zee is quite atmospheric at times, and it's cathartic to get back to home port after spending so much time traipsing between islands. Admittedly, I am currently seething at the sinking of a veteran captain, so consider this a recommendation with a big asterisk next to it. Allow yourself to save, at least if only when you reach home port.

9.5/10 N THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUNTHE SUN THE SUNTHE SUN THE SUN

I enjoyed Sunless Sea and the world its set in, but a lot of frustrating and tedious gameplay aspects became apparent almost immediately. At first, I championed the idea of a story-based RPG roguelike, but quickly I regretted that. This game repeatedly tells you to play it on a permadeath mode, which means you lose your save when you die. This adds tension and means you get to play it just a little bit differently with the next captain you play. It adds to the atmosphere in the setting: the Sunless Sea feels dangerous and it makes succeeding all the more impressive.

It does, however, fail in some regards. While I greatly enjoyed soaking in the atmosphere, I didn't enjoy having to replay certain story quests with seemingly little difference between the previous playthrough. I see that there are some choices and branching paths but they often fall in the "good" and "basically softlocking yourself bad" categories.

Sunless Sea is a story, and an interactive one at that. It is also a game, which means that there is a "winning" and "losing". As much as I tried roleplaying a veteran captain who tried his luck on the unforgiving Zee, I kept thinking about just how bad I was screwing myself over with certain choices, and occasionally dipped into the wiki and forums to find out what I was doing wrong and how I could do things better. I understand that this might also just be a "me-problem", but I feel that the games tedium and, in my opinion, poor replayability really hurts it as a roguelike.

I should mention that I did watch that Rock Paper Shotgun youtube video on Sunless Sea, defending the roguelike design and the tedium as an achievement, not a flaw. I almost agree with it in theory, but in practice I feel like maybe there's a reason Fallen London started as a text-based browser game.

This game doesn't seem to know what it is. Part breathtaking exploration and part walls of text written out on the cramped receipt backs, the only maddening horrors I found in this experience were in the game's design.

A game about exploring the unknown, cool idea, so why then spend 80% of the game on resource menus? What's the part in every great tale of adventure that everyone remembers, that inspired the imaginations of generations to come? Was it stopping by to pick up 15 lbs of fuel and groceries? No, it was not.

Like if you took a really great, imaginative, fun, well-written novel, ripped out all the pages, and dropped them in a windy park for you to awkwardly chase after one by one.
The boat gameplay is atmospheric at first, but quickly gets dull, and adds very little. It's an unnecessary buffer between story beats that would stand well on their own.
I can't not recommend this. Fallen London is one of my favorite fictional universes. But really, you're better off playing the browser game. I don't know why they looked at that and thought, "you know what this written story needs? WASD controls."

Love this game.

I spent an entire class telling my theatre professor why he needed to play this game because Literature™. Vibes/10, would hyperfocus on this game again.

Amazing atmosphere and world.

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.

***Review in progress, may edit and add to it once I progress even more ***

This game is fascinating. It's weird: It took me years to get into it. I heard about it, was quite interested, but on my first attempts to get into it years ago, I didn't understand a lot of things and never got far. Still, it was sitting in my library, kinda tempting me to try again.

This time, 6 or so years after purchasing it, it clicked. Yes, it's mysterious, has a fascinating Lovecraftian vibe, and the world and lore of it can be confusing at first. I guess that, if you are familiar with the concept of Fallen London, it's easier to get into it.

So basically, you cross the mysterious and dangerous ocean in your ship. You have to manage your fuel, food and the terror level of your crew. There are other ships and sea monsters that may attack you. Pick your battles carefully, as your ship may get damaged, and you may run out of fuel too.

More and more, you will explore the map, find new ports, compile port reports and hand them in for money (echoes). You may also try raising money by doing certain trade routes which you have to figure out (or look up on the web).

By now, I have explored most of the map, am slowly gaining more money to get a better ship with better (and more) weapons. I try to avoid most combat, and raising a certain stat (iron i.e. imcreases your damage, veils make you more stealthy, so you will be less easier to detect etc.) helps with that.

There are quests you can do, which are a bit confusing at first, as you won't be told exactly what to do and how in some cases... you actually have to explore, read quite a bit and try things out.

My journeys are quite fun, and you actually feel like it's an achievement when you return to your home harbour, your ship slightly damaged, your hold full of stuff you can sell, your log full of port reports to hand in. It's an adventure, and I have finally started to enjoy it quite a lot.

So: This game will not exactly hold your hand. You will die, but you will keep certain advantages of your previous character if you start over. You may run out of fuel or food in the middle of the ocean. You will have to read quite a bit and actually spend some thought, but if you do, you will find a fascinating game world with a mysterious, yet beautiful land- and seascape that offers risk, reward, challenges, insights and weird occurences.
Give it a try! I sure am glad I did.

Atmospheric

Unforgiving

Fun, until you're killed by bats after a terrible string of luck and you realize how much time you've sunk into it. If you're just a casual gamer, turn on manual saving asap and just don't bother trying to get the hard-mode achievement.

Really enjoyed probably the first 60 hours of this game. The atmosphere and storytelling was awesome. The problem with a game like this is eventually you've read all the unique little stories of what is going on on each island and your run out of new options of dialogue then everything starts repeating. Once you've discovered most of the mysteries of what each item is for and what is at each location it starts feeling very repetitive. At the end it's actually very grindy.

I would say avoid going online and reading the wiki for information and just play it but I've found the game is very fickle and you can die from simple mistakes. This wouldn't be a big deal if the you'd only invested a few hours in your character but If you've invested 40+ hours then you do something like sail off the edge of the map and find out that kills you it makes you want to never play again.

Often you'd also find that you invested a lot of time doing a major side quest only to find it's an alternate ending and if you complete it your game will be over and you won't be able to complete you main objective. There is also a quest later in the game if you simply return some documents to London your game is instantly over and you've lost the game.... The dialogue in the game needs to be much more clear of the consequences.

I highly recommend playing with the no manual save function. It's much more fun and you're choices will have more meaning. I played one round with Save/Load and it got real boring because the temptation to save/reload when something doesn't go your way is really easy to get sucked into.

Lastly they need to change a few of the game mechanics. Specifically the "Something awaits you" mechanic, Once you find out it refreshes every 60 seconds you can just sit outside ports to basically get free items or keep doing certain events say like buying red honey..... Pretty soon you're just farming high dollar items by sitting at a port for an hour. This is not fun but you can't help doing it because it's easy money. I good solution would be that you have to go to a different port for a "Something awaits you" or you have to go back to London before you can go back to the same island again.

Another thing they need to rework is the terror counter. It goes up every few seconds so you can time when to click on your lights so save fuel. When sitting in port you can count 5 seconds and flash your lights to prevent it from going up. Then the game becomes a count to 5 click a button repeat game....very boring but hey you don't want more terror right? So you keep doing it. Not fun gameplay. A great solution would just have it do a constant gradual climb not something that happens every few seconds.

All complains aside it was a good game but could be much better by addressing some of the issues above.

You need a lot of patience but it's amazing.
One of my favorite games ever!

I slain God's Son, Mt Nomad in my Frigate, The Windmill
My crew clambered upon it's peak, and seized the golden heart and a brilliant diamond
What did i get for that? Couple thousand bucks after some trading
Killing son of god, good business

i shouldnt rely on my memory