SUNLESS SEA

A wonderful game. It's taken me several years to get into it properly as it's a rather tough game. Even before my most recent stab at it which has seen me encouraging my child to become a zailor too it was still a magical experience. I remember the first time I started a romance with someone back in London. It was nice and fun and small and kept my terror down. I kept the locket because I figured it'd be nice to. I died on that trip and I was left thinking about how my girl would feel about my never coming back.

I think those sorts of experiences are what make the game special. It's a very immersive thing and you end up with memorable stories that stick with you. But I will admit that the game can be very hard to get into. It's rather slow and you're not given too much guidance when you first start. And not knowing any early game moneymaking options is brutal. If you can stick with it though it's a very cool experience. If it's really proving too daunting, maybe look up tips for early game moneymaking or a basic beginner's guide. Once you've got that down I don't think you really need more guidance. Just the willingness to sink into the game.

Sunless Sea is a Masterpiece of Storytelling and Atmosphere with an unforgettable Soundtrack. It's a weird mix of multiple genres: Roguelike, text-based RPG, Naval Combat, Ressource Management, which works surprisingly well. The first hours are very painful and slow, but once you start exploring more of ther map with a better ship, it's hard to stop playing. This game has some of the best writing I've ever seen in a videogame.

A very good, atmospheric game

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 shit 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 FUCKING 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.

Eldritch!

Laden with rich lore. It challenges survival through exploration and careful story discovery.

great game especially if you like reading

A Rainy day, good coffee, a little doobster, and this game = vibes

Ten out of ten, am currently in the process of losing my mind and or eating my crew.

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.

A very special game. Never has a game achieved quite the same feeling of fear, confusion, mystery, and awe as this one. DO NOT PLAY ON IRONMAN, IT'S NOT WORTH IT.

This game has a ton of lore and is almost like a visual novel. The game is fustrating in that if you don't know the lore of Fallen London you will die pretty easy. it took about 7 of my captains dying before I was able to get a successful playthrough

Quite refreshing in its quirkiness.

Great game for when your tired of people online but still want a slight mental stimulation. Minimalist controls but deep & interesting story and world to discover on the open zee. So what are zee waiting for? Buy zee game!

Enchanting. Haunting. Captivating.

amazing

its a good way to spend time with a lovely story and theme done well.

Incredible game, I have never played anything with this level of atmosphere. It is very slow and difficult, but the sense of exploration and the uniqueness of the setting as a whole, as well as individual locations, makes this game amazing.

UN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SU-

How to enjoy it:
This game has two parts
At the start it's about exploration and resource management, and it's great.
But then you explore 90% of the map, and the only thing left to do is finishing the stories, including your Ambition. At this point the game is about finding better sources of fuel/supplies, optimizing your routes, trading items between. Every journey should give you some money. This way I never had to grind, as I was getting everything while progressing the stories.

If you want to enjoy it, don't play by the rules. Save before challenges and reload as much as you want. It has nothing to do with skill, and failure just sets you back. Don't lose your mind. Don't eat your crew. This is not a roguelike.

Rough gameplay, but fascinating world, wish it was twice as big

Bueno claro

Wonderful. Atmospheric. Hauntingly beautiful. One of the rare games that manages to actually capture an air of fantasy and wonder.

this is a bloody great game

W

It's dark, it has a story, it's weird, and it's lovely. You meander through the sea of a morass and explore not because you have to, but because you don't always know what you will find.
Love it.

Set in the Fallen London universe, Sunless Sea is a cruel yet masterfully written game comprised of storylets that allow the player to experience the gloomy life of an unterzee captain as they rise in rank and renown. Alexis Kennedy was a cornerstone of this project, and for anyone acquainted with either Failbetter Games or Weather Factory, this promises nothing less than deeply twisted yet captivating storytelling of remarkable proportions.
Be warned: this game is not for everyone. It's slow. It's unforgiving. The stories are intentionally obscure. YOU WILL FAIL!... Well, at least once. Yet, beneath it all lies a lore so tantalizing that you'll be drawn to it like a moth to a flame.
Play Fallen London first, then come back to this. I hope you enjoy this little gem, my delicious friends!

THIS GAME IS AMAZING great for playing on a laptop type of game chill steady away gameplay

ignore my time on this game " I like to buy my games OFF STEAM, BUT THEN I DO SOMETHING WITH THE DOWNLOADERS BEFORE THEY ARE INSTALLED THEN CHANGE THE "S.........api" TO ENSURE I FULLY OWN THEM, THIS IS so i can play them offline AND MAKE my own installers so ive got ownership of my game I BOUGHT 100% offline. YES THERE IS A WAY OF ACCESSING IT BEFORE INSTALL BEGINS AND .x:@{}~@a THE FILES" ; )

I like it.

londons skies look the same as ever

The Zee will take us all, to amongst the flying bats where crickets drink to a merry-go-round. Storm watches.

A masterpiece.
The adherence to the Fallen London universe is done with as much darkness as humor.
If you do not have the inclination for storytelling, which if you are born post 2k, is unlikely (when book reading was replaced by tube-algos and pretty colors), this is not for you. I repeat, your ADD is no match for this game.

"Three decades ago, the bats stole all the iPads and dropped them underground, it was terribly inconvenient for everyone, welcome to the Unterzee".

The only shortcoming, and it's by no means fatal, is that officers and some global stories are 'reset' upon completing legacies instead of evolving or producing substitutes.
The Zubmariner DLC made this game considerably more viable, and I recommend you get it if you decide to purchase the game.

Sunless Shiz

The Zee will take all your free time and at the very least; your soul.
Ship management and unsettling underground sea sights are in store for you.

This is a fantastic game! Really immersive and lore-heavy, while also having fun exploration and combat mechanics--an instant favorite for me! The game also has a "legacies" system where when you die, you get to keep a little bit of what you've accumulated for your next zee-captain, which incentivizes you to not die, but also not be terribly crushed by that same inevitability. I love this game (not sponsored)!!

I did not expect this gameplay at all, I was hoping for an immersive boat game where I go out to sea and encounter scary monsters all in a dark and gloomy atmosphere, Instead I got an interactive novel.
Don’t get me wrong, I love reading, but this is a game, and in the short amount of time I played I spent about 5 times more time reading than actually playing the game.
And the tutorial being ALL reading with minimal introduction to mechanics I think also played a part in me not liking this game.
It just didn’t deliver the atmosphere I was looking for at all, no immersion, no scares, tedious to get into let alone start over and too much reading.
Overall score 2/10

Book thinks it's a Game

I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this.

When playing games like FTL: Faster Than Light the roguelike aspect makes a lot of sense. The roguelike of this game is questionable at best. I'm supposed to explore the "Zee" (underground sea) so shouldn't this be an adventure game ... about exploration? Instead ALL of my resources, my ship, my weapons, my captains, my stats, Everything gets taken away because I decided to explore ... ?

I hate seeing Lovecraftian and madness (called terror in-game) meters. Such a slap in the face to H.P. Lovecraft and his ideas and attitudes of reality. Especially how boring and uninventive it is in this game. Why not do something as your madness rises? If I was truly going mad, wouldn't I be hallucinating or having delusions? You're making a game with visual and audio feedback for your player. Why would I read about going mad? Bad game design, that's why.

Nail in the coffin

The boat is sooooooo incredibly slow. If you don't lookup some guide on how to farm money for a good ship and engine to get to the speed of smell, you'll take 20+ minutes to go from 1 side of the map to the other and it's not because the map is big (literal, real life 20 minutes, not in-game time). And you know what those guides are going to tell you to do? "Take X to Y", "Get me 20 Z from A", "Go to B and buy X, then you can go to C and sell it for X+2" 🤢🤮 This game is so slow and the story is just me reading. I'm playing a video game and most of the time is reading. The combat is bugged/laughable (ships give up if you're behind them) and the exploration just leads to more reading or fetch quests. IDK about you, but if I was reading a book and I went to turn the page but a QTE came up, failed it and the whole book shut in my face, I'd be pissed. This game would have been a decent book, but that doesn't make it any less of a bad game.

There are some games that should have never seen the light of day. This is one of them.

I lost my mind, ate my crew and travelled East. 10/10 would recommend.

Interesting concept for a world and game, but the actual game and gameplay are more chore than source of enjoyment. Played my first captain 'blind' aka without using the wiki and was interesting to explore with bit of tension not knowing how far I could go safely or what to expect. Beyond that initial sense of exploration the game becomes dull and vague, repeatedly stumbling around in the dark without any sense of progressing until you realise you need to have the wiki open in a browser and constantly using it to double check where you saw something for sale or where it was you needed item x, y, or z. There are many elements that hint of all sorts of options for shaping the future of the world, but feel kind of arbitrary as to why you might pick one over the other as feels lacking in info about them as many things you choose first and info gets drip fed somewhere down the line.

Amazing writing and atmosphere.

Great atmosphere, and a beautiful, haunting soundtrack. The stories it generates are pure cosmic horror.

Awesome Game, Needs Economy Balancing

I love this game. I've played it dozens of times and never completed it with a character because the economy is way out of balance. Maybe you can get the meta route working, but this is explicitly an exploration game and not a trading game, yet the economy is the biggest hurdle to progressing your exploration.

I recommend editing your save file to give yourself enough money so you'll never have to worry about it, and just enjoy the stories and exploration. That's what I'm doing now and I've never had a better time in a game I already loved.

Lose yourself in the words of Alexis Kennedy (one of my favorite writers). Amazing lore; if you are a fan of text based games you will love it. Also, if you are a fan of what I like to call process games- where you repeat a certain action after figuring out the game system to accumulate game currency, resource, you would love this game. 10/10, definitely recommended!

boaty horror game boaty horror game :D

Don't know what I'm doing, won't learn. Will try over and over again.

it’s a nice game.

I have a folder full of text documents and screenshots that I refer to when playing this game.

This game has everything I could want: map exploration, lovecraftian, and text based. The vibes are immaculate and the storyline is memorable. It’s not an easy game and no two play throughs are the same. I fully recommend this game and the extra content too.

I love a creepy ocean game. 10/10.

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....