SUNLESS SEA

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.

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....

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!