Sunless Sea

Sunless Sea spins a powerful yarn, but it’s not entirely without holes.

Sunless Sea’s best moments are the ones I can’t tell you about. Out on the ‘unterzee’ beyond Fallen London are islands to be discovered, and each of these islands promises a new deftly-written spin on a dark fantasy with its roots in Lovecraft, Verne, Machen, Dunsany and Poe. The chance to explore a setting this inventive is rare, and you deserve the chance to do so without too much priming. I won’t tell you why you should pay attention to the submerged rock formations near Polythreme, or why you’ll breathe a sigh of genuine relief when you first set eyes on Aestival. That said, a fair number of the game’s less-spoilable elements present problems.

London has sunk into an underworld called the Neath, coming to rest at the edge of a vast uncharted underground ocean. As the captain of a tramp steamer, you attempt to make your name and protect your crew in the face of dwindling supplies and mounting terror. Basic WASD-controlled naval exploration is matched with interactive fiction-style storytelling on land.

The simplicity of Sunless Sea belies its hostility. Poor decisions and misfortune will rob you of your crew and you’ll risk your captain’s sanity venturing deeper and deeper into the unterzee. Failbetter knows exactly how to walk the tonal knifeedge between fear of the unknown and the romance of a long journey.

Sea of crises

Your captain can be lost forever, but Sunless Sea isn’t a roguelike—its best features are authored narratives rather than anecdotes drawn from a dynamic system. Every time you die the islands are rearranged and you start a new journey. You can pick a different victory condition, if you wish, and the wealth of your former character’s estate establishes the starting conditions of the new one. Overall, though, the experience is more like re-reading a chooseyour-own adventure book than starting a fresh Spelunky run.

As in Fallen London, gathering resources determines the extent and manner of your progress. There’s something of the boardgame to this aspect of Sunless Sea— a hard underlying structure that becomes more important the longer you play. The weakness of the system is that it’s ultimately about hoarding and gambling. Sometimes, Sunless Sea’s tremendous storytelling is enough to elevate the system out of those murky waters—like when you take a crew-endangering risk because the pragmatic alternative is so grim that you can’t bring yourself to do it. At other times, the drive to maximize your odds of survival overwhelms the game’s ability to spin a tale.

If travel produced more interesting situations, this issue might be less pronounced—but as it is, it has very little influence on the types of decisions you make on land. The combat is especially weak. You line up your ship’s firing angles and take pot shots at AI opponents that are incapable of generating an interesting challenge. Sunless Sea doesn’t need to be a great strategy game to tell a great story, but the two could have enhanced each other and it’s a real shame that they don’t.

I find myself wanting to return to the game even as I attempt to articulate its flaws. Sunless Sea is haunting, sad, exciting and energizing by turns, and each new journey from the safe waters of Fallen London promises new sights and stories. It carries a recommendation because, ultimately, there’s nothing else like it. I wish more games were this passionate about engaging the player’s imagination. But its supporting structures are merely passable when they could have formed the basis of a classic.