SUNLESS SEA

Great if you appreciate a slow burn, and like to piece together lore slowly.

Honestly, this game is awesome but extremely irritating with random events that just kill your 20h playthrough out of nowhere, i needed to visit the wiki multiple times due to item icons being duplicated while having different meanings. Combat is nonexistent, and, though the story is fun and the lovercraftian setting / art makes it unique, the random events killing playthroughs become way too annoying. This was my last try, will try sunless skies next but i doubt I will be playing this one again.

游戏题材和故事文本都很好，画面太古早，操作也很难受，毕竟是十年前的游戏了

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

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!

This game is exquisitely frustrating, beautiful, disturbing, intriguing. Everything I love about Fallen London, plus the roguelike elements that draw me in and keep me in that "just one more try...." state. I will say that the autosave is rough, but manual saves lock you out of one achievement - autosave happened after I purchased a new ship, but not after the purchase of a new gun,. So when I logged back in to go take on Mt. Nomad, I had the wrong weapon, despite having purchased the upgrade already. Multiple captains of preparation, nearly finding my father's bones..... gone in terror as my crew mutinied. I take some solace in knowing it wasn't my fault, it was a quirk of the game, but dang does it hurt.