![]() ![]() Returning to London will reset this value to 50 if you're already higher than that, encouraging you to return home every so often. Should it ever hit 100, your crew will try to mutiny and will kill you if you don't calm them down. Other actions you take in the text portions of the game will also increase or decrease this value. ![]() And the further you move from London, the quicker it will increase. As you sail, you crew will get progressively more nervous about sailing the weird, treacherous waters. You'll also have to manage a third “resource”: terror. Fuel and supplies are of extreme importance because if one of them depletes, it's game over. The real terror underneath this backdrop, though, is an elegant resource management game clashing against your desire to press your luck by pressing into the unknown further and further from London. The rich, nuanced backdrop that the Unterzee provides is just begging players to explore its darkest corners. Even positive responses can be treacherous, as praying to Stone for fuel has been known to drop stalactites of coal from the ceiling, crushing crew members in the process. Or if they will even be kind rather than cruel. That doesn't mean they'll actually answer, mind. Indeed, should you ever find yourself stranded without food or fuel, you can pray to one of them to give you a boon to tide you over until you make port. Three mysterious, powerful beings are worshiped as gods of the zee-Stone, Salt, and Storm-but their influence is so vague and cryptic that you may not even know they're acting. Ships have the option of going to the surface, where human society still thrives, but their crews risk exposure from the sun, which can be deadly for inhabitants of the Unterzee (most of whom appear to be human themselves). Hell is real, and it just had a revolution to exile its aristocracy. London has sunk underneath the Earth's crust and serves as the principal port for the varied inhabitants and societies of the ocean below. The Unterzee itself is a strange, scary place that combines the unknowable dread of the works of Lovecraft with the diverse, normalized weirdness of Dungeons and Dragons' Planescape setting. Of course, it's the intriguing setting that makes you want to explore in the first place. The map in Sunless Sea slowly fills in as you explore and discover islands. If you can imagine The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was a visual novel with resource management set in a series of twisted British colonies, you'd be in the ballpark of describing the bulk of the Sunless Sea experience. Your reward? A cavalcade of islands and shoreline settlements, each with their own secrets and stories to tell, which takes the form of expertly-written text which occasionally lets you choose how you react to what you find. That last bit is crucial to understanding where Sunless Sea's heart lies, as your primary instinct in this game will almost always be to sail for the black spots to see what's there. ![]() Though it sports an immensely imaginative setting and fantastic writing, Sunless Sea's roguelike-inspired elements don't quite gel with the longform exploration you're meant to embark on.īuilt in the mold of such games as Sid Meier's Pirates and Koei's Uncharted Waters series, Sunless Sea sets you loose on The Unterzee with a simple ship, a crew, some supplies, and a blank sea chart that slowly fills in as you explore the zee. It's at this nexus point between the potential and the static that Failbetter's Sunless Sea finds itself in. A world fully revealed is suddenly a more static place than when it started. Once we discover something, we can never discover it again even if we start over. The wonder that exploration brings within a game is finite. ![]()
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