Sunless Sea - Initial Impressions

Originally published February 2015.

You discard the last of your shaving razors overboard; the damned thing couldn’t cut hair if it was pulled taught and the blade was heated. Ages since you used the last sharpening stone onboard, you’ll have to buy a crate’s worth for the next voyage if you make it back to Fallen London. Until then, you’ll have to cool your head with something other than the ocean breeze. The absence of your favorite sailing sensation won’t make riding the torrential waves or swallowing your sickness from the latest batch of bat-blood soup the shifty cook conjured up. It also won’t make searching for tangible victory any easier.

After countless landings at foreboding ports with the local inhabitants harboring their own questionable intentions, you’ve grown weary, tired, and a little mad. Late in the endless nights, you wake, screaming a name you don’t know how to pronounce and you’ve never heard before. Still, the name is there and clear. It’s in a tongue you can’t mimic, but it rings clear off your lips just the same. It’s just as clear as the eye you see when you beckon his name. The eye in your dreams. The eye in the water, beneath your ship as you traverse the sea in search of your haunting, daunting, unlikely, intangible victory. The crew is weary that you may be leading them to their deaths via exposure, starvation, or madness. Until they break and wage a mutiny, however, you turn your nose to the lights in the distance, in the hopes that wherever you may land will have enough supplies to make it back to Fallen London once more.

Such is one of the countless excerpts someone could write to describe an experience in Sunless Sea: the narrative-driven, RPG-adventure game on the PC with rougelike qualities and Lovecraftian influences. My amateurish attempt at writing fiction aside, the game is not told in the 2nd person, nor is it like the text adventure games of yore such as Zork or whatever your Apple II could run back in the day, nor is it a point-click adventure like the Monkey Island games. In my short time with it so far, I’ve noticed that there is a lot of depth to the pieces that make up this game that are worth discussing. The short version of this Initial Impressions: I’ve found a deep level of enjoyment in Sunless Sea, but the path to reach said enjoyment can be an arduous one, which will likely turn many people away. I will say that I did not like the game from the start. It’s only after starting over with a different mindset and strategy that I’ve been able to openly approach the game and appreciate it.

Style

The player takes control of a ship as the Zee Captain, traveling across perilous waters in the endless darkness of the Unterzee, in search of new lands and new stories. The Unterzee is a world trapped below the Earth’s surface. There was a catastrophe of sorts that buried entire cities, like London, underground and surrounded by water like a whole new world. The sea has forced people (and stranger creatures) to small colonies and islands where they must survive the harsh conditions of constant darkness and whatever other monsters or gods lurk in the deep.

The dark and horrific themes of the game are what grabbed my attention initially as I’m instantly drawn in when someone mentions HP Lovecraft as a “strong influence.” The game is not without its humorous and light-hearted moments, however, as the art style has a gentle quality to it and the writing has a tone that, at times, juxtaposes with the horrific themes and content found typically in a Lovecraft story. In some ways, the whimsy is what makes the world a little more creepy, drawing you in only to hit you hard with terror. Its presentation slightly reminded me of movies like Pan’s Labyrinth, only with a little less detail. I guess you could say Sunless Sea is like a Guillermo Del Toro movie’s storyboard: capturing the fairy tale and surreal horror without all the minute and specific details of the finished film.

Failbetter Games

Sunless Sea is a text-heavy adventure, however, so a majority of the horror I mention is strictly in word form. Even the images that appear can be unclear in what they might be depicting, so the horror you experience is mostly in how you interpret the writing. Every port at which you dock your ship has pages of text to read through about whom you may encounter, what choices you can make, or what quests to fulfill. In many ways, Sunless Sea progression is very similar to a choose-your-own-adventure visual novel, as most of what you’ll be doing in the game is reading.

Writing

So then, what about the writing? If the game relies so heavily on telling its story through text, the writing had better be good, right? In the various videos and reviews I have seen and read about this game, the writing is consistently praised as fantastic or amazing. It may be due to the fact that writing in video games is rarely ever beyond the level of a week-long writing workshop in a high school English class, but I think the overwhelming praise of the writing is a bit excessive. Don’t get me wrong: I really enjoy the writing and I do think it’s good, but I would be more inclined call the writing “advanced,” before stepping into the realm of “fantastic.” In my opinion, it’s limited by its medium from expanding into something more. There’s some good material here and plenty of ideas that could be flushed out into deeper enthralling stories, given enough room to grow, but a lot of what is said is kept brief for the sake of it being a video game. Perhaps the reviewers who praise the writing endlessly are just unaware of the existence of prose poetry because that’s essentially what each page of text brings. Much of what the authors are trying to say is summarized in a few lines with some big words, not always complete sentences, and a linguistic flow that makes the text fun and interesting to read. It’s poetry. It’s prose. It’s not boring. So it does a good job of capturing scenes in as few words as possible, but does that make it amazing?

Once again, I still really enjoy the writing, enough to provide a counterpoint to my own argument: I think the developers made the right choice in keeping their material brief due to the fact that it’s the text of a video game. For one thing, it ensures the player keeps playing instead of spending ages on each page of text. I also think that, in some instances, the abridged nature of the material adds to the experience by having the player fill in the blanks in their own mind, especially with the stories that have “bad endings.” I’d like to see where their stories could go in a book where they’re able to actually do some in-depth characterization and be able to describe more than just a single piece of the environment at a time.

You might be asking: “This is still a video game, right?” Don’t worry, I’m getting back to the gameplay stuff.

Pacing

So the writing is good. If you want quality writing in your games, Sunless Sea delivers. If you don’t care about game writing, or just don’t like reading, then I seriously doubt you would like this game. If you’re all about the gameplay, well, that may not pull you in either. If you want a game that is fast-paced and moves briskly as you play, you will not enjoy Sunless Sea. It is a slow, slow, slooooooooowwwwwww game. In fact, it is one of the most methodically slow games I have ever played.

You start in Fallen London with a simple boat. It’s not the cheapest vessel you can steer, but it’s nothing special either. The defense guns are not super useful and the engines do little to putt-putt your ship across the dauntingly vast sea. For the first few hours, you will want to stay close to Fallen London waters in your exploration, not that you’ll have much of a choice. Fallen London is your home, it’s where you can rest, resupply, and repair your ship. It is where a lot of stories come from and it is where a lot of stories go. Much of what you do in Sunless Sea revolves around this place. The further you venture out from here, the greater the risk and the greater the reward for your adventure. There may be some places where you can purchase fuel and food for your crew, but it will likely be much more expensive, and you don’t start with much money. It’s important to always have enough of both of these resources for the voyage out and back, because, if you don’t, you may end up stranded in open waters waiting for pirates or monsters to kill you, or your crew may begin to starve and succumb to cannibalism.

Failbetter Games

So you stick close to London for a while. Gathering information, trading supplies, hunting down sea creatures and pirates, and talking to locals on colonies are good ways of earning enough coin to be able to afford more supplies to venture further and further away from the city so you may finally be able to afford upgrades for your captain or your ship. Doing all this, however, takes an extremely long time. Before you can start being a real threat to anything on the open sea or being able to run a solid trading operation, you need to upgrade your vessel to something with a bigger cargo hold and more space for guns and engines. The cheapest upgrade for a new ship is at least 2000 echo ($ equivalent), which is a number I have not even begun to reach. That’s only for the ship too. The guns will cost another 500-1000 or more apiece. Plus there are various other variables to take into account with how to spend your coin.

The amount of time it takes to earn the necessary funds is compounded by the fact that your ship is slowwwwww. The map of the Unterzee is quite vast, and while you chew through fuel at a brisk pace, your boat does not cross the map so quickly. Just leaving London’s port and heading to the nearest colony on the starting boat eats up about ? of my fuel at full speed and takes at least 5 minutes. This is the pace of Sunless Sea. The game’s pace is very analogous to what it would be like to take a steamboat across the ocean and it is for this reason that I recommend this game to only the most patient players.

Failbetter Games

Is this frustrating to me? Yes and no. Sunless Sea is a game with rougelike qualities, so it’s a tough and unforgiving game. I think the upgrade path is rather steep, and if you die, you have to start over with only a few benefits from your previous efforts. You do get some additions from your previous captain as buffs and resources are passed down through your lineage, similar to games like Rogue Legacy, but the pace at which you can gain experience and resources requires you to be very prudent with your strategy and choices. Playing something like this may sound like masochism on some level (I won’t deny if it is), but it’s actually the difficulty, the pace, and the risk are exactly what makes the experience so exciting and rewarding. The very first thing you see when you load the game is a quote from Joseph Conrad--author of the story Heart of Darkness, which was adapted into the film Apocalypse Now--and a little snippet of advice from the developers telling you to take risks and accept the fact that your first captain will likely die. The designers knew who this game would appeal to when they made it. The slow pace adds to the tension of exploring the Unterzee, while the risks you take in quest decisions provide for more story and more variety in the experience.

Failbetter Games

The game’s scope is relatively small in scope by comparison to other big titles, so you will encounter the same towns and characters from captain to captain, but their locations and what may happen upon interacting with them is highly varied. The game is made up of constant dice rolls and gambled risks as well as just plain random chance. The same quest for one captain who has the exact same stats as the other could go in completely different ways by the time you complete it. The randomness as well as the impact of my choices is what drives me to take more risks. I’m willing to make riskier decisions than I normally would because I’m curious to see what will happen and how my captain’s story might change. Even if I fail in the risk, I feel like I'm rewarded with some interesting detail added to my captain's voyage. Even though the game may not be so exciting to look at, or move at a brisk pace, it really feels like I’m crafting a deep story about my captain on a Melville scale.

Closing Thoughts

Those were the main things I wanted to discuss with my initial impressions of the game. I intend to keep playing it and see how my lineage might be affected by the decisions I made with my first captain. While I didn't last long in my first few sessions of the game during its early access days, since its release, I've still managed to survive (somehow) with my first captain of the Malcarth lineage. There have been plenty of close calls and instances where luck saved me from a watery grave, but there is still a lot for me to see as this captain and even more once he dies. Hopefully, I’ll be able to upgrade my boat by then to see if the boat is passed down or not, because if it isn’t then this game is even more unforgiving than I originally thought. Since this was such a long initial impression review, check in for a quick wrap-up review where I’ll go over some final thoughts, as well as some pros and cons about the whole experience when I’ve finished the game.

UPDATE I've since finished the game and you can read my closing thoughts on the matter in my Completion Report.