Sunless Sea - Completion Report
Originally published December 2015Remember that game Sunless Sea? I started playing it a while ago. I gave my initial impressions of it, as I had been playing it for a few hours, but not enough to give a full review of the game. I had a game going that was relatively successful for a while: my first captain was still alive and I had mapped out more than 2/3 of the world. Then I rebuilt my computer and somehow neglected to back up my save.
So, months after I had stopped playing it, I started over again. With the little extra knowledge I had this time around, my new "first" captain had a much more successful run through the sea, managed to save enough money to buy the most expensive ship in London, and retired having accomplished his lifetime goal. It took me many hours to do so, but I "beat" Sunless Sea with a first-generation captain.
With the knowledge and experience I've gained having stayed on the nautical course, my opinion of Sunless Sea has changed a little, as one might expect.
One thing Sunless Sea is very up-front about, as I mentioned in my Initial Impressions, is the game's difficulty. It's really tough, your captain will likely die, and you'll have to start over. Or not.
Image: Failbetter Games
I completed the game in one generation and mapped out the entire world with one captain, and while there were certainly a few close calls, I never considered myself in dire straits or considered the game that difficult. It was no Dark Souls. I'm not bragging about it. I mention this mainly because the gameplay and story seem to match the intended difficulty of the game.
What I mean is, your captain is supposed to die, over and over, because it should be very unlikely that you are able to do so many different quests and see so many parts of the world with a single character. That's the impression I got anyway from the various islands and towns you can visit. There are multiple branching paths in terms of decisions you can make in these towns, which means that there's a lot of replayability to the story. However, it's a little odd that everything just sort of resets over again each time your captain dies/retires. All the same quests are available again at their respective locations but the locations themselves shift around to give players that feeling of exploration again. I understand this as a way of getting around having to write a massive number of stories and plot lines for each journey, but it's a superfluous method of increasing the longevity of the game. It seems like it might have been better if there were just quests or options that weren't available in the first-generation playthrough.
Image: Failbetter Games
I spent a lot of (too much) time in this game as this captain. Mapping that entire world and staying alive as long as I did allowed me to complete many different stories. Of those stories, there's a strong percentage that requires skill points and items that players are very unlikely to achieve in one playthrough unless they want to dedicate more than a hundred hours to the game. This is made more surprising by the method in which resources, abilities, or stats are transferred from one generation to the next.
On the final screen of the captain's journey, before choosing your next generation, you have to select the type of heir you'll have for the next playthrough. Doing so selects the type of rewards you will give from the current playthrough to the next. You can only choose two of the total rewards to apply to your next captain though.
Image: Failbetter Games
What are the rewards? They're stat boosts from your previous captain, but they're only worth it if your captain was able to improve their stats above 50--no "easy" task by the standards of the game. It takes a long time to get your stats on the various captain abilities up above 50. By the time I finished my captain's story, I had managed to barely break 100 on two of his stats, while the others sat in the 60-70 range. Only being able to choose two of these stats means that everything else drops down to the baseline of 25 points every time. Even the stats you choose to boost are only half of the value of what they were with the previous captain.
Why am I rattling on about this? Because I spent so much time on this game and it bothered me that it was so long when it really shouldn't have been. Mechanics like this are padding for game length on a game that really didn't need more padding than it already had. It takes a looooong time to get from one port to another in Sunless Sea, regardless of how much you've upgraded your ship. Since you're stopping in at every port to collect reports or restock your supplies as you journey through the Unterzee, a single trip to the far reaches of the map and back can quickly turn into 20 minutes. If you have a specific quest or goal in mind, but you forget to buy the necessary item to complete it, and have to make another trip, you've suddenly just dedicated an hour to traveling for a single quest. Even then, if you don't have the necessary stats, you may only have a slim chance of succeeding in your quest.
Image: Failbetter Games
The risk/reward system to me is very weird and feels unbalanced. It takes so long to build up your captain that you have to take the occasional risk in dialogue options and hope that it pays off. This was certainly the intention of the game, but the bar for entry is so high, it's just hard to justify. Your captain's abilities go up so slowly, you can only improve two from generation to generation, and the two that you can improve are only half of what you managed to achieve after countless hours in the game. This, coupled with how slowly you can accumulate money, which is certainly very useful to have, makes the game exceedingly long when it doesn't have to be. Traveling from one place to another adds significantly to the length of the game already; there's no need to tack on this slow character growth too.
Money is one of the other rewards you can take with you after your original captain's journey ends, which is certainly handy. If you don't choose it, however, you have to hope that any heirlooms you managed to accumulate for your heir will be enough, because that next captain starts with almost nothing. I was surprised that they didn't start with at least a few hundred bucks. Considering the fact that the various methods I had employed in my first captain's journey to accumulate wealth ran out sooner than I had hoped, this only served as a nail in the coffin for me wanting to play again immediately. This wasn't a method of making the game "difficult" like the creators thought it was. This was just tedium.
Image: Failbetter Games
After spending as much time on the game as I did, I was quite burnt out. I was also a little disappointed to find that having managed to do so much with my captain, completing so many quests, and managing to actually finish my captain's story without his death didn't have much of a lasting impact on the world, and that he might as well have died. I understand it's a bit much to expect the creators to write so many stories for this game that you could just keep playing generation after generation and continue to encounter new things. I just don't agree with their methods of stretching out the game's length and so-called difficulty.
Don't get me wrong. I still think Sunless Sea is a solid game and well worth the lower price tag of an independent game. I put a lot of time into it and got a number of intriguing stories out of my (sometimes tedious) experience. It was satisfying upgrading my ship to a mighty Dreadnaught and going up against giant crabs and sharks with the bravado I would have thought unobtainable in the early moments of Sunless Sea. I just think that the time it took to get there was not entirely worth it and could have been significantly reduced if my captain's abilities and methods of securing funds weren't so limited.
Image: Failbetter Games