Sunless Sea is a top-down ship exploration game in the vein of Sid Meier’s Pirates. Sunless Sea is also an ode Lovecraft Ian drama, calmly expressed in an overload of snappy literature. Not content with that particular duality, Sunless Sea also asserts a fondness for resource management, vaguely turn-based combat, roguelike principles of calculated disposability, and basic role-playing. All of this builds to a certain level of intimidation – it can require an exceptional amount of time to procure the particular nature of Sunless Sea’s identity and intentions – but not without a certain indelible magnetism. Making sense of Sunless Sea’s complexity seems to be one of its underlying challenges.
So you start where it’s simple. You take a look at its condition and begin to absorb Sunless Sea’s bizarre nomenclature. The city of Fallen London is representative of its surname, only with the added caveat of having literally descended into menacing darkness sometime in the late nineteenth century. The Neath, as it’s known, contains dozens of landmasses of varying caliber all operating under their own peculiar temperament. The player sets sail under through the Unterzee under the duress of darkness, and pieces of the map are gradually revealed with moderate to heavy exploration. Exact locations vary game to game, but their general placement will always be the same. The horrors waiting inside Kingeater’s Castle, for example, will always be somewhere in the faraway southeast, and the doomed fate of the Tomb Colonists will remain in Venderbight in Fallen London’s immediate north.
Location isn’t the only variable worthy of intense consideration; you also need to keep track of a rapidly depleting series of resources. Your crew consumes supplies, the importance of which is granted its own meter in the top left corner of the screen. Same goes for fuel, which is visible just below supplies. One could theoretically load up on both, but your ship has a finite amount of cargo space – and that includes any items or trade goods you’ve managed to pick up along the way. Either your entire ship or its engine and armaments can be upgraded, should you produce the capital to make any of it happen. There are plenty of other things to worry about – suspicion, terror, and maintenance toward any number of allegiances among them – but they don’t really set in until much later. This is true for the statistical categories that govern your available options.
It’s in currency where Sunless Sea starts to manifest some sort of drive. Getting stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no fuel and no supplies spells doom, so you want to pad your pockets enough to render than an impossibility. So you offer to take a Tomb Colonist up north to find. You find weary travelers in need to transportation at Mangrove College. The Dark-Spectacled Admiral in Fallen London pays well for port reports, acquired easily enough through most of the Unterzee, and he pays especially well for reports from specific places. This seems to be a reliable way to make money.
Except it isn’t – and these comparatively menial tasks are barely self-sustaining. Knocking (or breaking down) doors throughout the Neath better reveal and engage the weird, terrorizing, and ultimately enduring narratives of Sunless Sea. I smuggled a crate of human souls into the deep north east, and I had to bribe away dock security when I accidentally brought some back to Fallen London. At Saints Haven I got involved in a dispute between anthropomorphic rats and guinea pigs, and made a mud monster out of one of my crew to intimidate the latter into submission. I made a lot of money from The Cheery Man in Fallen London, and accidentally spent it on a new ship engine all before completing his errand.
It’s that last one from which there was no apparent recovery. I didn’t know what would happen if I didn’t raise enough money to complete his errand, and I spent the rest of my captain’s short life scurrying from harbor to harbor in search of an honest day’s work. As it turns out, an honest day’s work doesn’t really exist in Sunless Sea. At some point I ran out of supplies and was challenged into eating my crew to resolve this issue. While I was mulling that decision over, my ship was attacked by a shark covered in massive bandages and it sank to the bottom of the sea. Game over.
Objectively, Sunless Sea is a roguelike – a game with a common core but shifting set of principles built for replayability – but only in the narrowest of terms. My first campaign lasted just under an hour. My next lasted for twenty. Part of this is due to the applicable knowledge acquired on each successive run (though, if you play your cards right and create and heir or craft a will, some material capital can last from one life to the next). Labeling a game like Sunless Sea, with the potential to go on well past traditional game clocks, as a roguelike seems a bit disingenuous, especially in the age of forty-second Spelunky runs, but it’s still a principle under which Sunless Sea pledges an allegiance.
And so Sunless Sea’s meta-progression goes. Simple exploration gave way to my American drive for capitalism. Making money soon gave way to personal efficiency. I made routes I knew would work, and returned with money I was sure would be enough to fuel the next round. Early into my second campaign, I started connecting the dots with different story bits. Each named member of my crew, acquired at various port-side stops in the Unterzee, had a personal story that demanded resolution. This frequently cost me fuel, supplies, and the lives of my disposable rank-and-file crew members, but it revealed and rewarded harrowing circumstances. Sunless Sea isn’t immune to inane twists or predictable context, but it largely shies away from contrivance.
The passive hostility and indifferent sensibility at which Sunless Sea operates can be a major deterrent for the wrong type of player. While it’s narrative adventure twists and winds its way from Lovecraft to Melville, very little of it is expressed visually. The top down view of the sea comes complete with pseudo-3D perspective tricks and impressively detailed art, but story sequences are almost purely text adventures. Upon docking somewhere, you’re give a premise and, assuming you pass the statistical categories to participate, options to go adventuring.
There are risks and there are rewards, and there’s always the assurance that nothing is easy. Not necessarily in the “every choice is bad” way embraced by The Walking Dead, but rather every choice is loaded with weird seductive potential. There are pockets of society that are to have presumed to have been operating in the suffocating darkness for quite some time. There’s an enigmatic and violent “dawn machine” nestled in one corner. There’s an entire sentient race of mushroom…things in desperate need of propagation. Every land mass tells a story, and while reading isn’t gaming’s most beloved method of communication, it’s tremendously effective for Sunless Sea’s ideals. It’s not a visual novel, ala Danganronpa or Corpse Party, but it is reliant on a player’s willingness to engage and respond to its texts.
Unfortunately this does some weird things with the nuts and bolts of Sunless Sea’s gameplay. It’s hard not to feel like an errand boy. Building cash pipelines involves making trade routes or generating port reports. Completing a crew member’s story or solving a particular Unterzee nation’s problem often requires a collection of materials. At a certain point, Sunless Sea can lose the mystique of the great haunting unknown and slip into a pure resource management sim. Late in my game, after I had acquired a decent engine, I was basically away from my keyboard after I aimed my ship toward a destination. It became less of a game and more of a spreadsheet exercise, where I would note down which port needed what item in order to engage the rest of its story. Once you’ve got it figured out, so to speak, Sunless Sea can lose some of its drive.
Ideally this where Sunless Sea’s combat system would step in and take control. Ship-based combat involves managing WASD and waiting (or chancing it, if you’re impatient) for a firing solution, hopefully staying out of range of your usually-well-armed aggressor. A bit of nuance is added in the amount of control you’re granted, and you’re intended to use this to evade an enemy ship’s line of sight. As it turns out, this is mostly useless, as it’s pathetically easy to cheese the game and stay forever-behind another ship. It’ll cost you fuel and supplies while you bob around, sure, but 500hp behemoths can be taken down with little effort. Sea monsters are a bit of a different story and require advanced weaponry, but they’re (usually) easily avoided. Rather than a welcomed pallet cleanser, combat is a tedious chore that feels best left avoided.
All of this leaves Sunless Sea’s talents at a bit of an impasse. What I hoped would be staggered stages of appreciation fizzled out upon the revelation of its core loop. I loved exploring but then I revealed every area on the map. I loved ship combat but then I discovered its imbalance. I adored all of its stories, but found completing them relied too heavily on stat grinding or fetching items. I loved the music and how it played that familiar, haunting theme whenever I made port at Fallen London but—just kidding, there are no limitations in Sunless Sea’s surreal soundtrack.
My last point aside, it feels like Sunless Sea isn’t built for a proper end game. Sunless Sea certainly has and end, and it is possible to retire from the seafaring life, but mustering the resolve to get there requires an incredible commitment on the part of the player. In a rare anti-feat of my nine year term at Digital Chumps, I didn’t properly finish Sunless Sea. I knew what I had done, and I knew what I was capable of, and I knew it wasn’t enough to see my third captain to any conclusion other than death. Maybe that’s the point, but after staring down my fate I couldn’t start the whole process over again. The exploration, the grind, the lack of surprise over ingrained plotlines; it wasn’t enough of a lure for a repeat performance. I couldn’t conquer to dominating force of terror and nightmares, and my time with Sunless Sea was effectively over.
It’s important to note that Sunless Sea’s story isn’t entirely written yet. It began life on Kickstarter, made its way to Steam early access last July, and found its way as a final commercial product just a few weeks ago, but the folks at Failbetter Games remain committed to improving the experience. Additional stories are on the way, up to and including an entirely new scenario in Aestival. One will hope Failbetter also checks some balance tweaks, making the economy more viable for a game that’s intended to dig deep into double digit hours.
Or maybe they won’t. Maybe this is what Sunless Sea is. Despite its flaws, and in spite of the fact that I literally quit playing it, Sunless Sea manages a strange neuro-perseverance through its better and defining aspects. I respect what it does, and I adore its commitment toward creating an otherworldly experience for which I have no personal analog. I loved it for a time, and in the end it wasn’t totally for me, but its appeal is disclosed vicariously across its strengths. For a select group of people, Sunless Sea is perfect form of exposition by way of experimentation and exploration. For others, it’s a time consuming decent into micromanagement.
Which side of the line you fall on reflects your personal interest in Sunless Sea’s strengths. Do you shudder at the prospect of enjoying one fictional medium inside another? Can you deal with the requisite grind of an inattentive master? Will you be able to stomach the cataclysmic loss of everything you’ve invested and start again? Are you able to overlook the faults of its gauche combat mechanics? Depending on your personal answers to those questions, Sunless Sea is either the next best thing and a game-of-the-year contender for 2015, or a weird experience with a fleeting potential consumed by its own delirium.
