Written by Laird Allen
Sunless Sea
Procedurally generated problems in the deepest of all possible seas
“Sunless Sea,” by Failbetter Games, is an above-view roguelike set in the “award-winning Victorian Gothic universe of Fallen London,” according to the publisher. The essential gameplay centers on management of resources on a boat in a vast underground ocean where London has, well, fallen, and where you must explore with little more than a collection of malcontents, an ever-dwindling supply of fuel, and the knowledge that whatever is out there drives humans utterly mad. Managing fuel, supplies, and the tiny ship’s light that holds the terror at bay make up much of the core tension of gameplay. The game’s map is randomized when you restart—although broad similarities persist—so each time out of port is a quest into the unknown. With each game, you select different backgrounds and motivations, allowing you to somewhat characterize each experience, but broadly speaking, it is the classic roguelike with a naval twist. Live, die, and live again in an established gaming universe, which may have driven the game’s substantial popularity.
And indeed, ordinarily this is so very much my kind of thing that I expected to fall in love with “Sunless Sea” right away. The game has a style out of the gate, presenting you with eerie blue- and green-lit darkness, with a sense of foreboding, even a bit of melancholy. The sea, it is implied, has always been a harsh mistress, but this deeper stranger sea is inimical beyond our knowledge, etcetera, etcetera. The tone strives for Dickens and Lovecraft and in places, succeeds quite admirably.
However, what lets down “Sunless Sea” is a reliance on the design of its predecessors. Whether through conscious imitation of the earlier generations or through a desire to keep consistency across both previous browser-based games and Steam titles, “Sunless Sea” has a frustrating interface that relies on a sort of ongoing choose-your-own-adventure whenever you’re in port, reading long expositional info-dumps and keeping track of characters and political arrangements in dense small fonts. This wouldn’t be such an issue, but the gameplay between these segments—the actual sailing of the Sunless Sea—is monotonous and slow, promising steady advance but on a scale of investment that the game simply doesn’t seem to merit out of the box. Add to this the game’s high deadliness and you have a difficult sell.
It is tempting to give the game more credit based purely on its writing, but this has some consistency issues—particularly tonally. It’s difficult to have a survival horror experience in the cthonian darkness when one of your crew is a sleepy ferret. While generally well done, the writing leans heavily on the conventions of the modern steampunk genre, right down to warrior nuns, the grim undead, and sentimental romance. Having expected a more gothic turn, the game world seems by turns a horror in the dark and a pastiche, which is frustrating considering the effort that goes into setting the mood.
There are a lot of good ideas in “Sunless Sea.” The Terror Meter, which measures your exposure to darkness and madness and which has lovely little details conveyed in flavor text and visual stings, is a great way of heightening tension. Additionally, while bedeviled by the aforementioned inconsistency in tone, many of the locations and characters are quite interesting and tell interesting stories. However, the amount of time required toiling the abyssal depths to bring the disparate plot threads together and the difficulty in figuring out just what is important at any given time make “Sunless Sea” a difficult game to recommend. After the initial exploration and charting of the game world, the game offers only a steep climb upwards with only crumbs along the way.
“Sunless Sea” is by Failbetter Games and is available on Steam for $18.99 on Mac and PC. It is suitable for gamers teens and up owing to persistent horror content.
