KickStarter Sunless Sea - an undersea trading and exploration game

[Multi-headed Cow]

wat? I must try this.

Edit: Nothin'. Now I'll never know what a naked woman looks like.

 

[laclongquan]

mute exiles and irrated monkeys? They have the chance to show off their skill in the high art of Internet known as trolling and that's the best they can do...
Bah, humbug!

 

[Bubbles]

Tutorial and Keybinding
By Hannah, January 22, 2015 · Patch Notes Sunless Sea
It’s just over two weeks until launch! Today’s update covers some functions which you’ve been asking us for:

TUTORIAL

Even seasoned zailors will find helpful tips in the new tutorial system!

It’s really important that this is as useful as possible; please consider sending feedback to sunlesssea@failbettergames.com if you spot something confusing.

KEYBINDING

Not everyone wants to zail WSADly. Re-bind the game controls to keys of your choice from Options in the menu.

IMPROVED CHART

The fog of war is less foggy; you should find that the labels are easier to read.

SMALL UPDATES AND FIXES

• New vessel – Steam Launch, an adorable lifeboat
• The gazetter page you are currently on will now have its tab highlighted
• Same goes for your current shop
• The Tyrant-Moth, Lorn Fluke and Bound Shark have some new animations
• ‘Goods’ have now been renamed ‘Cargo’ on the hold tab
• Being moved to a different port will now update the Fog of Uknown on the map correctly
• The Pirate Steam-Pinnace has moved further North of Fallen London
• You can new assign items usable in combat to different slots from the Hold page on the gazetteer
• Performance optimisations

And some news: very soon you can expect to see stories involving a great deal of monkey business when you visit Empire of Hands…

Happy zailing!

 

[Disgruntled]

Wanted to pick this up but its $19 on steam. Is it worth it?

 

[Starwars]

This releases Friday, ended up getting it today but probably not gonna play it until the weekend.

 

[Eyeball]

Wanted to pick this up but its $19 on steam. Is it worth it?

IMO no. Setting is nice but particularly combat isn't that much fun.

 

[Bubbles]

UI design is also a big turnoff for me. We'll see how the release goes.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Like all the other bros I'm waiting until release. Although I might not play much on Friday and Saturday due to business depending on weather. From my few looks in early access I'm fairly sure I'll be grumbling about it a lot and wondering why it isn't better.

 

[Starwars]

Just a small heads-up, as far as I understand it any (or the first? not sure) DLC will be free for Early Access buyers. So if you're pretty sure you want to buy this game, it may be worth to do it now.

Or just wait until the inevitable sale I suppose.

 

[Infinitron]

Eurogamer gives it a 10/10: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-06-sunless-sea-review

Sunless Sea review
Hello sailor.

Do you keep the trinket or cast it into the water? It would be a symbolic gesture, sure, but the ripples through your story will be genuine. Drop the keepsake back into your pocket and you'll be keeping the preposterous promises made to a young lover after a drunken night together. Drop the keepsake into the sea and, eventually, she and it may be forgotten. Then you will be free to find refuge in the next warm and welcome body (and, so long as you make to back to port, there is always another).

If a game is a series of meaningful choices, as per the designer Sid Meier's oft-repeated, oft-abused maxim, then Sunless Sea is more game than most. The choices pile up quickly, then escalate. Sure, you're a merchant captain now, but who were you before that? Poet? Priest? Veteran? Urchin? And by what measure would you consider this new life a success? By discovering your dead father's remains? By becoming a well-regarded travel writer? By dying wealthy? Who will serve as your crew in this endeavour? Do you care about their personal hopes and ambitions? Do you care enough to help them out and, when the time comes, free them from your trade?

What trade is that, anyway? Smuggling? Piracy? Exploration? Haulage? There's nothing so crude as a class to pick in Sunless Sea. Rather, the lines between each way of life are traversable. Decisions will lead you down certain paths, some of which cannot be returned from, but it's entirely possible to keep smuggled goods, stowaways and legitimate cargo in your hold to make the most of a trip.

The Echo is London's currency, earned through exploring the Unterzee and returning port reports to the admiralty, selling treasures you find and trading goods.

Okay, says Sunless Sea, more gravely now. When the money runs out and you're 50 miles from home and the food is gone and disease is everywhere and your engines finally sputter out, in the darkness as you hear the monsters rounding, will you cook and eat your first mate? If you don't, your girl back home may never know whether her heart was already broken before it was broken.

It's the 1800s and London has fallen into the ground. As the soil overhead closed (Essex: meet Surrey), a twilight and subterranean archipelago landed a mile below. Here in the luminous ocean, known as the Unterzee, the map is unfamiliar. Gone are London's boroughs, replaced by islands that go by new names. Some are archaic: Pickett's Bluff, Watchmaker's Hill, Lick-a-Monkey Crag. Some are futuristic: Station III, Codex. Others are just playfully wistful: Low Barnet.

You'll want to visit them all, you and your crew. Regardless of whether you're in the business of trading goods, stories, or blows, your livelihood depends upon travel. Indeed, while the geography surrounding Fallen London is unfamiliar, the question that greets you here is common to all who come to the city: where are you headed?

This is an exploration game at its core, then, about questing into the unknown, penetrating the darkness of unfamiliarity in search of new places, stories and truths. Your range is naturally limited, however. Your ship is only able to carry so much fuel and supplies and, until you're able to afford a larger vessel, it's best to keep within sprinting distance of home. Run out of either and the choices you will face are unthinkable. The balance of risk and reward, therefore, is built into the geography.

Great stretches of water are landless so you soon learn to rely upon your zee-bat scout, who can be sent out like Noah's black dove to return with news of nearby lands. If the scout returns successful it will place a vague mark on your map. Find the place for yourself and you can dock there and meet the locals to find out more about their lives. This knowledge can then be sold back in London.

Soon the intense rhythms of long-term sea travel are established: the thrill of departure, the exhilaration of discovery (tempered, always, by the fear of the unknown), the excitement of learning new stories and scraps of news, the creeping dread as supplies dwindle, the relief - the glorious, blessed relief - of arriving home again, beleaguered but alive. Then, after nights drinking at bars, selling supplies, trading those stories, you begin again to feel the call of the sea, the draw of all that horror and gain it promises.

The story, which accumulates from a thousand fragments and diversions of your own choosing, is communicated by snippets of delightful text. There is a lot of reading to be done here, but the writing is lively, subtle and never indulgent. "Ah yes," says London's admiral, the first time you're granted an audience. "The merchant-captain of whom we hear such complicated things." Complicated! Yes, the perfect word.

Lose too many crewmembers to sickness, combat or hunger and your ship's speed will be greatly reduced. New men of varying degrees of proficiency can be enrolled in London, but it will be a slog home first.

Choices are often pinned to the bottom of these pieces of dialogue and description. Will you, for example, loot a host's home, or search for clues as to their past? The choices available to you depend on your current attributes, which quantify your aptitude for healing and morale, detection and perception, trickery and knowledge or blunt attack power. Some islands have stories that unfurl only over multiple visits. In time, checking in with your favourite communities en route to more perilous and unknown locations becomes a treat.

These warm interactions are valuable because the Sunless Sea is an otherwise relentlessly hostile place. You will often be attacked while sailing and, in these instances, you must choose whether to fight or flee. Fight and your deck gun's range is shown as a red circle with your ship at its centre. Shine your ship's prow lamp on to the enemy and the crew will ready a shot more quickly. Once you've defeated your enemy, be it a vast shark wrapped in belts (Lovecraft is everywhere, down here in the Unterzee), or a nimble pirate ship, you can salvage from the remains food, cargo or knowledge. As you begin to earn a living you can upgrade various parts of your ship according to your favoured style of play. Blow everything on the most expensive engine on the market and you'll be able to outrun most attackers. Or pick out the latest cannons and meet them head on. Maybe, if you're more of a family man, woman (or oligarch) a London penthouse might seem like a better way to spend your money.

As well as the financial choices set before you and the decisions you must make about what kind of captain you are there are philosophical choices: do you worship the Ur-gods here on the dim sea, or remain stoic in the temptation of superstition? Then, there's the question of legacy. Death is not the end in Sunless Sea. You are able to pass on scraps of your life to the next comer, an inheritance of your choosing: the chart you so carefully drew (perhaps the most valuable of all assets), your knowledge, cunning, strength or skill. With the passing of each new life there is grief but also opportunity. You are able to try different choices in order to see where they lead you, rejecting the path laid down by your predecessors, just as a child rejects the choices of the parent in order to create a space in which to grow distinct.

As well as your self-described ambition in the game, there are other secrets to unravel and settle about the Unterzee. Find the right mooring and it may be possible to return to England's surface ("a warmer place"). And what is The Dawn Machine? Who lives in the Kingeater's Castle? Even if you decided to chase wealth for your character at the expense of all else, often these peripheral conundrums prove irresistible distractions. They are secrets that can be unravelled through generations of character, each playthrough bringing further insight.

It's possible to send your engines into overdrive if your crew needs to beat a hasty retreat, but doing so introduces a new mechanical risk: explosion.

Sunless Sea's method of storytelling isn't unique, but it has never been realised with such impact and elegance. Every playthrough is singular because it's composed of the fragments of your decisions. A writer hasn't pre-laid a narrative for you to trace. They've simply created scenarios and opportunities. It's broadly up to you how your chosen beats of drama link together. You are the architect of your victory or downfall, the only one that must live or die by the consequences of your actions.

This is the video game at its most mystical and revealing. It exposes much human juxtapositions: our elemental longing for exploration and discovery, and the tension with our common desire for home and sanctuary. It reveals the way in which we will imperil ourselves in the quest to gain knowledge for the greater good, set against our selfish instinct to hoard and sell that knowledge for personal gain.

Sunless Sea is a game about transport in another way too: it takes us to another, currently vanished period in human history. It's fictional and yet it's also representative of a time when this kind of travel was at once essential, burdensome and perilous.

Through play you start to learn the ancient principles of captaincy and leadership. You learn how to plot a feasible voyage (for a start: don't waste your money on wine and women till you've first bought fuel and supplies for the next trip). You learn first hand the tremendous cost of a miscalculation, and how, on the capricious sea, you can never be fully in control. You become more decisive, especially of what to keep and what to discard (there is no time for equivocation, no room for hoarding, you tell yourself, as the keepsake sinks). You learn, as they used to say, how to run a tight ship. And in that journey, Sunless Sea holds a mirror up to your own temperament, character and approach to life.

'The sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea,' reads Coleridge's poem, Kubla Khan, from which the game takes its name and setting. It already knows that you will take up the challenge and bravely attempt to measure these caverns. The better question, and the one that Sunless Sea asks in countless ways is: how?

10 / 10

 

[WhiteGuts]

Some are futuristic: Station III, Codex.

 

[Trash]

As someone who absolutely loves exploration in games I'm pretty much stoked. Interesting review. A bit too prosaic for my tastes but it does succeed in bringing across the strong points of the game. Would have liked to read a bit more about why the score is that high though. Informative should be key to any review imo. Anyway, just read a dev post on the steam forums saying the release patch will be out in 6 or so hours. I'll be waiting.

 

[Starwars]

It's encouraging that they gave such a score but yeah, the actual review doesn't really go into much depth at all. Too bad.

Nevertheless, looking forward to trying this out!

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Eurogamer is biased.


Wait for the :kwafuckyeah: reviews.

 

[Trash]

Sunless Sea has just been released. For a paltry 17 euro. Got a few pretty good reviews as well.

Already we've been hugely excited to receive a rare 10/10 score from Eurogamer[www.eurogamer.net], and another 10/10 from Starburst magazine[www.starburstmagazine.com].

And here's a review from Rock Paper Shotgun, just gone live!

We're getting so hyped it's quite likely we'll steal a nearby boat from Greenwich Peninsula and cause chaos on the Thames.

We're streaming live pretty much all day at http://twitch.tv/failbettergames, hosting such friendly streamers as FuzzyFreaks, MegnaGaming and Indie + the Indie Army.

Come by for the dev stream with GOG at 7pm GMT!

See you on the zee!

 

[Infinitron]

Released: http://store.steampowered.com/app/304650/



Hey Vault Dweller, text adventures, exploration and stuff. This seems like it could be sort of up your alley. Like your Space Rangers review.

 

[Infinitron]

RPS review: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/02/06/sunless-sea-review/

Perhaps they wouldn’t have taken to Sunless Sea anyway, for it’s also a game which asks a great amount of reading from its player. You will never see a human beyond a still icon of their face, and you will never hear a spoken voice, so to get a sense of their characters or of the finer details of the places they inhabit you will have to read. There are some quarter of a million words in Sunless Sea already, with more due to be added over time. In tone and theme they borrow liberally from Lovecraft, Gaiman and Meiville, and any number of other inspirations from across the spectrum of both low and high culture, and while I don’t believe that Sunless Sea is pretending it’s invented a language of its own, I do think its writers are enormously skilled and the result is enormously characterful.

From lascivious descriptions of freakish faces or desolate places, down to brief lines such as how the crew appear anxiously on deck once they sight home waters, the text and dialogue works and works and works to make Sunless Sea’s intricate but often static environments so much more than the sum of their sunken parts. This is a game, and a world, to lose yourself in and revel in the little, playful details of. That’s why I stay, even when it’s giving me a hard time. That’s why my heart always skips a beat whenever I see Low Barnet. Nearly home. And home means something.

To some degree, Sunless Sea’s wonderful worldbuilding and shaggy dog’s tale-weaving is in spite of itself. Its interface is a touch plain and overly clicky, it suffers for the lack of any zoom function (oh, to simply scroll out to see the main-screen-as-map, or to zoom in to make a skirmish with a giant crab that little more exciting), and sometimes the item requirements to fulfil a quest or even engage a character in conversation seem so many, so involved and so time-consuming that there’s almost a touch of Farmville to proceedings. While its map is refreshingly icon-free, its journal and some of its conversations are effectively long lists of icons. Sometimes this shatters the illusion, reveals a certainly utilitarianism at the game’s heart, and I can almost see the parts Sunless Sea was made out of.

Then I see Low Barnet, I know that home is close, a nautical-gothic tune strikes up, and I don’t want to be anywhere else. Except, perhaps, for out there, in the fog far, far way, on dark waters I’m yet to explore.

Look, Sunless Sea isn’t for everyone. It requires patience, and it requires no small amount of imagination. For those who have those qualities, or are prepared to try and acquire them, I would say that Sunless Sea is an uncommonly rewarding roleplaying game, and an essential one.

 

[Tommers]

I played a little bit this morning (cos I thought it had been released already) and it's certainly moved on a lot since the last time i checked. There seemed to be a lot more stuff going on.

 

[Starwars]

Just dove in for a very quick look (I also died very quickly because I'm a dumbass).

The mechanics, "stats" and how the game presents it, feel kinda weird to me initially. Still, it looks quite promising and definitely unique.

 

[Trash]

Just dove in for a very quick look (I also died very quickly because I'm a dumbass).

The mechanics, "stats" and how the game presents it, feel kinda weird to me initially. Still, it looks quite promising and definitely unique.

It's very much like Fallen London (or that Dragon Age: The Last Court game they made to tie in with DA:I) in its mechanics, stats and storytelling. Fortunately without all the time bullshit constraints these browser games have and a whole exploration part added. They certainly got the atmosphere nailed and combat is a lot more fun than it was in the 'demo' I played ages ago.

 

[omega21]

I'm scared to start again because I don't want to die. Perhaps that's the best review I can give the game.

 

[Eyeball]

whoah, they appear to have changed the combat bigtime. Gonna mess around with this a bit later - combat was pretty dreadful in earlier builds, wondering what it's like now.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Thus far it's better than it was, but I'm still dubious. It seems you're largely forced in to blind exploration to get yourself started, because fighting pirates and beasties won't really even give enough to cover the costs of any damage you take, and early trading is absolutely pathetic (Though I'm sure once you know the game like the back of your hand there are routes you could manage at the start). Blind exploration could be cool but it just seems like such a stupid idea. It's not even exploration with a vague goal of finding glorious spices, it's just "Well I've got fuck-all to do around here so I guess I may as well wander aimlessly". Got around a third of the map explored in the space of an hour or two after I got myself up around 20ish fuel and 20ish supplies. Just limped back to London a few hundred echos richer with an assload of port reports and intel to turn in and a few expensive doodads to sell, and enough terror to give myself a few nightmares.

Overall it'll take more playing to get a better sense of the game. To take another recent game as an example, in Darkest Dungeon I can quickly see I like the basic gameplay of the dungeon crawl and town improving but there isn't enough variety to want to keep playing it currently. In Sunless Sea's case I don't really like or dislike the basic gameplay of sailing around (It's not particularly fun but it's relaxing and laid back) so the meat of if I give a damn about it is based on the randomization/reactivity of the world and story. Thus far that doesn't bode particularly well, but as mentioned I'll have to fuck with it a lot longer to fully tell.

Also not sure why everyone's jerking off over the writing. Guns that make your heart rain smacks to me of random shit, but people apparently liked the writing in Sanctuary RPG so what do I know.

 

[agris]

Yea the writing in that screen is trying to be.. something, maybe like Neal Gaiman but a lot worse.

 

[Bubbles]

I supect that some reviewers are basing their assessment of the writing on their experiences with Fallen London, which is generally well written. The writing in SS is much more inconsistent by comparison.