SUNLESS SEA
Failbetter Games · 2015 · Exploration, Lovecraftian, Survival, Story Rich, Dark
PC
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About SUNLESS SEA
✦ AI summary
Captain a Victorian steamship across a vast, nightmarish underground sea filled with cosmic horrors, madness, and permadeath in this Gothic exploration RPG. With 350,000+ words of branching stories, hand-drawn art, and a legacy system where your captain's death passes resources to the next generation, Sunless Sea offers deep narrative and consequence-driven gameplay that rewards the curious and punishes the reckless.
LOSE YOUR MIND. EAT YOUR CREW. DIE.
Sunless Sea is a Gothic Horror RPG with a focus on exploration, exquisite storytelling and frequent death.
Captain a Victorian steamship on a vast underground sea
If the giant crabs, sentient icebergs and swarms of bats don’t get you, madness and cannibalism certainly will. But that old black ocean beckons, and there’s loot for the brave souls who dare to sail her.
Seek out intriguing individuals for your crew
Hire unique officers like the Haunted Doctor and the Irrepressible Cannoneer. Each has a story to tell, if you can draw it out of them.
Stray from the gas-lamps of civilisation
Light and dark, terror and madness: spend too long on the wide, dark sea and your crew will grow fearful and eventually lose their sanity.
Carve a life for your captain in a cruel and unique world
A deep, compelling world packed with 350,000+ words of stories and secrets. Find your father’s bones. Determine London’s destiny. Defy the gods of the deep sea.
Your captain will die.
Pass on resources from one generation to the next. Acquire a family home and a hoard of heirlooms. Build a legacy of zailors who braved the sea and lost - or, occasionally, won.
Features
- Beautiful, hand drawn art - castles of sparkling ice, prisons perched on lily pads, fog-shrouded lighthouses and the DAWN MACHINE.
- Real-time combat against ships and Zee-beasts, spider-crewed dreadnoughts and sentient icebergs.
- Upgrade your steamship with powerful engines, cannons and pneumatic torpedo guns. (Or buy a bigger, better ship.)
- Choose a ship’s mascot: the Comatose Ferret, the Wretched Mog, the Elegiac Cockatoo, and more!
- Trade or smuggle silk and souls, mushroom wine and hallucinogenic honey.
Who are Failbetter Games?
We’re a boutique games studio based in London, UK. We’ve been making indie games since 2009. If you’ve read this far, this game is almost certainly for you.
DLC & expansions
🎁 Complete the collection
Base game + 1 of 1 DLC at today's best prices.
$8.33
to own everything
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
I got more hours on this game on other platforms, around ~500 total. This is an AMAZING game if you like exploration and learning about the game's world & lore. The characters are interesting, the writing is super high-quality, and each port is memorable and has its own side-lore/plot going on. Play with manual saves the first time around. It makes the learning phase of the game way less punishing and saves you frustration if you make a dumb decision and die. Get the base game first, and then the DLC if you like the game. The DLC adds more locations and characters, but it basically just expands the (already considerable) game world and adds a few new mechanics.3 found this helpful
The concept is great, the atmosphere is great. So why the thumbs down? The mechanics of the 'game loop' are somehow both frustrating and boring. Combat is lacking strategy and nets you almost nothing by way of reward for winning, and it is not a way to move from early game to mid game. Exploration, which seems to be the main attraction of the game is ok, but if you want to somehow progress to the mid game, you have to make the same early game loops over and over, because you can't get enough supplies to make it to a mid game location and back. This nonsense with permadeath is for atmosphere only, the 'legacies' aren't really worthwhile rewards for starting over, but at least you aren't likely to die with much, so you haven't lost all that much except the time you spent playing.1 found this helpful
Not a "fun" game by any stretch, and certainly not for everyone, but the setting and story are captivating. Approach it like reading a dark fantasy novel (akin to the work of Gene Wolfe) and you will enjoy it thoroughly. That being said, since this game is very narrative-forward, the rogue-like aspect with permadeath does this title more harm than good. Just turn on merciful mode, kick back, and enjoy it. It's kino.1 found this helpful
It takes a little bit to get going, but the writing and world building are phenomenal.
Many people apparently love this game. The story part just didn't do it for me. so I would not recomend it. But not an awful game. I just had other things I would rather play.
The save system is garbage and totally unexplained, a literal waste of hours of my time.
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