Thoughts: Sunless Sea

sunless_london

It’s important to properly set your expectations before entering Sunless Sea. What it looks like, at first glance, is a game in the vein of Pirates! or Elite – a freeform game set in an open world where you can explore, trade and fight according entirely according to your own whims, clawing your way up from having nothing to owning everything. Sunless Sea has one or two elements in common with this sort of game — especially Pirates! — but it is most definitely not them.

Then there’s the roguelikes, specifically FTL, where you have a concrete goal and meander down an unforgiving, randomly-generated path towards it; where the game is geared towards variety and replayability and the player is intended to experience several dozen unsuccessful attempts before they finally accrue enough experience to crack it open and win. Here the resemblance is stronger, but a direct comparison would still be misleading. Sunless Sea isn’t all that much like FTL either.

In fact if you asked me to find the closest touchstone for the sort of game Sunless Sea is, then I would have to dig very deep into my trove of gaming knowledge as it’s been quite a long time since I played anything like it.  Once I came back up, though, I would be holding just one solitary game in my hands, with the following words stencilled across its metaphorical cover:

King of Dragon Pass.”

Up until a couple of years ago King of Dragon Pass was an obscure curiosity of precisely the kind you spend the majority of your time in Sunless Sea trying to acquire. It was a vast, sprawling piece of interactive fiction masquerading as a strategy game; on the surface it looked like it was about managing cows and crops and fighters and spreading your clan’s influence, but while those elements did a hell of a lot to enhance the IF part of it they were ultimately a cover for one of the finest pieces of personalised storytelling I’ve ever seen in computer gaming. King of Dragon Pass wasn’t about management, it was about building your clan’s story as you threaded the narrative needle through any number of random (and not-so-random) events that helped or hindered you according to whatever actions you’d taken in response. It was a game – or rather, a story – experienced almost entirely through text, with some lovely hand-drawn art accompanying each event to enhance the atmosphere.

sunless_nuncio

The curio days of King of Dragon Pass are over; it’s since had a well-received re-release both on GoG and on mobile devices (and I urge you to try it out if you’ve never played it before). It’s therefore unsurprising that we’re starting to see games cast from a similar mould1, and Sunless Sea is the first of these that I’ve encountered. Like KoDP, it looks like something else entirely — in this case, all the games I mentioned in the first two paragraphs — but ultimately its looks are an elaborate wrapper for a collection of well-written stories that mesh together to form the tale of your captain’s career. To its credit Sunless Sea doesn’t lie to the player; it’s an unapologetically wordy game and it hits you over the head with this fact from the very first moment you set foot in Fallen London, as if it’s trying its hardest to stake out its territory well away from the arcade fighting and trading elements that you might have otherwise expected. Those are present, in a rather vestigial form, but if you try and play the game like Pirates! you’re only going to end up disappointed.

To explain what Sunless Sea is actually about, it’s first necessary to explain its setting. Sunless Sea is set in a vast underground ocean called the Unterzee. You play a sea-captain in command of a small steamship; you start in your home base of Fallen London with no map information beyond a few directional clues the starting events give you (“Frostfound is to the north” and so on”), and your career is spent charting the Unterzee, landing on its various islands and settlements, and dealing with the stories and events that spring up as a consequence of your exploration. The Unterzee is a strange and eldritch place where just about anything can (and does) happen, and each of the settlements you discover is dramatically different from the last — here are the Tomb-Colonies of the north, a dusty, sepulchural settlement where the recently deceased go to live out their unlives, while there is the Iron Republic, client state of Hell and general font of insanity. I’ve seen it described as Lovecraftian but I think that does it a disservice because the Unterzee is so much more imaginative than that; it’s wonderfully creepy and venturing out to its furthest reaches is terrifically foreboding.

sunless_irem

Because the Unterzee is underground it goes without saying that it’s more than a little bit dark down there. Your ship has a powerful lamp that illuminates the sea in front of it, but the rest of the sea is pitch black unless lit by one of the light buoys or the much rarer lighthouses you’ll find scattered around. If your lamp isn’t on you can see very little, but keeping it lit requires precious fuel – the same fuel that your ship constantly burns to make itself go. If you run out of fuel, you’re dead. On longer voyages it’s often necessary to turn the lamp off so that you’ll have enough fuel to make it to a port where you can resupply, however this means that your ship is illuminated by a pair of weakly-glowing green werelights that only light the area immediately around it, leaving you surrounded by nothing but inky blackness and the constant drip and splash of the sea.

Oh, and the sea monsters. Of course.

Exploring the unknown reaches of the Unterzee is consequently rather tense. Pushing out the boundaries of the explored territory on your map is downright hazardous unless you’re very well-stocked with both fuel and food supplies, and it’s a relief when you can make it back to a known port where you can buy fuel for the long trip back to Fallen London itself. The map is semi-randomised in such a way that the further out you go, the more isolated and otherworldly it feels; the monsters get tougher, the islands get weirder and there’s a real sense that you’re teetering on the edge of the world. A prolonged voyage will also give free reign to the Terror mechanic; too much time spent staring at horrors from the abyss, too much time spent in the darkness of the Unterzee with no light, too many encounters with magical objects and beings not of this world — all of these will raise your Terror level. If it gets too high you (and your crew) start to suffer from nightmares and hallucinations, incurring long-term psychological damage that takes a while to heal. There are scattered events that can lower your Terror level and it gets reset to 50 (out of 100) every time you return to Fallen London, which yet another reason why it’s a good idea to return home as frequently as possible.

sunless_dreams

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really feeling the whole Terror mechanic to begin with. This was because I’d been making relatively short hops only halfway across the map, and had more than enough fuel to keep my lamp burning constantly and thus stave off the nightmares of the Unterzee. That all changed when I decided to voyage to the roof of the world, where the blackness of the sea suddenly became studded with the twilight of stars and I discovered an island where two ghostly statues stood sentinel over a gateway into the unknown. I tarried too long here, pushed my Terror above 50, and for good measure was attacked by a gigantic sea creature that inflicted Terror damage with each attack just after I left the island – I lost two crew, the ship barely got away with a quarter of its hull strength remaining, and my captain has been struggling with nightmares of a giant, all-seeing eye ever since. This is the sort of atmosphere that Sunless Sea can create when the art, the sound and the storytelling are all working together in harmony, and it’s really something quite special.

Speaking of the storytelling, each individual island you can dock at in the Unterzee is the focus of its own chain of stories and events. Completing them successfully often requires a stat check (your captain has the standard RPG stats that they can increase over the course of the game) or a set of special items that must be acquired elsewhere in the Unterzee, and finishing a story often isn’t an ambigously good outcome – experiencing the unsettling events related therein can cause your Terror level to rise even as you acquire a magical item or a scrap of forbidden knowledge that can be sold back in Fallen London. Several of them give out long-term quests that require you to criss-cross the Unterzee in search of various bits and pieces of arcana, and completing these quests is a game-long pursuit. Quest options are often locked when you encounter them for the first time, but Sunless Sea is kind enough to tell you which items and stats you’ll need to unlock them — which is good, because it’s a massive, sprawling game you need some sort of hint in order to keep yourself pointed in the right direction. There’s something like three dozen islands scattered over a map that takes a good 10-15 minutes to sail across from end to end, not to mention Fallen London itself which acts as the home base and hub for everything that you do; it’s where you go to refit your ship, hire more crew and officers (each of whom have their own personal stories you can tease out of them), rest in whatever accommodation you’ve purchased with the profits from your voyages, and spend time with your family, if you’ve got one. There’s a whole system for passing money and knowledge on to your successor captains here that I haven’t really messed with; Sunless Sea starts with permadeath on, but it’s thankfully optional and allows you to revoke this at any time by saving the game manually, with the only drawback being that you give up the shiny medal that (one assumes) would show in your achievements should you ever manage to actually complete the game.

sunless_palmerston

We’ll get on to just why I’m thankful for being able to turn permadeath off in a second, but first I really want to emphasise just how big Sunless Sea is; I’ve been playing for ten hours so far, and I’ve explored just over half of the map and have barely made a dent in the vast number of quests and events on offer. If you’re not put off by a lot of words in your videogames — words that are almost without exception very well-written — and are willing to let your imagination do a little bit of the heavy lifting then I could easily see Sunless Sea devouring 40-50 hours of your time before you were done with it. I’m certainly not anywhere near done with it yet; once I’d turned permadeath off and learned to live with its flaws I found it to be one of the most immersive games I’ve played since… god, since I don’t know when . The Unterzee is a fantastic setting, the writing is never less than excellent, and I fully intend to keep playing Sunless Sea until I either fulfil my captain’s ambition (which counts as completing the game) or burn out.

For some balance, though, let me tell you the story of why I came to turn permadeath off in the first place.

This was actually at the recommendation of a friend of mine who had played Sunless Sea during its Early Access phase. “It’s a great game,” he said, “but just make sure you play with Merciful Mode on otherwise you’ll ragequit.” I usually treat permadeath options as a challenge, but in this case I took his advice and I’m really glad I did because he was absolutely right — and now I’m going to give you the same advice. Sunless Sea is a great game, just so long as you’re playing on Merciful mode. If you’re not, then there are a couple of parts of it that come together to potentially make it a very unattractive prospect. First up: as I said in the opening paragraphs, this is not a trading game. There are shops where you can buy goods, true, and you can sell these goods in other ports for a small profit, but the primary reason these goods exist is so that you can use them to complete stories and quests. Bulk trading isn’t really feasible because the amount of money you’ll spend on fuel and supplies will quickly exceed the amount of money you make on the cargo. If you try and trade your way to success in SunlessSea you’re going to end up getting very, very annoyed.

sunless_officer

On its own, that’s fine. Despite appearances it’s really not the way you’re supposed to play the game; you’re supposed to get your income from completing quests and selling your discoveries, not by transporting goods from one port to another.  I suspect there’s a secondary reason trading is so ineffectual, though, and that’s because it’d give you a way to bypass the extraordinary amount of grind Sunless Sea puts you through in order to get anywhere. As an example, I’ve been playing for ten hours and I’ve just barely made enough money to upgrade from the starting ship. It’s astonishingly stingy with its cash rewards at the beginning of the game, with a half hour trip around several different ports yielding just a few hundred coins once you’ve paid for fuel, supplies and hull repairs. Having to scrape and scrabble for every last scrap of money certainly does put you in the shoes of a sea captain who is struggling to make their mark on the world, but it’s not something I’d want to put myself through more than once. Having this quantity of grind in a game where death can come quite quickly is not a good idea; I can’t imagine how soul-crushing it must be to play for several hours, make a mistake, lose your ship, and then have to build yourself up from nothing again. Like I said, there’s several options for passing your worldly possessions on to your successors, but you need to be quite well established to take advantage of them and so they won’t help at all until you get to that point.

This is my big beef with Sunless Sea, then: I’m not mortally offended by the grind — even if it is rather too severe — but it’s something that renders it very, very unsuitable to be a game where permadeath is turned on by default. In most roguelikes progress is significantly faster and playing for 4-5 hours would get you a significant chunk of the way through the game, enough so that you felt you hadn’t wasted your time once you carked it. In Sunless Sea that same 4-5 hours will barely get you started – and because of its reliance on static stories its not going to have the replayability of a roguelike, either. It seems like a big mistake for it to advertise itself on its permadeath credentials quite so heavily as it does, since that’s just going to lead to a lot of frustration and annoyance at how slow it is compared to most other games that do this.

sunless_combat

As long as you do turn permadeath off, though, Sunless Sea becomes the game it’s supposed to be: a captivating jaunt into a world that can be weird, wonderful and scary all at the same time. There’s more imagination packed into just one of the game’s islands than there is in most AAA titles that make it to market, and what particularly excites me about this is how easy it should be for the developers to add to the content that’s already there. I’m not saying writing a new island to the same quality of the existing ones is in any way an easy task for whoever has to write it, but it requires a far smaller investment of time and resources than your typical DLC and I think Sunless Sea could expand to be even larger than it currently is a few months down the line. With a constant drip-drip of new locations and storylines it’s a game that can just run and run, that I could potentially revisit in a year and experience something drastically different. That’s where Sunless Sea’s replayability will come from, not any foolish notion of forcing the player to restart the game every time they die. Let’s just hope Failbetter Games see things the same way.

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  1. Not that I’m saying anyone looked at KoDP and thought “Let’s copy that!”, but if you were thinking of making a game that was not that dissimilar to KoDP it can’t have hurt to see how well its rerelease did.
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13 thoughts on “Thoughts: Sunless Sea

  1. You haven’t mentioned the Fallen London, browser game in the same setting. It has storytelling on the same level (Emily Short wrote some of stories) and only had skill checks as gameplay mechanic. I’ve played it for a long time but eventually it kills you with grinding and puts you in a mood of skipping text (which supposed to be the most important part of the game) and grinding. And the game uses typical system of limiting your actions per day so you forget all those stories you’re involved in. Even if you pay real money you only get some marginal benefits like twice as much actions. You can’t immerse yourself in this game cause you only have around 10 (now 20) actions per session.

    Even if Sunless Sea has grinding at least it has gameplay. And you can play the game as much as you want seeing new content on a tolerable rate.

    Thanks for the permadeth advice. By the way, what’s randomized in this game? Island placement?

    • Darren says:

      Grinding does seem to be Failbetter’s Achilles’ heel, doesn’t it? The problem with Sunless Sea’s gameplay is that the combat is against monsters that very quickly outpace your starting ship’s capabilities. So until you grind yourself stupid to get some real upgrades, most of the gameplay is about avoiding combat, which isn’t super exciting.

      As for randomization, island placement does shuffle around when you start a new game or a new captain. Islands tend to be placed in similar positions from game to game (Mt. Palmerston is generally northeast of London) but even then there’s a lot of variation as to placement. When playing with permadeath on, the map doesn’t always shuffle around, which can create instances of delight when you realize things are how you left them and a sense of despair when one of the few worthwhile cargo runs is essentially inaccessible.

      • Hentzau says:

        The map is made up of something like a 5×5 grid. The leftmost row – the coastline with Fallen London — is static, so the Cumaean Canal and the Tomb Colonies will be in the same place every game. Everything else is at least pseudo-randomised; Frostfound and Avid Horizon will always be somewhere in the north, but you won’t know exactly where. Other islands can be found just about anywhere. It preserves that sense of venturing into the unknown that’s so important to the game.

  2. Darren says:

    Actually, it is very Lovecraftian, but it recalls one of his more obscure works: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. That’s personally my favorite Lovecraft story, by the way, so if you like Sunless Sea you might find it worth reading the novella.

    Agree 100% with you about the grind, but I’ve been playing with permadeath on just to see if I can handle it. You can actually pass on a decent amount of money to successor captains, but the ugly fact is that the money proves so important that any option that doesn’t increase it pales in comparison. And yes, it does the writing no favors to experience the same stories over and over because you have to try again from the start.

    Still, I’m cautiously optimistic that more content will alleviate the grinding a bit. Failbetter has done an excellent job supporting Fallen London and they’ve already guaranteed one expansion for Sunless Sea (with submarines!) so if nothing else there will be more variety.

    • Hentzau says:

      I’ve read a fair bit of Lovecraft (to the point where I noticed how many of his stories are written to the same formula and are essentially phoning it in) but I haven’t run across that one. I might go and look it up once I’m done here.

      • Darren says:

        Well hopefully you’re in for a treat! Dream-Quest is significantly different from most of his other output–though it explicitly connects to several other works–and comes closest to presenting a unified cosmology. I like Cthulu and cultists as much as the next guy, but it’s a damned shame that his evocative fantasy gets overlooked in favor of his often repetitive horror.

  3. Ian Neufeld says:

    Heyo! As an avid Sunless Sea player, I thought I’d leave a comment since your excellent review was linked from the Failbetter forums :)

    I find a lot of new captains are making a mistake much like the one you’re describing in the later part of the review. So I wanted to come by and drop a line to share my opinion on what a lot of people are faltering on in their early game.

    Sunless Sea is a game about exploration – and that exploration nets you a lot of information about how the game is designed. The prices of ports are set. The value of a quest is set. Some randomization of the islands occurs, but what they contain and where you can get money from quests is set – you know what the value of finding Polythreme, Nuncio, or Avid Horizon is.

    With your first captain – you didn’t. You knew none of that stuff, and almost certainly bumbled around into the darkness: excited, scared, and bewildered by what you would find there. Every new island was a giant unknown of both story and economic return. You bought items that turned out to be useless, backtracked to get something you needed, and generally were pretty inefficient with time, fuel, crew and supplies.

    Your second captain will not be the greenhorn that your first captain was. When your first captain dies, he passes along something that is not included in the Legacy screen: the player’s knowledge of the Unterzee. As you take on your second, third, fifth, tenth, or even twentieth captain, you do so with hopefully a finer-honed understanding of the mechanics of the game, of where profit can be found, of how to zail in a way that is efficient and profitable.

    You will spend less time reading (because you’ve already read some of the story), you will spend less resources making mistakes, you will set out with an understanding in your head of what islands will give you useful rewards for even the poorest, humblest of captains. And you can turn that knowledge into 5000 echoes of profit within the first half hour, putting you within range of a wide variety of ship upgrades. You’ll know which ones are important to get early and which ones won’t matter much.

    So, this above is why I do not think permadeath is a bad thing in Sunless Sea. I think in fact it does something valuable – it allows the player to show off how much they have learned of the Zee because they can revisit old locations and quests with a sense of mastery instead of constantly encountering new and unknown things. Some might say “this is a good thing” while others will scoff at the idea of playing the same content again. To each their own – but I know I have put many more hours than your predicted amount into the game and continue to love it – almost 20 captains later.

    • So you say thanks to permadeath you eventually will no longer play fascinating interactive fiction but will master grinding in crappy primitive arcade game?

      • Darren says:

        As an argument, saying there’s no grinding because you’ll learn the optimal way of playing the opening game after replaying the same early content over and over again isn’t the best I’ve seen.

        • Magnus Roe says:

          I’d like to step in here for a second.
          My first captain lasted me for for about the first evening, I had hoped to complete the game with one captain (sigh), but yeah. Fast forward two weeks and 21 hours later and I’m on my third captain, doing pretty well, but still using the base ship.
          I haven’t found a way to get 5000 Echoes in half an hour, but I disagree with Ian that the game is about dying dozens of time to learn the quickest paths to get money, because as the game itself explains to you during start up and while begging you to leave Perma-death alone: The game is about risk management. You want to go somewhere far off, you have to plan ahead. If you decide to go further than planned and waste fuel exploring a new island, killing a crab or go sightseeing between icebergs, consequences more often than not will bite your behind.
          You really need to make quite a lot of poor decisions to get yourself killed in this game, at least after the first death.

          Oh and about the stories repeating, I agree the resetting of story elements is probably one of the weakest parts of the game, but if you pick a different character background or aspiration, many of the stories will have different outcomes and options.

      • Ian Neufeld says:

        My apologies, but I was not aware that interactions beyond “click for next page” would qualify as “grinding”. Perhaps that’s my own RPG/MMO background speaking where I remember sitting in the same zone killing monsters for hours to increase my level.

        There is nothing akin to that in Sunless Sea, thus I do not see “replaying some of the IF” as grinding. I see the ability to explore story branches I otherwise could not. I – also – see a chance to optimize the expenditure of resources to get myself into a better financial position.

        If what you are after is the IF – you need a bigger ship for exactly two quests. You need to engage in combat for one quest your character might have to do. I understand you’re trying to see the game and find out more, but – what are you even looking to spend that money on if you’re focusing on the story?

        • Hentzau says:

          It’s true that I’ve been able to explore most of the map in my crappy starting ship, but there are definite no-go areas. Movement around the Khanate is really dicey because of those war trimarans. A bigger ship is necessary to explore basically the entire bottom row of the map, which is populated by those damn coral flukes – which you’re required to kill to complete a couple of the longer quests such as the one the Venderbight Curator gives you. Basically there are areas of the map where I feel like I can’t go until I upgrade, and it’s taking me way too long to get there.

          And replaying some of the IF isn’t grinding. Replaying *all* of the IF, however, is, since there’s so much back and forth involved as you shuttle things across the map. I wouldn’t mind doing something like Nuncio again, but if I had to get all the bits and pieces required for the Apocyan chess piece again I don’t think I could be bothered.

          Lastly, I’d make the point that even 20 hours is a non-trivial investment of my free time these days (unless I’m having a binge-gaming weekend it would take me a couple of weeks to sink that much into a game), and if Sunless Sea isn’t going to be a bite-size experience I can complete in one sitting a la Spelunky I’m not very interested in repeating the same content several times. Do I want Sunless Sea to be more forgiving? Lord, no. Much of its atmosphere is generated by it being a rather unforgiving environment – it’s hard to project an atmosphere of oppressive terror if there’s nothing terrible to be afraid of, after all. I do think it’s a better game for being able to save it, however – only being able to save in port is a reasonable compromise, especially when you’re only going to save it if you’ve got enough fuel to make it back to London.

          Now, all that being said, Sunless Sea putting the option in the hands of the player and allowing them to choose between permadeath and manual saving is a great thing to do – bitching about the grind aside, I can play the game in the way that I want, and you can play the game in the way that you want, and we both get a lot out of it. I’d still advise that the typical player turn saving on, at least to start with, but they can always fire up a permadeath game if that’s what floats their boat. I wish more games were that flexible. :)

          • Ian Neufeld says:

            “those damn coral flukes – which you’re required to kill to complete a couple of the longer quests such as the one the Venderbight Curator gives you”

            Actually, all paths that ask for a Fluke Core except the Principles of Coral one have alternate ways to complete them that don’t involve killing a Fluke. The Venturer sometimes asks for a Fluke Core, but asks for Caskets of Sapphires at the same time. The Curator is looking for the color “Irrigo”, which the Fluke Core qualifies as – but so does an Eyeless Skull (of which there are three non-combat sources).

            I digress though …

            I agree – collecting all the pieces for the Principles of Coral or the Curator is really grindy. So don’t do them. My last few games I’ve turned in the 2 or 3 easiest pieces of each of those, and left the rest of the quest line unfinished. I’m not required to complete these quests to advance the areas of the game I’m more interested in – but I can do the easily accessible pieces to help cover my costs.

            Sunless Sea isn’t a linear IF game where you need to go through all the steps of unlocking this door every time you restart, or else you can’t progress. It’s a game with 50 different mini-stories occurring in parallel, and you can explore the ones that suit you while ignoring or only partially progressing others.

            Personally, I collect enough money to not be concerned about running out of fuel … and then go explore a new corner of the game that I didn’t get to last run. I focus my attention on different ports, I choose different options when talking to my characters, or I try to set up different combinations of events to see how the game handles archrivals next to each other. And I *still* haven’t completed Saviour’s Rocks in all my hours of play (maybe because those spiders are just so icky).

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