SUNLESS SEA
LOSE YOUR MIND. EAT YOUR CREW. DIE. Take the helm of your steamship and set sail for the unknown! Sunless Sea is a game of discovery, loneliness and frequent death, set in the award-winning Victorian Gothic universe of Fallen London.
SUNLESS SEA is a exploration, lovecraftian and survival game
developed and published by Failbetter Games.
Released on February 06th 2015 is available in English on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
It has received 9,182 reviews of which 7,626 were positive and 1,556 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.1 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 18.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified SUNLESS SEA into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at SUNLESS SEA through various videos and screenshots.
Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows XP or later
- Processor: 2Ghz or better
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1280x768 minimum resolution, DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics card
- DirectX: Version 9.0c
- Storage: 700 MB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible
MacOS
- OS: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
- Processor: 2Ghz or better
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1280x768 minimum resolution, DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics card
- Storage: 700 MB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible
Linux
- Processor: 2Ghz or better
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1280x768 minimum resolution, DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics card, OpenGL Core
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Tldr: Sunless Sea wants you to get to know it, which is actually made quite pleasant and interesting by the many tales of the people living in it. Once you do know your way around, however... It's Dark Souls level catharsis! I love this game. Now that that's out, I wanna say I also get when people are confused about what the game really wants them to experience. As an overview: This game is, on the one hand, a thrilling 2D open-world adventure/exploration game with rogue-like elements and a difficulty I found comparable to any of FromSoftware's Soulsborne titles. On the other hand, it is a beautifully fleshed-out choose-your-own-adventure narrative, being told as a text adventure game in each port. Sunless Sea is immersive to me in the sense that it offers so many different things to be engaged with (from at times quite tricky route-planning to not strand in the middle of the ocean, to the age-old ethical question on whether to eat your Navigator... :) ) I remember being set into my first savegame: Being told that my character would likely not make it far, and that I'd have to act brazenly to achieve basically anything at all noteworthy. (Of course, I played with manual saves enabled back then.) The shops in the starting port of London layed out a myriad of stat boosting equipment for my ship (all of them wayy expensive, mind you!), as well as letting you glimpse the (literal) mountain of items that exists in the game as trading goods. At face value, this is nothing special at first, but I can assure you that every. single. item. on. that. list. (and all the ones London merchants are not interested in) can be turned into a way to break a profit! >:D As you explore, you figure out what ports sell and buy which goods, which is also generally quite memorable because every single destination is a whole part of the world with its own culture, own customs and own peculiarities. When exploring, the world feels alive! You have to adapt to an unforgiving world (once, I "sank" by virtue of letting all my 5 crew fight a Siren. I learned the hard way that day that Sirens, if fought and lost against, kill six crew members. :,) ), while time actually advances, changing what events are available in the world as well! I totally get why people get confused or frustrated when the material portion of the world you are setting out to explore is really just teasing your ignorance, without any explanation whatsoever on what "Parabola-Linen" is, or HOW THE HELL you will get your hands on one of the elusive "S&C Longboxes"... Looking back on it though, I think this is all the more intentional: I find the creators have a unique and humorously grotesque style of writing, and when first confronted with one of the mascots of the game right there in London, you feel no less like the stranger in a strange land than the Londoners before you. Seeing that some people were frustrated by the vastness of the game while simultaneously being given no explanation whatsoever is something I can relate to, even though Sunless Sea wasn't that experience for me. I am a naturally very curious person and my drive to explore seems to have carried me through that initial phase of confusion... I think the biggest point of critique might be the way quests, stati and quest-related attributes are being represented, which might be the most frustrating of all. Generally, anything that is neither an item (i.e. for trading) nor a ship ressource nor a player character stat is a little picture including a short description altogether found in the menu "Journal". Earlier, I mentioned that time advances, which is being kept track of by a quality counting up from 0 all the way to 199 (...I believe. To be honest, I have only once completed the game in a very unexpected "draw"... THAT'S RIGHT: I FINALLY FINISHED A QUEST AND THE REWARD WAS NEITHER MONEY NOR FAME, BUT GETTING A PERMA-BAN FROM MY MORTAL SHELL INSTEAD!). This quality steps forward a certain amount (usually like 7 or 8 in my experience)whenever you return to London after having spent an irl minute out at sea. I believe this is a quite elegant solution to the question of how to advance time, but it bears one of the many catches of this game: Being out and about uses ressources, and eventually you will run out of money to buy said ressources in London. Fortunately, the game is well-balanced in that regard as the people you meet on your travels often do things like dining with you, which boils down to free ressources, one way or another. Back to qualities, which are far more than just the state of civilisations advancing in their schemes: Favours you get with factions, quest stages (including Officers', aka companion quests), any more abstract threats like nightmares or... ...(daylight...! o.o) -- heck, even the counts of the spies you instigated into various ports in the world (why, yes of course you can become a spymaster!), or the number of Captains lost on the current line of savegames has a neat little picture and a count associated with it! (By the way: You can circumvent having to start from ZERO after game over fairly easily... You will still have sunk that expensive merchant vessel you have drowned in, unfortunately...! o7 ) What I'm meandering around is the fact that the qualities' descriptions are often short and not rarely more emblematic than helpful. The time quality for example reads "Your time at zee will change you... and London." -- Now, do you know what this random quality that reads "Out with the old laws, in with the new." actually means?? Or try "You've been known to visit the three sisters of [Location]". I know how that quest progresses, but I am bloody unaware of how I get there. If you think it'll be half-bad because there is a list of quests, then I must disappoint you: THESE ARE THE QUESTS! >;D Seriously though: I've played the newest game the creators behind Sunless Sea made and it handles quest information better. Sunless Sea's mercilessness shines through in this place as well, and I suggest you keep some sort of notes when playing this game in case your memory and/or attention span is prone to glitches like mine. ^^ :) Frankly, I like creating spreadsheets a lot, and one day I wanted to find out the most optimal progression through the game (as trading for money to buy better ships to get faster but more dangerous money is a little grindy... Look, if you want easy progression without story or immersion, play Cookie Clicker. :p). I started logging my journeys, timing the routes, and writing down my routing in advance. I make it sound more technical than it really needs to be, my point being that keeping track of where you will (migth have to) visit five ports over makes the game a lot easier, since even if your crew suddenly all go insane at the prospect of their Captain suffering prophetic nightmares, you can still acess whether or not straining the engines for that little bit of extra speed to get to one of the safer (== more sane) ports faster is a good idea or will break your ship in half. :) ...That is not to say that this game can not be played casually, oh no! I'm just saying that, at its core, it is designed as a mild sweatshop and is, in my opinion, most thrilling when played that way! :3
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***Review in progress, may edit and add to it once I progress even more *** This game is fascinating. It's weird: It took me years to get into it. I heard about it, was quite interested, but on my first attempts to get into it years ago, I didn't understand a lot of things and never got far. Still, it was sitting in my library, kinda tempting me to try again. This time, 6 or so years after purchasing it, it clicked. Yes, it's mysterious, has a fascinating Lovecraftian vibe, and the world and lore of it can be confusing at first. I guess that, if you are familiar with the concept of Fallen London, it's easier to get into it. So basically, you cross the mysterious and dangerous ocean in your ship. You have to manage your fuel, food and the terror level of your crew. There are other ships and sea monsters that may attack you. Pick your battles carefully, as your ship may get damaged, and you may run out of fuel too. More and more, you will explore the map, find new ports, compile port reports and hand them in for money (echoes). You may also try raising money by doing certain trade routes which you have to figure out (or look up on the web). By now, I have explored most of the map, am slowly gaining more money to get a better ship with better (and more) weapons. I try to avoid most combat, and raising a certain stat (iron i.e. imcreases your damage, veils make you more stealthy, so you will be less easier to detect etc.) helps with that. There are quests you can do, which are a bit confusing at first, as you won't be told exactly what to do and how in some cases... you actually have to explore, read quite a bit and try things out. My journeys are quite fun, and you actually feel like it's an achievement when you return to your home harbour, your ship slightly damaged, your hold full of stuff you can sell, your log full of port reports to hand in. It's an adventure, and I have finally started to enjoy it quite a lot. So: This game will not exactly hold your hand. You will die, but you will keep certain advantages of your previous character if you start over. You may run out of fuel or food in the middle of the ocean. You will have to read quite a bit and actually spend some thought, but if you do, you will find a fascinating game world with a mysterious, yet beautiful land- and seascape that offers risk, reward, challenges, insights and weird occurences. Give it a try! I sure am glad I did.
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At 66% off, this game is a hidden gem that should, at the very least, be a unique experience for you. The game toys a lot with risk and reward in ways that feel thrilling and intriguing. It's slower paced(most of the time) and punishes you for not calculating all of the risks, but I found a massive joy in pushing myself past difficult situations, hell, even to the point of death to my character, to discover more about the world and the limits of it. My biggest advice to newer players is to experiment. Try differents endings, try maxing out a certain stat. Try things you know will kill you or cripple you. The joy in this game is discovering all of the complex writing the game has to offer. I can feel the love and excitement that the writers had for this game. This is another one of those games that I wish I could play fully blind again, because exploring the map end to end, discovering new creatures, threats, and relationships, is absolutely exhilarating to me. I settle for peddling it to any of my friends who might have the patience. The sluggish, sometimes frustrating, ship combat and some of the repitition of port events are certainly a means to and end, but in my opinion, the sum of its parts is something that drove me crazy with curiosity and adoration. I felt rewarded for putting in effort to unturn as many stones as I could, and I hope you will too.
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The slower you play it the better it is. Read everything, and make sure you fully understand what you are reading. I've had to look up dozen of words used in this game because they are not in common usage. If you let the game progress at its own pace and not at yours you will be much more immersed in this world.
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It makes zero sense for this game to be a roguelike. Making you replay 60 hours of narrative-driven text-based-adventure plot is awful. Good news is that you can just save the game and use checkpoints anyway and all you lose is an achievement. I highly recommend doing it this way; the intergenerational/descendant mechanics are very cool but not cool enough to play through 30+ hours of the exact same content. Not without a year long break, anyway. The writing and worldbuilding is phenomenal. I'm obsessed with this game and this world and really can't recommend it enough. It's bizarre and surprising and just twisted enough to engage you without dwelling in the grimdark of it all.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 18 November 2024 19:21 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 20 January 2025 04:34 |
| Steam price | 22 January 2025 20:43 |
| Steam reviews | 22 January 2025 16:06 |
Online players
49
Developer
Failbetter Games
Publisher
Failbetter Games
Release
06 Feb 2015
Platforms