Publisher: – Steam/Digital Distribution

Developer: – Failbetter Games

Platform: – PC (XP or better), Mac (OS X 10.6 or better)

Genre: – Survival Horror/ Rougelike

Released: – TBA

Rating: – N/A

Content Warning: – Horror, Cannibalism, Animal Cruality, Implied Corpse Disturbing, Mind Trickery.

Online Features: – Integrated into browser-based game known as Fallen London

The Good Fortune of a Windfall on the Sunless Sea

Were you a street urchin? Or a Poet? Perhaps a Veteran of the campaign against Hell?

“The Zee bats squawks as you pass, heading towards the admiralty building, the closest thing to a mayor in the city. An uncle, trapped down here when the city fell to save the Traitor Empress’ husband has passed away. He’s left me a boat, an old crumbly steam-crawler barely fit to traverse the Zee, but it’s a start. Anything is better than being trapped inside London, anything is better than being trapped down below.”

First things first, this is a game is in early access, so many of the features and story content, of which is the main bread and butter of the game, is missing. However there is just enough to bother writing a beta impression or review of the game and how it’s doing so far. So with that required disclaimer out-of-the-way, let’s begin.

London, the crown jewel of the British Empire and at the height of its power, falls into the Underzee. A nightmarish zone where demons are real, the monsters are sitting next you enjoying breakfast and the sharks have had their bones replaced with metal and are mighty peeved about it.

All for the sake of one crown prince.

London isn’t alone however; other nations and empires have fallen. The Khanate for instance has been around for years and years and regularly battles with the hollow forces of Fallen London. The Iron Men, golems empowered by strange and badly understood magics float around capturing and destroying any ship unlucky enough to get caught in the lights of their cold dead eyes.

This isn’t to mention the light beasts, bandits and other ill-intentioned beings that ply the Zee.

So where does it all start in Sunless Sea?

The game starts out with you choosing who you are, starting with a past. Will you be a street urchin? Thrown out from your gang for growing up? Or will you be a veteran of a war with hell, using his hard-earned loot and pension to find his fortune out at Zee? In truth there are only around five different pasts based around one of the five skills that are used in the game. Some stats are more useful than others, with a skill bonus such as pages being more useful than a skill bonus in iron (Iron being the skill that deals damage) and often guides will recommend that you start out with different past based on the need for different stats rather than any particular enjoyment from what role you play.

After you’ve chosen a past, it’s time to choose a future. Do you want to gather knowledge? Perhaps avenge a father? Or simply acquire wealth and good fortune? Like before, there are only five default ambitions that can be chosen and at time only two of the five had been implemented within the game, Fulfilment (The desire to gather knowledge) and Wealth (Get Money, have servants). The ambitions are rather more decorative than the past, as they offer no particular advantage in skill or money.

It’s rather more likely you’ll finish the game by dying somewhere on the Zee, a fate that’s infinitely more likely than achieving your ambition, though this is slightly more to do with the fact that a lot of the events and story fiction and locations haven’t been implemented yet but the game developers have indicated that they intend the game to be hard and that you’ll be prone to death more often than not.

The final step before you can begin traversing the great Zee is to choose a term of address, a picture and name. There are six terms you can be addressed by, four of them are specifically gendered while two leave the gender ambiguous, it’s a bit of fluff in all honestly as it doesn’t really matter, in Fallen London the morals of the Victorian Era are somewhat disrupted by the fact that actual human souls and silks from another dimension forged from dreams are common cargo.

Personally speaking I go with Captain and take a rather dashing image of a man with glasses, but you can choose to be a mummy or a deep-sea diver if you wish. With your personal details filled out, you are ready to set out onto the Zee and ply your trade.

Crypt Mummies and Mushroom Wine

Progress is good!

The game is, as one might expect for an early access game barely coming in above 500 mb somewhat sparse of content. In-fact the developer helpfully provides a chart, pictured above, showing the progress of the game in all of its glory.

A lot of the main functions, such as the sailing about and the exploration are fairly fleshed out meaning the game is actually quite playable, and my own experiences support this. I’ve had plenty of fun trading between Venderbight and Fallen London, getting money for transporting mummies and wine to a colony of people who have become almost destroyed walking corpses.

As I said, the game is all about the weird and wonderful.

That said, the game’s economy is less fleshed out than the sailing aspect, meaning that making Echos, one of the game’s currency, are harder to get than they would be in the fully fledged game. Though this isn’t to say you are likely to be overflowing in currency later on, but that because of the Early Access nature of the game some elements of the economy are not fully implemented.

Tying into the economy is the questing and story aspect of the game, which again isn’t fully fleshed out as it will be at the end of the Early Access period. A lot of the game, outside of the content for sailing and combat, isn’t exactly there yet. Again making it hard to eke out the money and supplies you need to survive in the game. For context, it took me 3 or 4 days to earn upgraded engine and a further 4 days to earn upgrades for my weapons and lighting systems.

That’s a lot of hard work for the most basic of upgrades, and suggests strongly that the game is harder than it’s meant to be.

That said however, what is there is very interesting. The exploration for the sake of lore is very fleshed out, with only a few sections of the game missing due to the incompleteness of its Early Access. You learn about locations such as Gionatti Harbour. Located next to the only way back to the surface of the Earth and you can’t spend much time on the surface.

Or perhaps visit Abby Rock, home to the sisterhood, a group of nuns who refuse contact with the outside to only the barest essentials. Or perhaps Iron & Misery Company interests you? As they harvest the giant mushrooms for the resources they provide.

All of these places can be visited, provided you plot out your course right into the dark of your map. Exploration also adds in one of the other major mechanics of the game. Terror. It is a measure of how sacred you are by the horrors of the Zee. The more scared you are, the worse some events become or the more dangerous they become.

If it hit’s 100, you get a mutiny. If you are smart, and brutal, you can crush it with a somewhat decent outcome. At the cost of half your crew and maybe even damage to your ship. If you want to resolve it peacefully you’ll have much more of a challenge to do so and are more likely to die.

And once you die, that’s game over. No more lives. You get to choose one thing to save for your next play through ranging from a favourite crew member to a copy of the map you have to a favourite skill you’d like to preserve. The only other thing you can preserve on top of this is your money, but only after acquiring the rights to a town house in London. And yes, there are two types of crew members. One kind is faceless, they have no particular story and exist only to crew the many stations that your ship needs to keep running. If the generic crew falls below 50% you’ll lose half your speed. If you lose 75% of your crew, I hope you enjoy really slowly travelling about.

The other type of crew are more your like officers, they provide bonuses to your skills, increasing your health and damage. They also provide story content, with a few even providing some cool gear like the engine called the “Serpentine”. A nice engine that increases speed, engine efficiency and sustainability. And if you die, that’s all gone.

In short, avoid dying. It’s not forgiving in any way at all.

Before I’d like to start wrapping this up, I think we should touch on the story such as it is. It’s not handholdy at all, even for the limited amount of it that exists there. There isn’t a quest log, so any story mission has to be remembered or placed down on a bit of paper. This also has the side benefit of preventing massive dialogue skipping, something that pervades most RPGs in general.

The stories themselves aren’t really stories. They are more easily described as storylets. There’s no overarching plot aside from your ambition and what you yourself set out to do. You aren’t a fulcrum of events; you aren’t going to change the Underzee to make it a better place.

You are just one guy trying to make a living for him and his crew members in the best way possible. Whether that involves doing a boring and mundane, but ultimately safe trip between London and Venderbight or rushing out to head to the khanate for fun and profit but taking the risks associated with that.

There are no hero’s in the Underzee, just the poor buggers who had the misfortune to be trapped down there when their leaders screwed them over.

An Imperial Proclamation

Sometimes you get into fights, sometimes the fights find you.

In conclusion, the game is actually a lot of fun to play. With the emerald release the map is now fully randomised every time you play, aside from when you bring your charts over from another character. Putting it alongside the likes of Faster than Light as the easiest comparison to make. Sadly however a good portion of the story is missing, as are parts of the over world.

This means I can’t really recommend the game to anyone just yet, it’s good some really good promise but it just needs a few more months of content on its bones before I could recommend it to the same level that I could recommend a game such as Kerbal Space Program.

However, I can recommend that you look out for this game, especially if you like games where you have to carefully manage resources, explore interesting ,if somewhat limited at moment, locations and stories and enjoying the fun that you can get from simply making your way as a trader in a big scary world. All manner of horrors await out there, all waiting for a chance to meet you and your crew.

Load up your supplies, check the amount of the fuel you have in the hold, and buy some trading goods.

Lose Your Mind, Eat Your Crew