Falling into a Sunless Sea
A Retrospective
Reading time: 5 mins
Imagine standing along on a pier at midnight. The soft lights of the seaside town behind you glint on the dark waves, but the stars are crowded out by an overcast sky. A buoy rocks beyond the breakers, the last drop of light in the sea. You can hear the waves breaking, the vibrations coming up through your feet and your face wet with salt spray, but outside the light of your torch is pitch darkness. This might be a calm place, or one that makes your heart race with anxiety at the freezing waters ready to welcome you into their depths. Sunless Sea asks you to step off of the pier and sail headlong into the night.
It is always midnight in Sunless Sea, the overcast sky built of stone and punctured with lights that are not stars. Released onto the world by Failbetter Games in 2015, the Unterzee on which you are to sail is contained miles below ground, somewhere beneath Europe, in a cavern called the Neath. This is something of a sequel to their ongoing Fallen London; the city was traded for a life by Queen Victoria and fell into the darkness of the Neath, crushing the city that now lays below it. Fallen London lies twisted and broken around the Echo Bazaar, but as you stand at Wolfstack Docks your back is firmly set against the city skyline. It is time to put to Zee.
Where you take your ship and your zailors is up to you. People, which encompasses more than humans in the shadows below sunlight, have to eat. If you sail too far and too fast, you’ll run out of supplies and be forced to choose whether eating a zailor makes up for the loss in man-power. The terror of your crew increases outside of port, as they stare at the shapes moving just out of the light of the ship’s main lamp. If it gets too high, you might end up leaping from the bow to join the zailors who drowned before you. Are they really there, or is their drowning song a hallucination? It’s best not to linger and find out, so keep your ship stocked with fuel and make haste for port.
But where exactly is port? When you first set out from Wolfstack Docks, the warm lights of London winking out behind you, your map is blank. The Neath is a tricky place and between playthroughs the map is scrambled to keep you on your toes. Places near London won’t go far; you can always find Venderbight reliably to the North, but the location of Gaider’s Mourn or Godfall is lost in the sea mist. Experienced captains soon learn to plot a route from port to port; dropping off a cargo of Darkdrop Coffee Beans at Khan’s Heart to earn a favour, then swinging by Mount Palmerston to take on more fuel to head further out to zee.
Shipping logistics is only half of the game. After making port and tying up at an unfamiliar dock, you are given an opportunity to interact with and progress stories within the port. This happens largely within the mind of the player – Failbetter Games use their strong writing chops to make you taste the dusty air of Venderbight and biting winds of the Avid Horizon through text adventures. Stories often take several visits to a port to complete, and usually direct the player further out to Zee for items or conversations at ports yet more distant. The light RPG mechanics are present here; four traits (Iron, Hearts, Mirrors, and Veils) to try against skill checks, and sometimes specific items to grease a palm or soothe a savage heart. Ports and portraits are the main way to collect officers, who buff your traits and your ship as well as having their own stories to progress. The eclectic denizens of the Neath abound at Zee: Rubbery Men with the faces of squid; Devils with red eyes (Hell being a short distance from London) and a fondness for souls; Clay Men from Polythreme where everything is alive and most of it can scream. The stories of officers, and stories found in ports, guide the player through the Unterzee by pointing them towards other ports. Elegant.
This is Sunless Sea at its best, a dreamlike (nightmarish) voyage through the darkness of a weird world where you have no context to understand anything at first glance. This constitutes the first big filter for players considering becoming a captain; Sunless Sea is often bewildering. The captain you play has more context for world events and items than the player does, and Failbetter Games expect the player to become familiar with their game worlds by immersion. If you can’t commit to understanding the setting on its own terms, or bounce off of the often flowery language that is a staple of Failbetter’s games, the Sunless Sea is closed to you.
The gameplay depth available on the Sunless Sea is far less than a fathom, if the player is inclined to be cynical. As pointed out by Mandalore Gaming’s review the RPG elements favour min-maxing over evenly distributed skills, as late-game content favours specialising in one or two of the four available skills. We see the same in the open-world gameplay; you direct your vessel on a 2D plane, avoiding obstacles and combat wherever possible. There is little tactical depth beyond planning your route. The combat itself is the most disappointing aspect of Sunless Sea. Late 19th century naval combat evokes stalwart ironclads trading blows from their big guns, black soot billowing from smokestacks as one takes a crippling shot to the bow and begins to list to port. I would say it is impossible for Sunless Sea to live up to this expectation, given the 2D top-down viewpoint and the focus on narrative rather than naval combat. This leaves us with a somewhat rote combat system, where the player attempts to avoid incoming damage from ships or zee-beasts while keeping the enemy within the arc of their guns. Serviceable, but nothing more.
It perhaps unfair of me to demand Sunless Sea be other than it is and I’m inclined to be charitable in hindsight as the sequel, Sunless Skies, fixed many of the issues associated with being a captain in the Neath. At its core Sunless Sea is a game for dreamers and explorers, who want to travel to unknowable lands where nothing is as it seems. If you are drawn to Sunless Sea, it is for the mystery, the writing, the visuals, and the music. Brent Barkman and Maribeth Solomon provide over forty minutes of OST that is locked to locations in-game; from the dreamy “Benthic” where harp-strings wander amid the other instruments, to the heavy notes of “Storm, Stone, Salt” that lay in the mind like fog surrounding a ship lost at Zee.
I expect many players will bounce off of Sunless Sea due to its flaws, and many may prefer the more refined mechanics and wilder setting of Sunless Skies. For readers drawn to the dark and quiet of the Neath, I think there is still much to be found in the setting and presentation of Sunless Sea that makes it worthwhile.
Further Reading
Sunless Sea Review, Mandalore Gaming, Youtube, 2018.
This work is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0