Sunless Skies

If you can look past the minor annoyances, the writing makes all the sunless games more than worth playing.

Sunless Skies é um jogo com uma narrativa tão viva, intensa e complexa que talvez fosse melhor se aplicada em um livro. O jogo como um todo seria no máximo medíocre se não contasse com essa parte. Seu gameplay é lento e difícil; sua direção de arte é boa, mas sem identidade e pecando em alguns quesitos; sua parte sonora é mediana. Pode valer a pena, porém, se você tiver a paciência para acompanhar uma história incrível.

Failbetter live up to there name... Many improvements to Sunless Sea. but Still so much fail. Pro's: Great writing, improved User interface that takes the design of '100 days', gorgeous world design, combat much more dynamic and fun. Cons: 70% of the game is doing nothing waiting to get somewhere.. the pacing is awful and ends up you have to grind the same locations to get a slither of story. This game tries to be a rogue lite like the first.. but it makes for a terrible roguelite experience as you end up just like the first repeating the same story content. You can turn this off which i recommend.. but you still have to deal with **** movement speed and the wims of autosave.. which just failed on me.

Don't be fooled: Sunless Skies is a game about horror. More accurately, it's about the narrative of the game beating you over the head every so often to remind you of the horrors you're supposedly in. I gauge Sunless Skies by a ratio that I call 2 to 1; two parts brilliance to one part BS. See, most horror games allow you to circumvent the horror aspects by allowing you to plan for---and by extension mitigate---parts of the bad stuff you encounter. It's a delicate balancing act that the best horror games are able to pull off. There are exceptions, such as Darkest Dungeon, where you just have to prepare as best you can and hope for the best. Sunless Skies delights in disallowing that mitigation, foisting inconvenient and often hidden dangers upon you at every turn. I'm referring to the "Nightmare" and "Terror" mechanics, in which "Terror" fills at a constant rate regardless of what you do, and "Nightmares," which measures how close you are to an unavoidable game over. Too much Terror, and your crew panics, with mutinies, madness, and outright crew loss. This guage fills constantly, and also fills due to actions you take. The problem is, it fills almost no matter what your choices are, and the game doesn't always tell you what induces Terror. Strip an enemy locomotive for parts? Somehow, that's scary, so you get Terror. Fail a check for hidden goods? Find Terror instead. Simply walk into the parlor of a Crewmember whom you apparently know well, but not well enough? That's Terrifying. Strike up a conversation with the wrong person? Oh, Terror. And often, the events that happen due to Terror do so with no apparent rhyme or reason, and often in rapid succession. I can't count the number of times that I've had a crew induce mutiny while I was fighting an enemy and my finger clicked a choice because I was in the heat of battle. Once, I had a mutiny happen three different times within the span of a minute of each other. Additionally, there is absolutely no doubt that the game will force you into situations during story choices regardless of your apparent success rate. I have failed FAR more times than succeeded, even with a 50% chance or higher of success due to my stats. It doesn't help that even with an apparent 100% success rate, you can STILL have what is called a "partial success." Even a partial success with a 100% success rate comes with a penalty. That penalty is---you guessed it---usually Terror. Eliminating Terror comes with few opportunities, but eliminating Nightmares is far more difficult, because the price to do so gets higher with every attempt. It's an un-fun mechanic that puts an arbitrary timer on your adventures, because regardless of what you do, it will get to the point where nothing can be done. This would be fine if there were multiple saves, but there are not---which is itself a heavy handed mechanic in modern games that really shouldn't be present. Combat is about as much fun as heaving a bag of rocks around in waist-high water. Your locomotive (why a **** the SKY?? Why not a zeppelin?) is as nimble as you would expect a flying locomotive to be. That is to say, it isn't. At all. Unlike Sunless Sea, you can strafe, but that doesn't mean much. Fighting others amounts to lobbing painfully slow volleys at a distance while your enemies dance circles around you. Particularly bad offenders are the Guests, parasites that masquerade as friendly locomotives and then spring their dirty surprise at you up close, scooting around far faster than you can ever hope to turn. Your only real tactic for survival is in spending an enormous amount of cash on a vessel that can take enough punishment during these frequent (and frequently frustrating) encounters. It doesn't help that the writing is very much in love with its own faux-Lovecraftian narrative, which it heaps upon you at every opportunity (O, horror! Lo, A Dead Star! Is it not terrible, this bleak and cyclopean sphere? Are you not frightened??) There are moments of levity, but they are far outweighed by the grimdark story, in which seeking the wonders of the sky simply aren't worth it. The game is practically devoid of any kind of humor, and the characters are a forgettable roster of cardboard placeholders, roughly half of which are of ambiguous gender, with no real reason to delve into their individual stories aside from the potential monetary rewards. I put about 80 hours into Sunless Skies. I put twice that into Sunless Sea, because that game maes more sense of the dread things that lurk beneath the waves and the things to discover were infinitely more fascinating. Sunless Skies is more accessible, with a more fleshed out economy, but that doesn't mean it's **** more fun. The writing can be interesting, but having the specter of failure constantly hang over your head through no fault of your own isn't fun at all.

The atmosphere is amazing! The setting, rich and beautiful! And then there's the actual gameplay. Are you excited to go back to the base to refill your supplies constantly? What about chugging along at a snail's pace just to get back to the place you were just exploring? How about dying in combat because using your dodge too much makes you take damage? There's potential, but I'm sick of sitting through the grind to reach it.