Logyck

Sunless Sea is a triumph of imagination and flair, though technically it is a bit of a mess. Long story short, you play as various sea captains on their voyages around the 'Unterzee': a strange underground ocean full of eldritch horrors and and other strangeness, both human and non-human. Let's get the simple stuff out of the way first: the writing is perhaps the greatest collection of prose in a video game this year or last year, and perhaps ever. It reads like Charles **** making 'come hither' eyes to HP Lovecraft, and one of the greatest joys this game has to offer is simply the joy of text, and of drinking in all the wonderful things that these game designers had to say about their world. The graphic design is also exceptional. The player is confronted with stylish renditions of ships, islands and many things much more wacky and wonderful than those first examples. Many things seem to just have half a toe dipped into the uncanny valley: several of the human characters have exaggerated features, and the player themselves can only choose a silhouette, rather than a portrait, and whilst everything is presented more or less on a two dimensional plane, the artists have obviously worked hard to bring just a hint of the third dimension into their game. Ships rock slightly back and forth on the water, and the Lifebergs (towering masses of living ice) rock menacingly to and fro as they chase you down. The sound design is also absolutely excellent: the ambient sound of the water is actually incredibly relaxing just on its own, whilst the various melodies that play as you sail are all memorable and evocative in their own ways. The only criticism I could make is the somewhat counter-intuitive recycling of sound effects for various different monsters, something I think could be easily fixed. However, substance-wise and on a technical level, the game sometimes disappoints. It's intensely resource-focused, to the extent that it sometimes hampers the ability of the player to explore as the designers probably intended. Certain resources are valued the same as others, but are much, much harder to obtain, giving the game somewhat of an imbalanced feel. The UI is a bit of a mess, with some story objectives revealed through officers, some in the journal, and some through items in the hold, and without the ability to annotate the map, it becomes difficult to keep track of everything you're supposed to be doing. The action of the combat is often dull and uninspired, with little practical variety in weapons or abilities, and occasionally the game veers dangerously into the territory of 'grind'-something that really shows that the people making it have only previously made a commercially successful browser game, where grind is essentially gospel. Despite this, I wholeheartedly recommend Sunless Sea to any friend I talk to, because to cut a long story short, the mild lows are not enough to distract from the wonderful highs. By focusing on their strengths, Failbetter Games have created an experience that, for better or worse, simply should not be missed.