zappo

I have spend now around 10hrs playing this game, and I'm ready to write a review. Let's start with a short summary: Seldom have I played a game that gives me such mixed messages. Sublime text based story and a truly wonderful world battle with bad game mechanics and pure boredom. And while I wish I could fully advise to buy this game, I feel troubled by some pretty bad design choices. The good: This has been said before, the game world and the writing are simply great. The whole world, while really dark makes complete sense. Every port that you explore has new interesting stories to tell. The choices you have to make are meaningful, even if you succeed in challenges you often have to deal with negative effects that come sidelong. Like some artifact you get that is worth a lot but raises your Terror levels. The card systems is kind of artificial, but works really good. You always know what you need and what your chances are to succeed in a challenge. As a whole the setting is wonderful and you strife to learn more from this world, explorer the secrets of the deep Zea and deal with it's terrors. The neutral (People might find this good or bad according to personal taste): The game is really hard. Ressource management is brutal, most of your money is spend on fuel and food. Building up something extra takes a long time. You will die quite some time, and dying is really punishing in this game. In the beginning you loose everything and you will have to start all over again. If you find this troubling I advise you to turn off permanent death witch is an option. (But default is unforgiving mode, so be careful) Also ff you die there is no random content, except the position of islands. So you will have to go through everything you did again. Overall the pace of the game is really slow. Most of the time you will stare at your screen seeing your little steamer make it's way through an almost black screen. Of course this adds a lot to the feeling of the game, but if you are after fast paced action, you won't get it in this game. The bad There are way to little options for ships, equipment etc. After 10 hours I haven't bought a single thing! I have now 2.000 money to spare, which is not bad considering the time I spent and there simply isn't a single thing that would make sense to buy. I repeat that 10 hours in the game and I haven't bough a single upgrade because there is nothing to buy: - New gun -> you will avoid fights 90% of the time anyway - New engine -> makes you slightly faster but consumes more precious fuel - New ship -> WAY more expensive then 2.000 echo While we are at it: combat ****. You will be stuck with a single gun forever because you can't buy another ship, so you have tactical options of 0. Also combat is really dangerous most of the time, so you will avoid it as best as possible. Trading also ****. There simply isn't anything you can trade with the starter ship that has enough margin to cover fuel & food and getting a trading ship is really expensive. Also this is a roguelike game, but dying is the worst thing you can do. You will want to avoid dying in any way possible because it's so extremely punishing. The permadeath option makes about as much sense as for Monkey Island. The Verdict So where does that leave us? Incredible writing vs. crappy gameplay. I the writing good enough to take the pain? I would say yes, but turn of permadeath or you will never explore the wonders of the Zea and only do the same stuff over and over again (remember, the definition of madness...). This game has been compared to Faster then Light (FTL) a lot. But let me say this to you straight away: It's NOTHING like that. FTL is a game stripped down to it's core gameplay. With incredibly deep and tactical fights, fast gameplay and a different outcome every time you start new. The combination of ships, weapons, crew members, augmentations etc. are endless in FTL and you get stuff pretty fast. On the other hand the story is spare and you will just get to make a handful of decisions along the way. That is about the complete opposite of Sunless Sea. Story driven, slow, very spare random elements, a complete lack of equipment and very flat sometimes really boring gameplay. To break it down for you: In FTL hardly every nothing happens in Sunless Sea you don't do anything at least 60% of the time. Would buy again? Yes, but a very close one.