KickStarter Sunless Sea - an undersea trading and exploration game

[torpid]

Game looks like it has atmospherefag potential, and exploring a dangerous sea reminds me of Silent Hunter III (totally different genre, of course), but if the story and feel of the world are meant to be conveyed by the writing, and MHC's example is representative, uh...

It's not just the description of the battle, either. In the lower left, there's "the glassy chop of dark water," which is awful: glassy water is the smooth, flat, Beaufort 0 sea; you don't use "glassy" for choppy seas, wtf. And I'm no sailor, or writer for that matter. Hell, even the "sullen lights" in the lower right feels a tad... overwritten? I get a feeling of trying too hard. If a game is going to have a lot of writing in order to describe events, I'd say the safer bet is to go for concision and avoid too much embellishment, and create atmosphere through sheer accumulation. Every piece of writing trying so hard is going to get old fast. But maybe that screen isn't too representative?

We need moar updates

 

[Starwars]

I'm not far in at all but I'm finding it rather slow (in a bad way) and, like the above post says, overwritten. There are times when I have to re-read passages just so I can understand what the hell they're talking about (though english is not my first language). Gameplay is rather repetitive so far, I think it may have been a mistake to set Fallen London as the one and only base (unless something changes further into the game). While it does create a sense of familiarity and safety each time you return, it also inflates the playing time in a rather bad way. Sailing back and forth all the time. I think I would have preferred it if the game featured more real havens where you could do your things instead of the brief visits and then going back again.
A lot of it also really feel "browser game-like", some of the choices have options that you can repeat endlessly. Say a choice may have 50% chance of success (your various, weird, stats affect the chance of success), you can just repeat it until you succeed although you may incur penalties if you fail (such as increased terror). I would've much preferred it if the text-adventures just moved forward instead of being able to repeat some stuff. I dunno, it feels weird and I almost could see the "you failed this choice, try again in 24 hours" thing that browser/facebook games tend to do.

Still, there's something that makes me want to keep playing a bit more at least. There is potential here and while the writing is overdone, there are nice things about it also. The setting seems to be interesting though also rather... anything goes. I wish we were given more opportunities to sort of interact with the setting more directly. Given the large scope of the game, it feels more like one is brushing the surface and not *really* getting into the nitty gritty things.

So far, it really seems to be a game that, at first glance, would be a perfect match for me. Exploration, easy to die, text-adventures, a rather unique and weird horror-ish setting. But the devil is in the details.

EDIT: I will say that I feel the review-scores it has gotten are fucking absurd, even though I'm not far in myself as of yet.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Well, I bought it.

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

It looks good, but the reviews seem a bit too nob slobbing for my comfort.

 

[Starwars]

It is a bit more fun once it gets going though, I'll give it that. The beginning is slow in all the worst ways. And I normally enjoy the "struggle" of starting out in games that are supposed to be tough and unforgiving. Here it feels like a chore. But it does get better.

 

[Grimwulf]

My history of relationships with this game:
- Looks nice, I've gotta buy it!
- Wait, it's Early Access. I've had enough of EA for a lifetime. Gonna wait 'til full release.
- What's that? "From developers of Fallen London"? The fuck is Fallen London?
- Hey, FL is free and seems fun. That writing and aesthetics are awesum. Gonna play it 'til Sunless Sea release.
- What? Sunless Sea is released already? Who needs Sunless Sea when you've got Fallen London?

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

but if the story and feel of the world are meant to be conveyed by the writing, and MHC's example is representative, uh...

It's a little extreme as far as the random bullshit but not the writing style. My gut feeling (Without scribbling down notes) is that roughly once every text-blob you get some rainbow-meat bubble nonsense, and when you don't get outright nonsense you get purple prose. I took a screenshot of that bit since it encapsulated what I dislike about the writing in SS so far. And like Oasis mentioned there's a lot of obfuscation and trying to make shit mysterious with the distinct feeling that there's nothing on the other side. Maybe I'll be proven wrong and as I play I'll find out there's some big shit going on but... Yeah. I doubt it. Especially since the world appears to be essentially static. To mention Sid Meier's Pirates again, the world in that was a hell of a lot more alive. Ships moving, towns rising and falling in power, etc. Any big shit going on in SS is most likely just text texting about text and you're supposed to think about how videogames can be books as you sail around doing nothing.

One thing I will mention in the game's (Partial) favor which has already been spoiled to hell and back in their goddamn trailers so I'll spoil it here, sea eyeball. I haven't seen it yet but my captain has started having nightmares about it and the crew keep thinking something's watching us in the deep. I have no idea if this is a semi-random possible occurrence or if it happens to everyone if you trigger something, but if they hadn't been goddamn idiots and sprayed that giant eye over all their promotional videos having "OH SHIT SEA EYE" show up after all the buildup would've been cool. Now if it shows up I'll just go "Yup" and think about how much cooler it would've been if I didn't know it was in the game.

I'm not far in at all but I'm finding it rather slow (in a bad way) and, like the above post says, overwritten. There are times when I have to re-read passages just so I can understand what the hell they're talking about (though english is not my first language). Gameplay is rather repetitive so far, I think it may have been a mistake to set Fallen London as the one and only base (unless something changes further into the game). While it does create a sense of familiarity and safety each time you return, it also inflates the playing time in a rather bad way. Sailing back and forth all the time. I think I would have preferred it if the game featured more real havens where you could do your things instead of the brief visits and then going back again.
A lot of it also really feel "browser game-like", some of the choices have options that you can repeat endlessly. Say a choice may have 50% chance of success (your various, weird, stats affect the chance of success), you can just repeat it until you succeed although you may incur penalties if you fail (such as increased terror). I would've much preferred it if the text-adventures just moved forward instead of being able to repeat some stuff. I dunno, it feels weird and I almost could see the "you failed this choice, try again in 24 hours" thing that browser/facebook games tend to do.

So far, it really seems to be a game that, at first glance, would be a perfect match for me. Exploration, easy to die, text-adventures, a rather unique and weird horror-ish setting. But the devil is in the details.

Really agree with this, too. London appears to be the only "Real" home port since you get gouged pretty terribly for basic supplies everywhere else. The only possible other main port I've seen is the Khanate (Maybe) and even that I'm not sure about. And if it IS a major port then it sounds like you'd lose access to London if you sided with them. Also agree on a lot of the little quests and things feeling browser-y. It even sort of has the "Try again in 24 hours" thing with the... uh... I forget what they call it, but the little lamp in the lower left that signifies it's been long enough since you've had a story token so now you can do A Thing at a dock now. Not to mention it's kind of annoying that the game shows you every little check in the game and you get cards for everything. I suppose they do it so you can see what you need to do various things in ports, but at the same time I find my eyes glazing over and just looking for filled-in ones.

And also agree that on paper it sounds like a fantastic game. I kinda think the setting and the exploration are what let it down the most in the end. The setting because they don't play it straight enough to really work as horror (And if given the choice of SS's setting of wacky and zany uh oh the coral can see your skeleton and overblown eldritch cyclopean sigil viewing and finger eating I'd go for the latter), and the exploration because by and large I haven't felt like I've really been exploring. I've been filling in my own map, but every port and island I've come to has already been settled, so I just sail in and say "WHAT'S ALL THIS THEN" and write a report for some fuel and shekels back in London. Landing on uninhabited islands and getting text adventures of exploring/looting them with your crew and then sailing your haul back to London would probably be more satisfying to me. Especially if the setting was leaning more toward horror.

I dunno bros. I DUNNO. It's certainly not bad enough to drop it but I have no goddamn idea why it's reviewing so well unless Doritos and/or blowjobs are involved.

 

[GrainWetski]

I dunno bros. I DUNNO. It's certainly not bad enough to drop it but I have no goddamn idea why it's reviewing so well unless Doritos and/or blowjobs are involved.

Disclaimer: Richard Cobbett, a contributor and friend of Eurogamer, is one of the writing team on Sunless Sea. We chose a reviewer who doesn't know Richard personally.

When you're in the clique, your games are reviewed on the 8-10 scale.

 

[Heresiarch]

I bought the game due to all the 10/10 must buy reviews (ok, I actually only read RPS and Eurogamer's reviews). The atmosphere is good, text adventures can be interesting, but the writing is very difficult to comprehend, on the borderline of being too pretentious. The game also feels slow, especially when compared to other 2D sea/space faring games such as Uncharted Waters series or Space Rangers . I can imagine it will get very tedious if I travel very far away and need to go back and forth. And the fact that this game which is full of texts doesn't officially support resolutions above 1920*1080 (you can play on 2560*1440 but the texts will all become super tiny) makes my eyes hurt.

I will try it again tonight and hope this is not another game that I pick up due to nice reviews and nice art styles but gave up because bad actual game designs (examples: Banner Saga, Transistor)

 

[Starwars]

Still find that the game gets better a bit farther into it. When there is more leeway with acquiring fuel and such (because you have some money to purchase it at ports if need be), it opens up the exploration a bit more without necessarily feeling devoid of danger. The writing really does vary wildly though. It really doesn't feel like there's been any editorial pass... *at all* to make the various text-adventures and such feel coherent. At one port you run into the incredibly overdone, but still short, passages that make very little sense whatsoever. The next there might be a more classic text-adventure with a lot of text all of a sudden. It just jumps all over the place.

Still, it's better now that the game has opened up a bit, it's kind addictive.

Also, I found the Codex.

 

[Gondolin]

Also, I found the Codex.

The developers, too, seem to have found the Codex... not to their liking.

 

[Weirdstuffinspace]

I dunno bros. I DUNNO. It's certainly not bad enough to drop it but I have no goddamn idea why it's reviewing so well unless Doritos and/or blowjobs are involved.

Disclaimer: Richard Cobbett, a contributor and friend of Eurogamer, is one of the writing team on Sunless Sea. We chose a reviewer who doesn't know Richard personally.

When you're in the clique, your games are reviewed on the 8-10 scale.

Ugh, Cobbett. The cancer is everywhere. bay or 75% off it is then.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Nothing more to really report on the game at the moment (Was doing shit all day, only now plopped my ass down for some videogames) but I did run in to one of the little text quests and took screenshots as an example for the people not playing the game.

First stage which I didn't take a picture of was just a generic "Explore the island" using the lamp token you get for being a certain amount of time at sea (Not sure how long, 3 minutes? 5?) which usually allows you one "Story" action per port since it typically regenerates in the time it takes you to sail between two near places.

That's the result of the search. My two options are to assault and observe, each using different skills with a different chance of success. Assault being based on my Iron skill (Damage) and observe being based on my Mirrors (Detection/perception and how fast you lock on target in ship combat). I went for mirrors since that stat's far higher due to my upbringing/class, which gave me a 67% chance to succeed. Assaulting was something around 20-30%.

And the result of a successful mirrors roll. Fragments are basically XP. You get however many and that turns in to a "Secret", which then can be most often spent to raise stats depending on your officers. No idea what a failure would've resulted in, or what assaulting would've done. Generally this seems to be the scope of most of the adventures in Sunless Sea though. Nothing particularly long lasting or interconnected and with generally piddly rewards. As you can see a 67% roll using my highest stat by far netted the same amount of experience as discovering a named area, which you tend to do extremely fast (At least early on).

And yeah this is the same location I blew up those pirates in earlier. Had a quest to drop things off here.

 

[Starwars]

The ways you die in the game can kinda provide for cool little stories in themselves also. My first captain ran out of fuel in the middle of the sea like an idiot. Nothing much to do except watch starvation set in and eventually death. Depressing.

Second time, I ended up getting chased by pirates that were way too powerful for me. In the game, you can hit F to put all power to your engines for a speed boost. But this can put a strain on the engine. Of course, this happened to me, the engine was set aflame and some of my crew died. Managed to get away from the pirates but I had lost enough crew that I couldn't keep the boat at full speed anymore (which means it moves fucking slowly as I hadn't upgraded my engine). Headed for the nearest port but of course there were no crew to hire on there. Instead I lost 2 more of my crew like an idiot in a text-adventure.
Slowly tried to drift back to London to recruit more people, ended up getting chased by some underwater monstrosity... Tried to get away by putting all power to the engines again and of course the fucking thing exploded on me. Boom, remaining crew dead.

Was pretty cool actually.

 

[WhiteGuts]

The problem with this game is the thematic mismatch it has going on.

Like it tries hard to set a mood through writing and graphics/sound, but at the same time it also tries to be silly with stuff life the "zee", the "zailors", and not to mention the goofy ass portraits and such. This kind of shit automatically breaks your immersion and pulls you out of the game every time you encounter it.

 

[Starwars]

It's such a shame about the portraits. I love how the game looks otherwise, the sailing part is beautifully done I think. Simple but effective. And then you see a portrait and it's like... wow, is this the same game?

 

[Weirdstuffinspace]

Excidium was right

 

[Ulminati]

Watched Undead Phoenix stream this yesterday for a couple of hours. (Although the text was nigh-impossible to read on the stream due to scaling/video compression). It seemed pretty good, but there wasn't nearly as much dying and eating your own crew as I expected. He came across the island MHC is on, but instead of mushrooms he found a charming demon waifu and sold his soul to her for a cup of tea.

Combat seemed pretty basic. Mostly just sailing in as tight a circle as possible and firing your single deck gun at the enemy. Hopefully it becomes more complex later on.

He came across the RPGCodex island too, so that's actually a thing.

 

[Angthoron]

Been trying it out as well, here's some thoughts:

- Writing is not good. It's overstylized, overdone, there's too much of it to convey too little of importance, and technically it's as irrelevant as reading quest texts in a random MMO. Unless it's a text adventure, but even then, I keep on finding myself skipping lines, paragraphs or entire pages. I think relevance is the worst part here though - if the text was relevant indeed, I'd have no problem reading all of it, no matter how massive the entries would be. As it is though? Puh-lease, I don't need your essays to convey The Feels. How is this writing being fapped to by gamejournos?
- The game is too slow. Yeah, it really is. Your boat is slow as hell, and while I understand it's supposed to help with that brooding feeling and everything, try going back and forth between London and whatever you have on the other side of the map 5 times or so on various errands and exploration trips, and then tell me that the game isn't wasting your time.
- Atmosphere is pretty good, some of the visuals are very pretty.
- Combat is kinda eh. It works I guess.
- Text adventures are 'k, but Space Rangers 2 did them better, and the texts are stylistically and comprehensibly better in SR2 despite being half-assed translations from Russian (well, not throughout)
- Expected more out of the officer interactions, where's my tasteful romance?
- Most overworld quests are fetch quests so far. Feh. And some quests (one of my earliest even) are silly. Sail around the world with 12 zombiedudes in your cargo hold going for a cruise vacation? Uhh, hmm...
- Codex island... Well, I guess we spited someone to give us a free nod, cool. Too bad it's not a proper insult though. Mutes and monkies? Snap.

So yeah, I keep playing it to see if there's any meat to this dish, but so far it's been very vegan.

 

[potatojohn]

That doesn't sound good

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

All style - no substance.

 

[Angthoron]

Eh. It's kind of weird, really. I've explored a bit more, and now there's suddenly some serviceable text - so it's pretty much all over the place.

Also, got sick of slow-ass boating and finally found a way to get around it. Apparently ship's speed is tied to engine heat. If you're really tired of never getting anywhere (and are willing to kill off some of the atmosphere and difficulty for it), read on:

Spoiler

Get a memory editor, find engine temperature in Float value - starts at 200 normal, then once boosted, just follow the tooltip values, freeze at 395, hit F, enjoy permanent speed boost. You might get hit by Overheated Engine event once in a while, but eh.

Oh yeah and might want to freeze the Fuel values as well.

 

[Starwars]

Yeah, some of the text is rather good, without the pretentious bent showcased in some of the screens earlier. Even so, it is *massively* overrated overall, those reviewers should be laughed at for praising it so much. The Eurogamer review has to count as one of the most terrible reviews I've read.

 

[Angthoron]

Another great example of how the game succeeds to waste your time:

1. Go to a volcano island to talk to a deviless.
2. She wants something from London.
3. Sail to London.
4. Come back to the volcano island. Shit, didn't have the "Something waiting in the next port" card. Sail around until it pops.
5. Back to volcano.
6. More shit to London.
7. Back to volcano.
8. To London again!
9. Optionally repeat this step again.
10. Finally return to London for a faint conclusion. Meh?

I dunno. This game could be pretty good if the text was somehow connected to the world, if the mechanics connected a bit better, but as it is, it's very disjointed, and once you learn how to "game" it (or get bored and mem-edit), it becomes another walking simulator. It's just lacking that something that would make it a lastingly appealing game.

 

[you know what time it is]

I wasn't expecting another Space Rangers, but i wanted to believe. Too bad. After playing it for a few hours i tend to agree with every negative point made in this thread.