Hell is real, and it just had a revolution to exile its aristocracy. London has sunk underneath the Earth's crust and serves as the principal port for the varied inhabitants and societies of the ocean below. The Unterzee itself is a strange, scary place that combines the unknowable dread of the works of Lovecraft with the diverse, normalized weirdness of Dungeons and Dragons' Planescape setting. Of course, it's the intriguing setting that makes you want to explore in the first place. The map in Sunless Sea slowly fills in as you explore and discover islands. If you can imagine The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was a visual novel with resource management set in a series of twisted British colonies, you'd be in the ballpark of describing the bulk of the Sunless Sea experience. Your reward? A cavalcade of islands and shoreline settlements, each with their own secrets and stories to tell, which takes the form of expertly-written text which occasionally lets you choose how you react to what you find. That last bit is crucial to understanding where Sunless Sea's heart lies, as your primary instinct in this game will almost always be to sail for the black spots to see what's there.

Though it sports an immensely imaginative setting and fantastic writing, Sunless Sea's roguelike-inspired elements don't quite gel with the longform exploration you're meant to embark on.īuilt in the mold of such games as Sid Meier's Pirates and Koei's Uncharted Waters series, Sunless Sea sets you loose on The Unterzee with a simple ship, a crew, some supplies, and a blank sea chart that slowly fills in as you explore the zee. It's at this nexus point between the potential and the static that Failbetter's Sunless Sea finds itself in. A world fully revealed is suddenly a more static place than when it started. Once we discover something, we can never discover it again even if we start over. The wonder that exploration brings within a game is finite.

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