Sunless Sea Reviews
Wonderful writing resting on top of infirm foundations. Almost a classic, Sunless Sea falls a few leagues short of its final destination.
A blend of horror, humor, and deep-sea exploration, Sunless Sea surpasses a few shortcomings to deliver an engaging, inventive, and challenging indie experience.
'The sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea,' reads Coleridge's poem, Kubla Khan, from which the game takes its name and setting. It already knows that you will take up the challenge and bravely attempt to measure these caverns. The better question, and the one that Sunless Sea asks in countless ways is: how?
Sunless Sea gives you a wonderful world to explore that's packed with memorable written vignettes and danger.
It's a rich, story-driven game of moving from island to island like some sort of Lovecraftian Odysseus. It's engaging, but loads of screens to push through and lackluster combat detract from the experience
Amazing writing and a good sense of discovery makes Sunless Sea's glacial pace and mismatched roguelike elements worth plodding through.
Sunless Sea is a little darker and less cheerful than its already morbid sister Fallen London, but it's no less delightful. The Unterzee is awash with clever, well-written stories, and you're sure to find something new every time you set sail – even if actually finding it can take a while.
Look, Sunless Sea isn't for everyone. It requires patience, and it requires no small amount of imagination. For those who have those qualities, or are prepared to try and acquire them, I would say that Sunless Sea is an uncommonly rewarding roleplaying game, and an essential one.
There are still many mysteries of the Unterzee that I have yet to discover, and maybe I never will see everything there is to see. But that just makes Sunless Sea even more exciting for me. The realm of possibilities seems endless, and every time I set sail I find something new. The sea is calling to me. Perhaps it's calling to you, too.
The action may not be up to quite the same standards as the writing, but the bizarre world of the Underzee is more interesting to explore than almost any other recent game world.
Indeed, one of the best things about Sunless Sea, apart from its beautifully crafted elder-horror stories, fantastically drawn artwork and generally creepy atmosphere, is the feeling that the decisions you make within the game are shaping the narrative, and that by playing, you are writing yourself into that story.
Sunless Sea does demand a lot from its captains, though. Patience, mainly. It's a slow, deliberate game, where a journey across the map can take an age, and where secrets are unfurled without haste. But the sea offers up a veritable bounty of rewards, and absolutely the best writing in any video game since, well, as long as I can remember.
Fantastically weird and powerfully written, Sunless Sea is sure to satisfy genre fans and could very well make some new converts into the world of Weird fiction.
The static narratives and roguelike gameplay in Sunless Sea don't always gel together harmoniously, but Failbetter Games has succeeded in delivering a tense and engaging experience and a rich and atmospheric setting.
Sunless Sea is a brutal roguelike with amazing plots and writing that still hold up years later, but if you're looking to explore the Unterzee, the Switch port is not the way to go.
Sunless Sea is a dark game combining Lovecraft-themed exploration with Victorian Gothic visual novels in exciting (and chilling) ways. The end result isn't perfect, but its sense of terror and wonder makes it a worthy follow-up to Failbetter's Fallen London.
Sunless Sea's contemplative pace and reams of text won't appeal to every player, but if you have a little patience, and an appreciation for atmospheric story telling, then it'll be hard to pass this one up.
Sunless Sea stresses a fondness for resource management, vaguely turn-based combat, roguelike principles of calculated disposability, and basic role-playing. All of this builds to a confident level of intimidation – it can require an exceptional amount of time to procure the particular nature of Sunless Sea's identity and intentions – but not without a certain indelible magnetism. Making sense of Sunless Sea's complexity just seems to be one of its underlying challenges.
An extremely good game which just doesn't feel properly finished. It's not quite a final draft. It's still damned good fun though.