This game is by far one of the most fun and immersive experiences I've had in a long time. In the span of a couple of hours of playtime it managed to make me feel happiness, anger, sadness etc. I got attached to the characters I met, the story and every little mystery (of which there are MANY) sucked me in almost instantly.
Pros
- FANTASTIC writing
- Great characters
- Amazing soundtrack
- Glorious story and lore
- Chilling graphics, that fit amazingly well in the narrative
- The most interesting and creepy exploring I've done in a game
- Time consuming
Cons
- Time consuming - the boats go real slow, the map is huge, you need a lot of time to get somewhere - is not a con if you can just boot up Netflix while slowly sailing
- Agonizingly grindy at the start - the game's currency (ehoes) is very hard to come by at the start - it's slow and tedious to amount a fortune, but once you're into the game and a couple of your captain's die, it will get easier
- A lot of reading - if you don't like reading, this game isn't really for you

Overall, I adore this game. The story, the setting, the music - everything. I even love grinding in this game.

"God bless Her Enduring Majesty, the Empress."

The "thumb down" you see above doesn't mean I think „Sunless Sea” is a bad game. It means exactly what it says - that I don't recommend it.

I love stories. I love fables, legends and tales. So obviously „Sunless Sea” lured me with a world where tales are told in every port, where every street urchin can tell you a secret, where memories of distant shores are currency. Wonderfully depressing atmosphere of Falllen London overwhelemed me, when I first set off into the Zee. I'll always remember when I found Khan's Heart for the first time, sudden change of music and relief, that I'll be able to refill my supplies. I'll remember exploring Frostfound, Monkey Foundling's mischief, pilgrimage to Amaradri and many others...

But I have to plead guilty. I've cheated.

You will soon recognize, dear player, that finding a new port and surviving the cruise takes a few hours. Managing your supplies and trying to make some extra coins takes a lot of work. The problem is – it's not hard work. It's slow work. A very, very slow work. After about twelve or more hours I've discovered no more than 20% of the map. I had a dozen started quests, very little improved character skills and was about 1000 echoes short to buy a reasonable boat.

If you have months of free time to spare, you will master the game, explore the game's whole world, complete all quests with multiple captains (It's impossible to level one character enough to complete or even start all game quests). But I don't have that much time. And what's more – I don't think the gameplay is worth it. Sure, in the beginning it's satisfactory to survive a cruise, find a new port, meet new NPC-s... But after some time all that stuff just stays in your way to improve plot, to push the story forward.

So I've cheated. I edited my save file to gain better statistics and boat speed (even the fastest boat you can buy is painfully slow). I wanted more stories, not more cruising back and forth. And I got them. The stories, the places, the characters where beautiful, subtle, ornate, colorful and aesthetic...

Yes, I describe the stories as if they were pictures, because, basiclly, they are. They are beautifuly crafted carvings, decorated shells – pleasing for senses, but empty inside, with no substance, no wisdom, nothing to gain but aesthetic feelings.

And I liked them. I enjoyed them. But they are absolutely not worth hours of coarse gameplay. At it's core „Sunless Sea” is like a long, thick book. Except fragments of it's stories appear once per hundred pages, and are poetic fragments, pretty but shallow.

So if you wanted to play „Sunless Sea” for fables and wonders of the Fallen London, like I did, play for a couple of hours, but not longer. Then edit your save file to gather all the legends from the Unterzee. You will be pleased. But you won't be wiser.

A very unique game. So unique I can't think of anything to lazily compare it to, so I'll just have to essay up the things I really like about it.

Atmosphere. Conveyed to you with far more lecture and suspense than most recent games would want to risk. One of the first things you can do in Sunless Sea sums the mood up pretty well: you receive a pet for your crew, the Comatose Ferret. Interacting with it reveals that it used to be happy living among its kin, until you locked it up to rot on your ship. It suffers. If you wake it up it bites you. It is pretty much useless. Eventually, you can have it fashioned into a ferret-coat to gain a few stats.
Most people in Fallen London are miserable ferrets. Jostled helplessly in their prisons, at the mercy of inconceivable forces. The few bold souls that venture out to lay claim to some material or spiritual ambition quickly end up dead, or worse. You are an insignificant struggler, soon overwhelmed and erased - your only hope is that you are not forgotten by those who might follow in your footsteps.

As you explore the zee, you will find many tasks to follow and decisions to make. Maybe even too many to keep track of between sessions. Fortunately all your interactions and objectives are reviewable as items in your Journal, along with the status of individuals, nations and other powers you've encountered. There is also a Curiosities section of the inventory with no carrying limit, where the game will store your abstract possessions such as information, debuffs and special conditions, also in the form of items. This system of retaining almost everything as an item allows the vast varieties of event triggers and quest states to remain transparent for the player.

Roguelike elements are present, but do not clash with the semi-persistent progression. Death means you have to start over with the entire world and most resources reset, but exploring the world becomes easier as you learn of its risks and opportunities, and you will unlock more upgrades to pass on to your next captain.
RNG is a factor almost everywhere, but is applied expertly; never do I feel entirely at its mercy. You'll learn which stats to boost to improve your odds in specific situations, and there are often options to back out of risky gambles or ways to influence outcomes using resources. Chance doesn't work entirely against you either, as there are methods to get out of disastrous situations with a little luck... or at the very least you'll know to better pick your fights next time.

Not everything is intuitive, but it doesn't have to be - there's such an abundance of paths and path-forks that it hardly matters where you start. You can chase whatever seems most interesting to you, and you will inevitably learn about most things around it. That's a vague description of how I felt while playing, but I think people are bound to have wildly differing experiences with this game. If you like to toil for hours trying to understand the game organically I can confirm you will have a blast, and a tremendous amount of playtime. Fifty hours in I am still accumulating knowledge and incrementally improving, it still feels rewarding and there's still tons of content I haven't explored. Using the term "learning curve" is hardly doing it justice, it's more a series of learning rollercoasters.

That's my overview of the gameplay. There's good things to be said about prose and soundtrack, but they are more matters of taste. I can't think of anything strikingly bad in this game, probably due to lack of comparison. Well, maybe engine power could be made more useful. Or maybe the huge $5000 engine could have a percentage sellback value like other equipment, instead of being worth nothing after purchase. That is the only major pitfall so far I would've appreciated being informed of and that I'd recommend new players to avoid.

One last thing. I think there could be more of this. In many ways the concepts of the game appear to me very expandable. There's a lot of stuff. They could easily add more stuff. There could be another game in the same frameworks, but with new stuff. I want that stuff.

"We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far." - H.P. Lovecraft

...you know what you do in this game? You take a look at those black seas and voyage the ♥♥♥♥ on out there. There are a lot of horror games on Steam, and there's fantasy and sci-fi aplenty, but Sunless Sea stands out for being a true work of weird fiction. It's about horror, and it's about survival, but it's not a zombie shooter or a walking simulator with jump scares. It's a steampunk game that feels dark and wondrous and strange instead of slapping a couple gears and monocles on everybody and calling it a day.

Go forth, bold zee-captain. Navigate under false stars and take shore leave at sundry isles shrouded in fog and wreathed in uncanny flora. But watch your provisions carefully. Should you fail, you won't go gently into that good night. You'll go kicking and screaming, with a mad glint in your eye and the taste of your crewmates' flesh on your tongue.

I wish you all safe travels, and pleasant dreams.

Pros-
Setting/atmosphere
Stories and lore
Difficulty and risk vs reward

Cons-
The pacing is way too slow.
The rate at which you run out of fuel and supplies is needlessly harsh and punishes exploration.

Why I can't recommend-
They completely missed the opportunity to make each play-through truly unique. You expect to die a lot in games like these, but when I first died in Sunless Sea I was surprised to see that there were options for me to pass down certain traits to my next captain or (if you did really good) even begin the game as an heir of my previous captain's fortune. Sounds great, but it's horribly implemented. The game doesn't randomize the map when you die, which is fine, but all of the stories reset as if your previous captain never burnt down a certain house or whatever it may be. Essentially, the best you can expect from this game is a repetitive experience where it becomes less about "luck" or "randomness" and wise decisions and more about memorizing the same quest lines and navigating the same map over and over again (let's not forget hor absurdly slow this game is paced) until you go crazy like one of the sailors in the game and want to throw your captain (the devs) overboard.

An incredibly in-depth cannibalism simulator where you can partake in a war against hamsters.

You can also play properly, I guess.

Zailed the zee. Died. Would zail again.

This is a great game. It oozes atmosphere, I like to listen to the Cure and cut myself while I play. No, I'm joking, I like to dress in steampunk garb and pretend I'm victorian while I play.

I do think that this game gets in its own way though, it borders on grindy/boring unless you get lucky or are accustomed to bdsm gaming.

If you like to be in relationships with difficult but interesting people, this game is for you. If you just want to have fun and relax, move on.

FTL on sea with lore. Requires many playthroughs and is as addictive.

Sunless Sea is an ever changing roleplay. This was suggested to me by a good friend that knows of my love of stories, reading, and Lovecraftian and Gothic Horror. The game allows the player to live several lives as several zee captains, each one different, each one presented with different choices. There is danger, adventure, intruige, piracy, and even opportunities for a lonely captain to find a little romance, so long as it is kept discrete. I've found this to be one of those addictive games with constant "what happens next" moments. I've also discovered it is really handy to keep a pad of paper nearby and a pen to keep note of the goals and directions you are given, as I've had to start out with blank charts twice so far.