Failbetter Games' superb interstellar narrative adventure Sunless Skies is finally coming to consoles next month, on 19th May, in the guise of the much-enhanced Sovereign Edition - which will arrive as a free update for existing PC players at the same time.

Sunless Skies is, of course, the follow-up to Failbetter's Sunless Sea and, as its name suggests, trades the nautical adventuring of its forebear for a rocket-powered jaunt across a "universe steeped in celestial horror and ravaged by Victorian ambition".

The end result once again offers a blend of rogue-like exploration and strikingly evocative storytelling - albeit with a much greater focus on more fulsome narrative arcs this time around - with enough finessing to the formula that Eurogamer slapped an Essential badge on Sunless Skies when it released on PC in 2019.

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Failbetter Games has successfully returned to Kickstarter to fund Mask of the Rose, a new romantic visual novel set in the studio's expansive Fallen London universe.

A detectivey romancey story set just after London's fall, the game features a familiar setting but a new genre for the studio - something which encouraged it back to Kickstarter again to test the waters.

As of writing, the project has more than £97k pledged of its initial £90k target, with 28 days of funding still to go.

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Failbetter Games, the developer behind the likes of Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, has revealed it's currently working on two new titles, one of which is a visual-novel-style prequel to its acclaimed browser game Fallen London.

Fallen London, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, unfolds in an alternate-universe Victorian London that was stolen by bats and carried beneath the planet's surface, down into a vast underground cavern system known as the Neath.

Failbetter's next game, titled Mask of the Rose, takes place in 1862, shortly after London's move underground and around three decades prior to the events of Fallen London and Sunless Sea. It's a somewhat different proposition to other games in the series too, being pitched as a "romantic visual novel" - albeit one that retains Failbetter's darkly irresistible gothic wit.

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Failbetter Games has announced its enhanced version of Sunless Skies will hit consoles in the first half of 2020.

Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition has a bunch of new and improved features from the base game - like new stories and ways to help your crew, as well as a complete overhaul of the character progression interface.

On top of this, the late game experience will allow players to raise their stats past the level cap.

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Failbetter Games' superb interstellar narrative adventure Sunless Skies will soon be expanding once more, this time courtesy of the story focussed Vagabond Update, which arrives on 12th June.


Central to the free new update is the Amiable Vagabond, a new officer able to accompany you on your journey among the stars. Described by Failbetter as "a gentleman of the skies (and no fixed abode) who will take you to the abandoned quarters of the sky", the Amiable Vagabond brings a selection of new mysteries to explore.

"Experience a tale of fortunes lost, found, and lost again," says Failbetter, "Meet the 'skylarks': the community of ragged wanderers who rove the heavens, and help them find the way to the Sugarspun Garden - a place surely too good to be true..."

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Failbetter Games has revealed that its excellent, narrative-focussed intergalactic space adventure Sunless Skies will be getting a brand-new update next month, aimed at adding "more to see and do during voyages".

It's called the Wayfarer Update and consists of two main components. The first is a major overhaul of Albion (one of Sunless Skies' four regions), while the second is focussed on introducing a host of new narrative encounters and options.

Part of Albion's new makeover brings visual enhancements designed to improve the "general look and atmosphere" of the region, and Failbetter has released a few screens showcasing the changes, as seen below. Additionally, the map itself will be notably altered, with Failbetter increasing terrain "to make navigation and combat more interesting".

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After 45 hours in Sunless Skies, it's tempting to offer your own spin on Roy Batty's "I've seen things you wouldn't believe" speech from Blade Runner. The problem is that it's hard to know where to start, and even harder to know where to stop. A hybrid, like 2015's Sunless Sea, of top-down steampunk naval sim and choose-your-own-adventure storytelling, Skies takes you everywhere from an asteroid circus to the howling corona of a clockwork star. Blending the juicier nightmares of Victorian astronomers, bureaucrats and sailors with some rather less antiquated-feeling characters and concepts, it's a tour of the heavens in which every port is an oddity, twinkling or at least glistening in the firmament.

Pick random moments from my playthrough and you'll find my captain doing something very different each time, all of it brought to life with Failbetter's trademark mix of dread and whimsy. Here I am having sex with a demon signaller, for example. And then there was that time I visited a laughing orchard to resolve an academic dispute about the exact occupant of a celestial tomb. Here I am trading shots with a ghost of wood and parchment as I skim the lip of a black hole - oh, and of course, here I am devouring my own crew after running out of fuel on the way back from hell. The great joy of Failbetter's latest is once again the ghoulish inventiveness of the writing and setting, though it's helped along in Skies by more accessible world design, relatively generous earning mechanics and some truly decadent background art.

A direct narrative sequel to Sunless Sea, the game's premise is that Queen Victoria has conquered the solar system, ensuring that Britain is, indeed, the empire on which the sun never sets by murdering the sun and replacing it with a mechanical one. She's also achieved immortality by somehow mining the raw stuff of temporality itself and selling it by the barrel - a wonderfully silly and brutal co-opting of the theory of relativity. In this universe, royal stipends are measured in hours, not coins, and time passes a lot slower inside factories than in palaces, the better to exact maximum blood and sweat from each labourer. Out in the solar system's recesses, meanwhile, upstart "Tackety" colonists battle London's representative the Windward Company while demons, the dead and other, even stranger entities go about their business.

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Sunless Sea follow-up Sunless Skies will release on 31st January 2019, Failbetter Games confirmed today.

The developer made the announcement in a panel session this afternoon at EGX 2018, the UK games event run by Eurogamer parent company Gamer Network.

Simultaneously, Failbetter also announced Skyfarer, a pen-and-paper role-playing game tie-in for Sunless Skies. It's freely available to download from the link below:

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Failbetter Games has announced that Sunless Skies, its intergalactic follow-up to 2015's nautical exploration adventure Sunless Sea, will now launch in January 2019.

Sunless Skies was originally expected to leave Steam early access development in May 2018, but that initial launch date was pushed back to September following poorer-than-expected sales and layoffs at the studio earlier this year - problems that Eurogamer had been alerted to well in advance of Failbetter's public announcement.

Writing in its latest development update, Failbetter explained that it has chosen to delay the game a second time for two reasons. Firstly, it says it wants to revisit Sunless Skies' survival mechanics, as well as the Reach - one of the earliest areas created for the game.

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Developer Failbetter Games has released a major new update for its currently-in-early-access Sunless Sea follow-up, Sunless Skies, introducing new region Albion.

Sunless Skies entered Steam Early Access last August, and is Failbetter's attempt at transplanting Sunless Sea's engaging mix of rogue-like exploration and strikingly imaginative storytelling to the stars. It unfolds in "a universe steeped in celestial horror and ravaged by Victorian ambition".

Failbetter called the version of Sunless Skies that released into early access last year "a small taste of what the final game will be like rather than a big taste of an emptier, less representational world." It featured the game's core systems - namely Hunger, Terror, combat, exploration, and a selection of interactive stories - as well as a single region, the Reach.

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