Your intrepid heroes transverse the Zee, read walls of text, and eat our crew.
Game: Sunless Sea
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/304650/
Devel: Failbetter Games
Engine: Unity
Price: 18.99 / CDN 20.99
Wazzat: LOSE YOUR MIND. EAT YOUR CREW. DIE. Take the helm of your steamship and set sail for the unknown! Sunless Sea is a game of discovery, loneliness and frequent death, set in the award-winning Victorian Gothic universe of Fallen London.
CHAIRQUISITION:
Makes with the working
V-
- Not losing a chair over it but it does have intermittent sutters when derping around in the ship.
J-
P-
- It did that stupid Unity thing of trying to fullscreen into both my monitors and failing miserably, but they fixed it within a day of me sending them an email about it.
- If you look at the Steam store page you don’t see a Linux icon for the game.
- The Developers said that since that icon means SteamOS and Linux, and since they don’t have any kind of controller support for it, they’re waiting on that to tick that box.
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Shiny / Sounds
V-
- If you’re not reading text you are putting around in a ship.
- The view is 2D top-down
- I really like the soundtrack when it decided to play.
- Sound effects are bog standard.
J-
- I mean, the graphics get the job done, don’t get me wrong
- Honestly, I have zero recollection of the soundtrack.
P-
- The graphics are very simplistic.
- I’ve seen naval games on the Unity engine, that only take 50MB of storage space and manage to have some very competent looking graphics.
- That game is called Windward, you may want to keep that name in the back of your head for later.
- It doesn’t get 2 chairs because the background noises are damn well done!
- They’re very subtle but they’re very competently done and will smack you across the head with atmosphere.
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Control
V-
- Keyboard mappings are all over the damn place.
- Really all the control you will be doing is driving your ship in circles.
J-
- The controls are sane for the most part. The main issue I have is that the keyboard shortcuts for maps/journal/lights is on the other side of the keyboard
P-
- This is a very slow paced game.
- Most of your controls are click the thing to make another thing happen.
- The boat, I assume the starting boat is purposely slow, but it makes turtles look brisk by comparison.
- Even crabs can do a charge attack and munch you.
- But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
- I feel the controls work for what they are, but proper controller support wouldn’t go amiss.
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FUN
V-
- Combat sucks alligator anus.
- This is a glorified visual novel.
- The majority of your time will be spent reading.
- And every time you get noped you are rewarded by reading the same startup BS for the first 30min. Guaranteed!
- If you give 0 fks about the story (guilty) this is nothing more than a unnecessarily hard grindfest.
J-
- So much grinding. So much
- There are elements of the game I really like:
- The various currencies
- The relatively freeform mission/goal structure
- Exploration
- All that is harmed by the painfully slow pace. And the grind
- There are also a few things that insta-screw you the first time. The only way to avoid them is to know ahead of time
- The crab battles devolve to flailing around trying to keep them in your firing arc
P-
- This is not the kind of game I was expecting.
- I can recognize it’s worth as an atmospheric, story-driven game with a degree of exploration and a lot of risk-reward situations.
- What I wanted to see from it was Windward with a heavier focus on story.
- As far as gameplay mechanics go, Windward has nailed the top-down sailing action to a T.
- Sunless Sea on the other hand, adheres to the school of game design of “Tell, don’t show.”
- “You have fell in love with a beautiful lady” the game says in the little journal. But all you can see is said journal.
- “The sisters tell you a haunting tale of the Zee” and I’m still looking at that same journal.
- In Windward by contrast, all you do is play and whatever bit of story you get, is often a small bit of text and something will happen in the game world. Like a pirate ship appears from off-screen ready to munch you, or a town will be under attack by an opposing faction.
- What I’m saying is, to reiterate what I said a few weeks back: when it comes to games, I’d rather have solid mechanics and gameplay than a good story.
- I can get a good story in TV shows, books, movies or any other medium.
- When it comes to video games, it’s the interactivity and the mechanics that fuel it that are important. In my opinion. I recognize that is not the case with other people.
- But since this is the most subjective category, I didn’t really have fun.
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Final –
