Hey folks,

I see this promotion of Sunless Sea on gog.com: http://www.gog.com/game/sunless_sea?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=social_media&utm_content=release&utm_campaign=sunless_sea%3Fpp%3Df53eac2e4221f1794509de8d786a143b5016901f

It sounds really good from the description! Like some open ended role playing and exploration with random elements.  It seems to me like a game I could relax with in the evenings while sipping a beer.

But there are no reviews.  Any word or opinion on if it is worth purchasing?

My recommendation'd be to first try the browser game that inspired it, Fallen London, then see if you enjoy the world. If you do - yeah, it should be worth a few bucks, but I played it and it definitely did not steal a chair from underneath my buttocks.

Quote from: Rincewind1;814421My recommendation'd be to first try the browser game that inspired it, Fallen London, then see if you enjoy the world. If you do - yeah, it should be worth a few bucks, but I played it and it definitely did not steal a chair from underneath my buttocks.

Ha ha, OK, I'll try and Google up Fallen London.

Well, I've tried both.

Fallen London is OK.  It reminds me of Kingdom of Loathing.  It's amusing enough.  Very creative.

It convinced me to give Sunless Sea a try.  I have been enjoying it for the past couple of hours.  I think it's rather difficult; I am going to have to start a new game because I don't have enough resources to purchase more supplies.  I guess it's one of those games where you have to know what you're doing ahead of time to progress in the game.  Like you have to meta-game a bit.  It's OK, though; I've obviously enjoyed it enough to keep playing.

RockPaperShotgun kinda loved it, but didn't think it would be for everyone.

It sounds like I might enjoy it. I may pick it up.

Having played it for a couple days now, I do have to think it's a pretty good game in terms of atmosphere and story.  That's enough for me; it was worth the money.

In spite of all the time that it apparently spent in alpha with input from lots of people, though, there are a few design decisions that nevertheless strike me as being a little strange.

After reviewing the wiki on the internet, it seems like they made it extremely difficult to profit off of trade.  It's like they made the decision to not let the game easily be about trade so you would be forced to focus on exploration.  Okay, I guess, since the game is supposed to be about facing the darkness and going insane, but is it ever really a good design decision to force players to have to play a certain way? Why include trade at all if it's meant to be minimally rewarding?

New ships and armaments are extremely expensive.  It seems like it's very difficult and slow to upgrade anything to a meaningful way.  In terms of design it feels like the game progression is artificially drawn out to the maximum.  In my case, since I'm more about atmosphere, I guess that's OK, but I know lots of people whom that would really annoy.

Speaking of more than one commentator has commented on how slowly your ship moves and how long it takes to go from one place to another.  For me, that really doesn't bother me, because I guess I enjoy atmosphere.  I don't think it really takes that long, personally, but people are always complaining about things in video games taking more than a few seconds.  Anyway, the point is, the game designers seem to have made things take a long time for the sake of making them take a long time.

Whatever, though...at the end of the day I enjoy the stories and the atmosphere while tolerating my sense of frustration as I would tolerate the gristle in an otherwise tasty stake.  I already have a pretty awesome in-game story that arose by itself without planning on my part, as these things tend to arise from no-manual-saves type permadeath gameplay.

Hmm.  I just rage quit the game.  I hardly ever rage quit games.  I guess that the combination of extremely slow progression plus permadeath made me feel that playing it again would feel like a big waste of time.

I spent hours trying to get to the point where I might be able to save some resources upon dying, and then got in an impossible situation through what I felt was no fault of my own, after I'd spent 2 full evenings specifically trying to pull together enough resources so that I could save some resources upon dying.

I'm starting to feel like what's the point in playing if it's nearly impossible to do better than break even on any given voyage, and where each voyage carries with it a significant risk?

I guess I have plenty of patience but it was sort of whittled down over about 6-8 hours of gameplay.

Basically, this game has some aspects that are utterly charming and awesome, which are enough to draw you in, but then punitive aspects of the game are a bit like hitting a rotten core at the heart of a juicy apple.

Amazing aspects:
1.) Great atmosphere
2.) Creative, awesome storytelling. Like choose-your-own-adventure versions of the Weird Tales of yore. Memorable characters, good writing.
3.) Open ended gameplay. No railroading for the most part.

Rage-inducing aspects:

1.) Crazy punitive-ness

For some reason they made the game extremely punitive. You have to do a tremendous amount of grinding to obtain basic consolidation of resources, such as the ability to pass certain resources on to your next character should your current one be killed. Although there are ways to mitigate it to some extent, every time you go on a voyage there is a significant cost in supplies in fuel.

Supplies cost 20 echoes, fuel costs 10 echoes per unit, whereas the most profitable item you can reliably purchase and then resell in London is Darkdrop Coffee, at 38 echoes for purchase and 44 echoes per resale. So consider how your profit margin is quite low versus your supply costs per cargo hold unit. And you can only make this kind of marginal trade once you've sailed all over the map in order to discover the port that sells the Darkdrop Coffee.

So basically you have to invest possibly dozens or more fuel units sailing all over the place to discover places that let you make a tiny profit before you can even begin to very slowly get ahead in the game, and have the resources to even not start completely over if your character is killed. Consider you need at least 1200 echoes profit after refueling, repair, and resupply costs to even get to the point where you can save some of your resources should your character die, and even then, you still need to re-visit London maybe 5 or 6 times and invest an Artifact, a Zee Story, or a Memory of Distant Shores in your offspring in order to gain a Scion. Imagine the hair-pulling rage if you've almost gotten there and then your guy dies.

Which brings me to my next point: sudden death. They tried to make the game about discovery and risk taking. Thus you are incentivised every time you find a new port and when making risky explorations you have a chance of finding a relatively valuable resale item (take a big risk and maybe you can get a 50 echo profit on selling the item instead of 6 like on a Darkdrop Coffee). However, if you don't know exactly what the potential consequences are of what you're doing, you can suddenly die by accident. For example, if you accidentally sail off the north edge of the map, the game takes a way a whole bunch of supplies and teleports you to the part of the map that is almost diametrically opposite to where London is. If you weren't really well supplied in the first place that means you're pretty much fucked. If you stumble into a random encounter with the numerous extremely powerful monsters you can also be killed really easily as well.

Even if you aren't killed there are huge penalties the game inflicts on you as well. If Terror maxes out, which constantly fills up as you're sailing around, you have a chance of getting a Game Over right there because the crew mutinies, but if you are lucky and survive, your lose most of your crew, and then for some reason your Iron attribute permanently decreases a lot. So your guns suddenly do noticeably less damage for some reason even if you get more sailors later. This is an attribute you have to raise 1 point at a time on a 100 point scale so it's a huge loss. And then if you have less than half crew, your boat moves at half speed, so you basically soak up Terror even faster and burn through fuel and supplies less efficiently.

Honestly sometimes I felt like I was playing a hentai game or something in terms of how punitively they designed it.

I think their idea was that you'd have a lot of characters go out and die or go insane or whatever and that they were going for an HP Lovecraft feel with that. But the problem is that what this means at the end of the day is a lot of repetition and memorization of where resources are, i.e. metagaming in order to get ahead. There are great stories in this game but I feel like I am distracted from them or fail to keep track of them in my mind because I'm so focused on trying to get a little bit of resources to stay afloat. The game has a bunch of ship upgrades but in all the time I've been playing I have only been able to afford one. I'm still using the starting boat almost vanilla.

Indeed, this is one of those games where I think the experience is better if you cheat. Either by looking up all the info on the internet ahead of time and planning your voyages based on this info, or if there were some way to cheat and raise your attributes to artificially high levels (there probably is), or by changing the payout rates and profits on things you do to double, I think any of these would actually make the game more entertaining.

I am all for a good challenge, but they took it too far in this game and, heh, missed the boat.