7/14/2023 0 Comments Sunless sea soullessIt's worth the risk, though, because killing them often yields up some food and some valuable goodies. Engaging sea monsters is dangerous, because even though they are easy to kite, they pack a big wallop if they manage even a single hit. You can hedge your bets by making some decisions along your journey. Or your crew starves and turns to cannibalism. Or you run out of fuel and have to abandon ship, and nobody ever makes it home. Your crew goes mad somewhere at sea, because the Unterzee is so scary and wrong that just sailing its waters will drive people crazy over time. When your risks don't turn out, you perish. One cruise can give you enough money to buy better equipment for your ship, fill it to the brim with fuel and food that could take you around the world, and recruit some of the best officers money can buy. The market is always hungry for exotic, foreign goods. An Alarming Scholar will reward you handsomely for forbidden knowledge and rare specimens. When they pay off, you come back into port full of valuable loot: the Admiralty will pay well for maps and intelligence. Sunless Sea consistently pushes you to explore farther, to risk more, and make bolder gambles. Fuel and supplies are fairly expensive, and there are very few "milk-run" type journeys you can make. Where skill and experience come into play is in how you manage the precious resources of fuel, food, and sanity in your travels. The thing is, Sunless Sea really is about the journey – and I don't mean that metaphorically. I rarely had much trouble taking on a bigger ship or a giant sea monster if I had a halfway decent gun and some hitpoints to spare. Enemies just slug away at you, and many of them can be easily outmaneuvered, especially if there are any rocks or inlets to help you confuse them. It doesn't help that combat isn't all that involving. But for people expecting something a bit more like Sid Meier's Pirates, where different actions and encounters throw you into a different minigame, much of Sunless Sea might seem passive. This is familiar territory for people who've played Failbetter's Fallen London, a free text adventure. While most of your time in the game is spent piloting a tiny ship around the darkened Unterzee, encountering sea monsters and pirates, and discovering new islands and ports, much of the action unfolds via the act of reading snippets of text and then choosing from among a menu of options. But here's the rub: Sunless Sea is as much a text adventure (or hyperlink adventure, if you prefer) as it is a naval-combat roguelike. It's a testament to developer Failbetter Games' tremendous writers that this world, built almost entirely through text dialog boxes and suggestive map art, is so absorbing. There is a mix of offbeat charm and profound, uneasy weirdness that permeates every inch of Sunless Sea. She was charming and generous, and was very polite when she asked me to give her my soul. Palmerston, where I had tea with a lonely deviless who guards the road to a hellish volcano. When my captain sat down to play, he went into a trance and began making moves according to the will of the primeval forces that govern the underworld, and played until his hands began to bleed. There's Port Cecil, where everyone obsessively plays chess with pieces of carved gemstone. In the basement, a storage room opens into a seemingly bottomless cavern, where all the misdirected mail of all the ages has gone to die. There is a "Dead-letter Office" where a friendly rat-engineer used a special machine to retrieve and restore damaged post. Its shores are covered in undelivered mail. There's an island called Nuncio, filled with former postal workers.
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