So I’m a fair few hours into the nautical RPG, Sunless Sea, chugging along on a boat somewhere in the middle of the ocean, tucking into my fourth and final crew member to avoid starvation and starting to think that perhaps my standards of acceptable behaviour has shifted somewhat in the last few days. There are giant crabs surrounding my boat. My terror level is at 100 (“crazed”). My fuel runs out. The lights cut off. My boat sinks.

Goodbye, cruel world.

The year is 1888. London has become “Fallen London”, dragged down into a sunless underworld called the Neath and is now situated on the coast of a vast, black ocean – the Unterzee.

Before setting out, you begin the game with a few options for your captain and an ambition for your nautical career. I have decided that I am a former street urchin and that my ambition is to travel across the Zee to find my father’s bones. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with bones when I get them, but I really want those bones. I am a boy, but I ask my crew to address me as “madam” for the sake of inclusivity. With the suck of an engine, I set off across the Zee in my trusty boat, able-bodied crew by my side, full of the buoyant optimism of youth, ready for anything the sea can throw at us.

Several days later I’ve had more screen deaths than Sean Bean and I’ve eaten my way through about10,000 crew members. My first encounter with the flagrant and fairly unapologetic cannibalism in Sunless Sea was when my demonic chef offered me a bowl of “Able Seaman Ayrton, rendered partially as stock”. It’s all going well.

Inhabitants of the islands in the Neath range from bizarre (the island of guinea pigs), to hazardous (the island of spiders), to terrifying (the island of postmen). The dark waters in between the islands are filled with giant sharks, giant crabs, giant jellyfish and the occasional giant tentacle stretching out of the deep to steal a crew member.

There is a real-time combat element, as you can upgrade your craft and your weapons in order to avoid being bashed about by tentacles and having your boat consigned to the deep after the hull falls apart. The ability to kill sea creatures also has the benefit of providing food for you and your crew, meaning you will hopefully never have to answer the question “One of your crew members has accidentally drowned. Do you want to eat him?” On top of beasties, whirlpools and pirates, the geography of the Unterzee has an interesting tendency to rearrange itself from time to time, making navigation rather tricky.

Island-hopping, giant attack crabs, cannibalism and a landscape that keeps rearranging itself, all have a tendency to grate somewhat on any ship captain, salty sea-dog or no, and as a result your “terror” score rises troublingly over the course of your travels. Helpful in-game phrases that pop up, like “YOUR CREW IS DOOMED” and “YOUR SHIP IS ON FIRE” or the classic “YOU HAVE GONE MAD” also go some way towards increasing this. The mechanics of the game are designed to make you return to your home port in between voyages, and going back to Fallen London is a way of reducing your terror score, and refilling on supplies, gathering information and unlocking new quests. You can relax at your lodgings and read the paper, before getting your Ahab back on and launching back out to into the watery unknown.

Sunless Sea was borne out of a Kickstarter launched by independent games studio, Failbetter Games, previously responsible for the narratively connected gothic adventure, Fallen London. The game has already been available in early-access beta for about a year, meaning the finished product has been moulded and shaped in a live environment. Its creators welcomed feedback from players, who have spent the last year requesting features and generally helping shape the experience they wanted to play.

StoryNexus: building your own adventure games Read more

This dialogue with participants is cleverly mirrored in the dynamic narrative of the game itself. Failbetter’s StoryNexus system means that all game events can be experienced in any order, combined with the constantly shifting geography of the Neath, the myriad of atrocities occurring on the islands and the random, horrific events befalling the crew while out at sea, mean that no two games in Sunless Sea are the same.

Indeed, one of the best things about Sunless Sea, apart from its beautifully crafted elder-horror stories, fantastically drawn artwork and generally creepy atmosphere, is the feeling that the decisions you make within the game are shaping the narrative, and that by playing, you are writing yourself into that story. So if you end up eating your crew, going mad or being dragged into the brine by giant creatures, it’s your fault, it’s your cruel world.



• Failbetter Games/PC/£13.