I've just pulled out to sea in a chuffing shoe of a steamship named after a gothic poem, skippering unsteadily through an inky subterranean expanse. My headlamp drives a cone of wisp-yellow light before me like a flat sideways mouth, probing for markers, hostile ships or alien forms of mutant life.

It's dim everywhere I look, faint corrosion-green city beacons stippling the blackness here and there, viewed from above like the glowing indicators on some eerily silent and byzantine industrial machine. I hear a steady ringing, a sonar-like ping punctuating the deceptive tranquility.

Off starboard, I catch sight of something monstrous and mottled lumbering toward me with giant pincers. Are those antennae or whips? I fire the ship's boiler hoping to outrun the horror, take note of my soaring thermostat, steer my ship toward a nearby shoal, and cross my fingers.

All of which is just a fancy way of saying that I'm playing the beta version of Failbetter Games' crowdfunded Sunless Sea, currently available via Steam Early Access for $19.

It's in admirably functional shape—still missing bits and bobs in places that the design team has filled with placeholder text that outlines what's to come—but quite playable, and so far at least, I'm having a blast with it.

What is Sunless Sea? For starters, a vaguely roguelike experience, meaning it involves exploration, randomized maps and permadeath, although the latter is optional here if you're willing to forfeit a "bragging rights token".

But to tag it as a roguelike with salt water is probably too reductive. Sunless Sea is a game that, as much as I've seen of it, couples the descriptive mechanics of a Choose Your Own Adventure to Asteroids-like exploration of a vast underground ocean, folds in the combat mechanics of an MMO, then wraps all that into a world-building exercise that'd do New Weird writers like Jeff Vandermeer and China Mieville proud.

Moreover, it's a game about quietude—about trundling along in merciless darkness, often on the verge of death from lack of food or fuel, half-blindly nosing around for ports of call. Death is omnipresent, arriving with starvation, mechanical ship failures, mutinies, rival vessels, leviathan-sized crustaceans, cannibalism and madness. You're a sort of Captain Nemo in a world stranger than any Verne imagined, a Robinson Crusoe marooned in a nightmare, sometimes having to stave off the cannibals—or, if the spirit (and your empty gut) so moves you, becoming one yourself.

The game transpires in the same world as FG's Fallen London, a browser-based, text-driven game that appeared back in 2009 about exploring an alternate-verse rendition of Victorian London, sunken deep beneath the sea like a gothic Atlantis.

As Quarter to Three's Tom Chick put it so aptly in an interview with the designers, in Fallen London, the gameplay is the text, the storytelling spur, the thing that impels you to play. And part of the reason you wanted to is that lead scribe Alexis Kennedy had assembled such a magnificently bizarre world, dropping artsy, often mind-blowing illustrative sentences like bombs. The game's sentences doubled as slowing mechanisms, layers of narrative spike strips laid to decelerate distracted minds.

Sunless Sea retains much of that text-driven approach, as well as Kennedy's sure eye for unsettling or mordant turns of phrase), but slips it into a top-down cartographic simulation of what lies beyond Fallen London—black, brackish sea between atolls, lonely outposts, exotic city-islands and pieces of actual hell. Sunless Sea's subsurface ocean is called the Unterzee, and sailing it is like poking around one of those old medieval charts with phrases like "Here Be Dragons," with the dragons replaced by Lovecraftian horrors.

Failbetter Games

I can't say enough about how lovely it all looks, like a living version of the ornate foldout maps you used to slide from the backs of pen and paper role-playing modules. Each locale you visit conjures a hand-drawn depiction of the landscape you're debarking to: Sunless Sea's London remains in perpetual gloaming, its foggy byways and gaslit hives of humanity rendered in grim silhouette. Failbetter's Paul Arendt, the game's art director, does terrific work here.

Like Games Workshop, which upended D&D conventions by letting you choose professions like Hypnotist or Tomb Robber or Rat Catcher in its Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay system, Failbetter Games is clearly obsessed with subverting fantasy tropes. When you start a new game, you'll choose from an array of unusual-sounding narrative backstories. You can, for instance, identify as a street urchin (aids subtlety and evasion), a poet (aids trickery and knowledge), a campaign vet (aids direct damage), a priest (aids healing and morale) or even a philosopher (aids detection and perception).

After establishing your profession, you select a goal: Fulfillment, or wealth. In later builds, Failbetter plans to add others like "find your father's bones," "establish a private kingdom," or "journey to the uttermost east." Then you can poke around London by way of a tab-based text interface and engage in activities that at first seem trivial, but in fact determine your means of survival. Read the morning paper and you'll gain knowledge of local events that have economic value if you carry the news to remote ports. Visit with local city officials and they'll ask that you secure intelligence about other locations during your travels. Lodge in the city and you'll reduce deleterious metrics like "terror" (it gradually rises as you roam the Unterzee) while gaining other useful seafaring bonuses in the bargain.

Every choice has purpose in addition to atmospheric value, triggering state changes that outline your current disposition. Each state change functions as if you're simultaneously drawing and tossing away a card, making Sunless Sea a kind of card game mashed with a text adventure mashed with a roguelike mashed with a queue-based MMO-like battle engine. It sounds bizarre, but in the time I've spent with this version of Sunless Sea, it works.

Once you leave port, you control your steamship with the W, A, S and D keys, turning like a sluggish version of the triangular fighter in Asteroids and propelling yourself forward or in reverse. This is where Sunless Sea's real-time resource-juggling game kicks in: Travel faster, or with your lights on, and you'll burn fuel at higher rates and be more visible to enemies; travel slower and you'll find yourself easy prey for sea monsters and enemy ships.

Run silent with the lights off and you'll be less noticeable, but your crew's terror will rise faster, leading to potential game-ending mutinies. Crank the engines to higher temperatures for temporary bursts of speed to elude faster pursuing enemies, and you risk crew-slaughtering explosions.

Therefore, there is no safe way to play. It's harrowing to be at sea even for a moment, because the clock's always prodding you to action. Hunger and Terror are vampiric forces, relentlessly accruing as you peruse the world's subsurface nooks, whirlpools and aphotic zones. Fuel barrels vanish every few minutes, threatening to strand you leagues from home. Every venture from port feels like a suicide run, and so part of playing Sunless Sea well is just figuring out early on where the most reliable trade routes are. Eventually, if you're good enough, you can upgrade your ship or buy a new one, ply a much more elaborate trading system, and get involved in all sorts of far-reaching story lines. But so far, it's been all I can do to feed my crew, fuel my ship and keep us all on the barest edge of sanity.

Failbetter Games

My least favorite part of Sunless Sea is combat. This occurs when you bump into enemies on the map, conjuring a one-on-one display with grids of abilities and pictures of you and your opponent beside vertical bars. The bars indicate how "illuminated" you are: Remember, you're in an ocean miles underground, and whosoever can see their opponent better is going to have the tactical upper hand.

It's a novel-sounding idea, but in practice it tends to go like this: both sides try to illuminate each other, wait a few seconds, try some more, wait a few seconds, then dash off attacks before taking further evasive action. That sequence plays over and over, enemy after enemy, as you boat around the Unterzee. You can change it up a bit with hybrid attacks or evasive maneuvers that alter how much your chosen gambit illuminates you versus your opponent. But the processes and outcomes at this point feel too heavily patterned.

My distaste for the combat may be because of my bias towards the story elements of Sunless Sea; I'm always itching to get past the drudgery of combat to see what new descriptive treasures lie in wait on the other side of Sunless Sea's least interesting mechanic.

Speaking of itching: I might mention that I found my way into a clutch of poison ivy recently, and had the severe-end-of-the-spectrum reaction. So I've been playing this sublimely creepy game about deep sea monsters and sinister tomb colonies and mischievous fungus and subterranean tracts of sable waters while my head has been thick with Claritin and Benadryl and prednisone (which amps everything way up).

I'm not suggesting you deliberately roll in poison ivy before playing Sunless Sea. But it kind of works.