United StatesLOSE YOUR MIND. EAT YOUR CREW. DIE. Failbetter’s award-winning PC game is now on iOS! 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. If the giant crabs, sentient icebergs and swarms of bats don’t get you, madness and cannibalism certainly will. But that old black ocean beckons, and there’s loot for the brave souls who dare to sail her. Betray your crew, sell your soul to a Devil, marry your sweetheart. Survive long enough and you’ll achieve your life’s ambition. You will die, but your legacy will live on… KEY FEATURES - A deep, compelling world packed with 350,000+ words of stories and secrets. Find your father’s bones. Determine London’s destiny. Defy the gods of the deep sea. - Beautiful, hand drawn art: castles of sparkling ice, prisons perched on lily pads, fog-shrouded lighthouses and the DAWN MACHINE. - Your captain will die. But you can pass on resources from one generation to the next. Acquire a family home and a hoard of heirlooms. Build up your own story across generations of zailors who braved the sea and lost - or won... - Real-time combat against ships and Zee-beasts, spider-crewed dreadnoughts and sentient icebergs. - Light and dark, terror and madness: stray too far from the gas-lamps of civilisation and your crew will grow fearful and eventually lose their sanity. - Upgrade your steamship with powerful engines, cannons and pneumatic torpedo guns. (Or buy a bigger, better ship.) - Hire unique officers like the Haunted Doctor and the Irrepressible Cannoneer. Each has a story to tell, if you can draw it out of them. - Choose a ship’s mascot: the Comatose Ferret, the Wretched Mog, the Elegiac Cockatoo, and more! - Trade or smuggle silk and souls, mushroom wine and hallucinogenic honey. REVIEWS - “Absolutely the best writing in any video game since, well, as long as I can remember.” (10/10 – PCGamesN) - “A very compelling and satisfying adventure... The realm of possibilities seems endless, and every time I set sail I find something new.” (9/10 – Destructoid) - “Sunless Sea's method of storytelling isn't unique, but it has never been realised with such impact and elegance.” (10/10 – Eurogamer)
I’ve never seen literature commit self-harm with game mechanics before
This is an enormous, extremely complex choose-your-path novel strapped to one of the worst games I have ever seen in my life. The story is witty and well written and engages with deep, unique lore that I really enjoy. Unfortunately, the tedious, luck-based, and shallow gameplay actively prevents you from engaging with and enjoying it. As I note, the novel portions are great, but your progress in them is limited in every direction by resources - you need money or certain trade goods or a tough enough warship to advance in virtually every storyline. But the best ways to earn money, trade goods, and better equipment require those things - money to buy goods in bulk for reselling at a markup, goods to trade, and powerful equipment to kill the few tough enemies who consistently drop valuable enough items to make them worthwhile targets. Not only that, but doing ANYTHING costs you, because moving around consumes resources you need to pay for. Thus, the early game is horrifically grindy. You have to squeeze out the same repetitive hauling runs that reward maybe one to three hundred currency, avoiding all the enemies because it’s not cost effective to fight them, while you save up for hours towards ships or equipment that can cost into the thousands. Even once you get to that point you’re not safe, because this game made the baffling decision to be permadeath by default (there’s apparently an option to change this, but I can’t figure out how). And you can die FAST - text/story events with stat-influenced RNG outcomes can be triggered at random or without foreknowledge of what you’re doing, and some of these will kill you instantly if you happen to roll poorly. In the worst cases, you can spend hours clawing your way out of the mindless early game slog only to randomly trigger an event and then die through no fault of your own because you didn’t get a high dice roll on it (this is particularly bad with the “Terror” stat that functions as crew morale, because so many events can increase it in large increments, it’s expensive and hard to reduce, and when it caps out you get a guaranteed event with very poor odds of success that kills you instantly if you fail). I love the story here. But I’ve played about fifteen hours and haven’t gotten to experience hardly any of it because all my time is spent grinding out resources to set myself up and then losing them to inexperience or getting bad event RNG. The combat is shallow, the exploration becomes stale because the map remains largely static between lives, and the progression is both deeply unsatisfying and schizophrenically balanced. It feels like a freemium mobile game trying to frustrate you into paying to skip content, but it’s not malicious, just really stupid! Look, unless the story, writing style, and setting of the game really appeal to you, don’t get it. And if those do appeal to you…also don’t get it. All of the dialogue and story paths are available for free on the wiki. Just go read it there and avoid the self-sabotage of the paid product.
United StatesPlease add support to iPad mini 6!
Real masterpiece but not support iPad mini 6 screen! Please add support!
United StatesNo DLC
The game will always feel incomplete with the DLC being brought to IOS
United StatesGreat game but takes a while
You have to be patient with this one. Also I recommend reading about how to sell sunlight. The money it brings in will make this one bearable.
United StatesTruly a masterpiece!
Was definitely worth the $10. Found Fallen London afterwards and can’t stop playing that as well. I wish you could connect the Fallen London to the Sunless Sea app however, but I think it is only possible with the PC and Mac versions. When is the Sunless Sky coming to apps??
United StatesMixed feelings, mostly negative
Pro's: Lovely ambiance and sound design, and the characteristic Failbetter grim, quirky, mindbending writing is always a delight. Con's: Terrible, non-intuitive interface, difficulty curve for performing even basic tasks is frustratingly steep, no tutorial section to speak of besides the occasional dropped "hint" that explains a fundamental mechanic of the game *several hours in*. Not for players even remotely interested in casual play. The difficulty of this game comes not because it sets challenges per se, but because everything from the interface on up seems designed to be as cumbersome and opaque as possible. It's a full-on misery simulator. I have to suspect this was the devs' intent, as it dovetails perfectly with the ambiance; it's just not for me.
United StatesPlease release Zubmariner for iPad!
iPad is the only platform without the expansion
United States
This app has been updated by Apple to display the Apple Watch app icon. - storylets now showing in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen now fixed - fuel bar no longer resets to 0 after loading manual save - no Zubmariner-specific ports should now appear on the chart
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