Muzman on 4/7/2014 at 04:30
It's not officially finished yet but some reviews caught my eye. The setting and fiction prods a lot of nerves in my evocation zones. For whatever reasons I've always been fascinated by: that era where exploration wasn't quite done with around the late 19th century, a London in perpetual night, and shallow-lying archipelagos.
Well this game has the lot. For some weird reason London is now underground in a vast cavern. Being English, the people just didn't up and leave back to the surface, but stayed and became very eccentric and isolated as their little boroughs became islands. You get to explore these dark waters in your crappy tramp steamer with its crew of misfits who are on the run from time, trouble or law.
It's pretty much a Strange Adventures in Infinite Space sort of game, but in a greeny black sea in the fictional 19th century. You get full control of your little boat and where it goes as you explore the islands and run little errands, building up your resources to let you venture even further into the unknown at the risk of losing your mind.
I'm not usually into games like this, for very long at least. But this one has me intrigued. There's various different careers you can have planned, from drawing a map, to writing a best seller about your adventures, to founding a Kurtz-ian colony in some obscure corner. There's lots of room to be just as out on the fringe, broken and filled with a dark unspeakable past as any misfit tramp steamer captain should be.
Some of you might have even backed it. Anyone given it a go?
(
http://store.steampowered.com/app/304650/)
Neb on 4/7/2014 at 10:11
That trailer is doing a terrible job of showing me what it is like to play, unless the game is almost entirely about slowly sailing around, evading sea monsters.
Muzman on 4/7/2014 at 10:19
It kind of is in a way, not the the trailer sells it very well.
I had to look up a LP or two to really get a handle on it though.
SubJeff on 4/7/2014 at 16:47
Looked good to me.
Until "Romance your crew".
reizak on 4/7/2014 at 20:15
I'm a big fan of their previous game (
http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/) Fallen London (although it does get terrifyingly grindy) so this is a no-brainer for me, although I mean to wait for the finished product. The lore they've built for the 'neath is wonderfully strange and intriguing and it's great that they're fleshing it out with another game. I did try Sunless Sea for a while and it does need more polish, as evidenced by their (
http://www.failbettergames.com/sunlesssearoadmap/) roadmap, it's quite fun already if a bit hard. The little money I was making by providing the admiralty with harbor reports pretty much all went into maintaining fuel and food and keeping terror at bay, so it seems really hard to actually progress. But they've got plenty of time to balance things, and I could just suck at it. Either way pretty excited about this. And if Fallen London is anything to go by, the romancing is less of the Bioware variety and more of the "get their guard down so you can bottle their soul and trade it for secrets" variety.
Shadowcat on 5/7/2014 at 02:29
This looks kinda great! And I love that they mention the Crimson Permanent Assurance in their list of influences :)
Quote:
Our influences! … FTL; Don’t Starve; Strange Adventures in Infinite Space; Sid Meier’s Pirates; Taipan; Elite; roguelikes; the Crimson Permanent Assurance; the Irish immrama myths.
on my radar. Thanks, Muzman.
demagogue on 5/7/2014 at 07:55
If it's an open sea trading game, that's interesting. I used to play Taipan and Pirates.
SubJeff on 5/7/2014 at 11:52
We need a new Pirates.
Or did they do one?
LoLion on 6/7/2014 at 18:18
Assassin´s Creed: Black Flag is likely the closest thing to new Pirates that we have gotten so far...
Anyway I´ve been playing Sunless Sea for a while now and I am quite impressed with what I´ve seen so far. The difficulty is brutal though - while in the Unforgiving mode (you only get autosaves in ports and there is perma-death) I never lasted very long since the starting ship you get has no chance against... well pretty much anything you can run into. Even while exploring ports and islands there are numerous ways to get yourself fucked up to the point when you cant really recover so you really need to think twice before attempting anything even remotely risky. On the other hand death is actually an integral part of the game - one your character dies your next one can inherit something from him, so you eventually get stronger after several attempts.
Then I switched to the Merciful mode (where you can save manually in ports and can load even if you die), which gave me opportunity to explore a bit more. There definitely are ways to make a lot of money (especially by discovering which goods are best bought and sold in various ports) and even various quests you can undertake though I am not sure if there is an actual storyline at this point.
In any case I´ll be keeping an eye on this. I do hope the devs plan to include some storyline though, since the aimless exploration would definitely get old at some point.
Muzman on 12/7/2014 at 22:46
I have to resist watching the lets plays anymore as I don't want to spoil to many random encounters and so forth. The map is fixed mostly and discovering the isles and their elaborate backstories is half the fun so I don't want to run out of that when I play it myself, tempting though it is.
It not being a rogue-like-lite in most regards but still having that flavour is interesting. You're not that surprised when a rogue-like-lite doesn't have a through-line narrative to latch onto. You make a little story each time you go.
This aims to be deeper and more concrete, so it does almost feel like it needs one. I'll be interested to see how much dynamism they can cram in. The trips to the various outposts do seem to have evolving stories and relationships you can report. Presumably how you play can affect those. Or I hope so. And a dynamic economy is always good for longevity in this sort of thing.
Well, the roadmap says the world details and so on isn't even half done yet. And the map in the lets plays (most of it blacked out as undiscovered) looked pretty respectable in size. It's going to triple those dimensions by the final version too. So holding off for a version or two seems like a good idea at this point.
ed. Oh there's one detail I didn't spot before. In the kickstarter video they say that the unexplored sections of the map rearrange themselves each time you play, or start playing.
That's not their words exactly. I took it to mean that when you start a game the bits of the map are somewhat rearranged but they stay there. Then as your successive captains die and their explorations are passed on you gradually fill out the same fixed map until its all exposed (I guess).
Presumably if you start afresh the map 'cards' are then somewhat reshuffled again for added variety.
That seems to still be the case. I'm curious what any current players thought of this feature
