Sunless Skies Review

I am deeply, deeply in love with Failbetter’s Fallen London universe. I have spent hundreds of dollars and and hours on Fallen London itself, I have more than 200 hours on Sunless Seas, and I have now played more than 70 hours of Sunless Skies on top of a large heap of other hobbies and responsibilities in two weeks since the game came out. So the first part of this review is fairly obvious: if you haven’t gotten the game, GO GET THIS GAME. It's a masterpiece of storytelling. There’s hundred of hours of content. You can get an Inadvisably Large Dog.

This game has been a long time coming, and it really shows. Every system has been tweaked and refined, usually for the better. Movement feels better than in Seas, the storytelling has a tonal consistency that’s unheard of in most novels, much less games of this scope, and the visuals are gorgeous on a level that I didn’t think was possible outside of AAA titles. Everything feels better, and its easily a contender for one of my favorite games of all times… for the first 50 hours.

That’s not to damn it with faint praise, mind you. 50 hours of engaging, nailbiting gameplay is something more games can’t accomplish with ten times of the budget that this one has. And there’s good reason, too: much of the game is centered around ‘what’s next’. And not just exploration, but danger, profit, development. For fifty hours your eyes are glued to the screen in a constant attempt to see where you’re going, what you can do there, what you can get out of it.

Unfortunately, around hour 20 a few problems begin to rear their ugly head. The most obvious is that money is easy to make in this game. Like, REALLY easy. While this means the early game is a lot easier to get through and the whole experience is a lot less stressful, a freighter with 30 hold can just get all the valuable they want and come back to the hub port in order to make a hefty profit. I made in the neighborhood of 50,000 sovereigns over the course of my gameplay and that was with me largely ignoring economic concerns for the last ten hours of gameplay.

Why does this matter? Because when you don’t need money, you stop looking for money. When its a constant concern, every chance becomes an opportunity to make some cash, and every decision is thrown into sharp relief. It may seem like a petty complaint, but this is why Seas remains so engaging for so long: when every echo you can squeeze out of your latest trade run is vital, you begin to see the world in a new and interesting way. In Skies, money so quickly become obsolete that there’s no point to this.

Then there’s the issue of upgrades. About 5 hours in, I got a gun called the ‘Beulah’, a low-stat requirement machine gun that could burn down almost everything in the starting area with a minimum of difficulty and was still very effective well into the second and third worlds. Then, saving up my money for one of the few difficult purchases in the game I made, I finally traded up to the Tier 4, the highest tier in the game, Saintfire machine gun. And it was a noticeable but minor upgrade.

The problem here, at least, is the Heat gauge system. You see, no matter what you do you are capped at a certain amount of heat you can generate before your system overloads and you need to wait for it to cool down before you can fire again. This means that raw damage is useless compared to the far more important Damage Per Heat (DPH). The Beulah, my Tier 2 waifu of a gun, stands at .675 DPH. The Saintfire stands at .75. Like I said, noticeable but minor. I had a bit of fun optimizing shot patterns before settling on a fairly standard four shot burst and beyond that, the strategy was in evasion and defense.

But here there are more problems. Your ship has limited capabilities to repair itself, nothing without an outside trigger. That means against tougher enemies were getting hit is assumed, though not guaranteed, more Armor simply means that it's going to take you longer to die after a few bad hits. You generally pay the same amount of money per hull no matter how large you hull is. It becomes a little bit easier to manage a tricky trip if you’ve got more hull, but for the most part you tend to simply stick in the sky until you need a heal. There are no maneuverability upgrades, speed upgrades, or health regeneration abilities. The only two types of weapons are forward facing and mines.

The speed upgrades are a particular issue in the latest stages of the game. You will be moving at the exact same pace at the beginning of the game as when you finally complete it, but you will be expected to go three times the distances for any given quest. The resource requirements will become more extravagant and obscure, meaning two or three treks across a region in order to secure everything you need, or god forbid a trip over multiple regions. Since most combat is better avoided due to a falling-off of power progression and money isn’t an option, that can mean long, cold hours of simply going back and forth hoping to earn the next bit of story.

Which, of course, is excellent. The stories are more personal than Sunless Seas, speaking to the individuality and improved character writing for each individual who finds themself on your floating conjunction junction, and yet all of them manage to contribute to the setting and the factions as a whole. One particular Officer is Your Aunt, who manages to be my favorite storyline in all of Fallen London to date. You can also get an Inadvisably Large Dog, as mentioned before, and he is a VERY GOOD BOY. All of the stories feel more heartfelt, as do the larger regional quests.

The ambitions are the piece de resistance, and this time they feel like it. In Seas they could be a bit soulless and could lack a lot of engagement (with the exception of Going East), as well as feeling purposelessness. This one makes what each one is about much more obvious but also iterates off of the core concept very well, make it feel driven and unique while still having a couple of twists and turns for you to sink your teeth into.

However, the ambitions also become the biggest problem of the endgame, where each of them requires specific high level items to complete. In the final step of the Truth ambition, I required a Royal Dispensation and despite having every other high level item imaginable, I still took an hour gathering Port Reports to exchange for this one item, accomplishing nothing in story and banging my head against the well.

On that note, the new Legacies system is clever, innovative, and downright broken. Not allowing players to rechoose officer storylines means that you have far less freedom to control the final stats your character will have in a game where that is a significant component of character customization. Removing low-level quests means that it can be unfairly difficult for officers to get starting capital. You can be started in more difficult ports than New Winchester leaving you with a difficult time getting home and in the unsteady equilibrium of unconquered territory. The final straw that convinced me to switch over to merciful was being started off with one point of fuel and one point of supplies and 30 echoes. Three hours of gameplay, destroyed by a couple of back to back mistakes. Merciful is just a lot more fun, folks, play on it.

Once more, I feel the need to reiterate that this game does so much right. The writing is the best writing in video games, period. The controls are a lot smoother, the visuals are brilliant, and the sense of exploration is immaculate. There are only a few core progression features that really hamper the experience, and this is still a strong contender for one of my favorite games of all time.