LOSE YOUR MIND. EAT YOUR CREW. 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.
“Soon,” she says, and the piano music falters and stops. “We’ll go hungry, and then the end will come, for me but not for you.”
“We broke into the galley today and found appalling things: corpse-candles, graven images, and the mortal remains of Able Seaman Ayrton, rendered partially to stock. The wretched cook would only cackle: You liked him better salted…”
Auroral Megalops roam the waters – large enough to consume a pony with messy and clattering glee, or to pose a menace to ill-prepared ships.
“Oh yes” the University’s Maritime Liaison whispers breathily. “Oh yes. This is quite a tasty one. Let me explain it to you.” She (he?) explains, teeth glinting.
“We sighted Mt Nomad again today, still afloat but listing, her dark glass flanks scored and pitted from the cannon-fire in our previous encounter. This will be the last battle. This monster has harrowed the seas too long.”
Sunless Sea is leaving Early Access at 5:30pm on 6th February! Early Access purchasers will receive all expansions and story DLC we create for FREE.
Welcome to the dark and hilarious Victorian-Gothic underworld of Fallen London, where every choice has a consequence, from the style of your hat to the price of your soul. Except this time around, the Unterzee is your oyster.
Choose your ship, name your captain, and leave the bustle of the docks for the wild and lightless depths of the Unterzee. The map changes every time you play, and every officer in your crew has their own story.
Encounter a corsairs’ village in a forest of stalagmites, come face to face with the vicious war trimarans of the New Khanate or the golden agents of the Dawn Machine. Grow strong and wise and rich and feared. With luck and skill you may achieve your ambitions: find your father’s bones, found a pirate princedom or sail beyond the Unterzee into the strangeness at time’s heart.
Find and recruit officers on your travels. These perhaps unsavoury folks are treasure troves of stories.
Get to know your First Officer and she might share the co-ordinates of a secret smugglers’ cove stuffed with drowning-pearls. Feed your ship’s cat a moonish sprat and it may begin to glow in the dark. Invite your surgeon to dinner in your cabin and… well, who knows?
Keep your crew’s Hunger and Terror at bay, or face quarrels, despair, nightmares, madness, cannibalism and mutiny. Too much and you’ll lose everything.
The Unterzee is a realm of sombre beauty. It is always night – where that light off your starboard bow might be a friendly port or the glowing teeth of a zee-beast. Turn up your lights to see farthest, let them sink low to escape detection… or to become the hunter.
Like everything else in Sunless Sea, light has its cost, and not just in the fuel it takes to power your glim-lamps. If you can see your enemy, they can see you, and you’ll risk leaving yourself adrift at the mercy of the tideless black.
Improve and customise your ship as you prowess on the black waters improves. Begin with a Splinter-Salvo and Evasive Manoeuvres: aspire to the Rarefaction Cannon and the terrifying Unclear Bomb…
Sunless Sea is a nautical roguelike in glorious 2D, presenting a non-linear, choice-heavy, personalised experience.
It’ll take dozens of games to explore all the sub-plots, grand arcs, alternatives, mysteries, relationships and romances in the game. Your character will die (or disappear, or lose her mind, or be hollowed out and filled with candle-wax and haunt a cliff-top chapel), but their legacy may survive. You’ll build up your own story across generations of zailors who braved the Unterzee and lost – or won…
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.
Sunless Sea is leaving Early Access on 6 February 2015! Early Access purchasers will receive all expansions and story DLC we create for FREE.
Here’s BLEMMIGAN! This toothsome little patch addresses some saving and loading issues, as well as problems with zee-beast AI and bizarre behavior with civilian ships, plus a number of other small improvements throughout the game. The game should now remember your position within a chain of stories. If you exit the game halfway through a […]
We’ll be doing an AMA in r/IamA at just about 5:30pm GMT using the account failbettergames, with assorted other Failbetters joining in. See you there!
“I have also seen his eyes rest fondly upon the faces in the room, upon the pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar objects of that home, whose abiding and clear image must have flashed often on his memory in times of stress and anxiety at sea. Was he looking out for a strange […]